Molton Brown

Focus Group planned and deployed a new WAN to enable the migration of a retail commerce platform to the public cloud and the rollout of new in-store services across the UK, Ireland, Germany, Denmark & the USA.

About Molton Brown

Born on South Molton Street, London in 1971, Molton Brown is a luxury British fragrance brand, with retail locations across the world, manufacturing plants, logistics warehouses and back offices.

The Challenge

Molton Brown appointed Focus Group to design and build a scalable, reliable and automated cloud-based infrastructure that was simple to configure and manage, while also providing user and application monitoring through a single dashboard.

Driven by a legacy MPLS provision that failed to deliver the agility and speed of deployment required by this international business, Focus Group, designed and deployed a customised Cisco Meraki SDWAN full stack Solution as a Service to all stores, occupancies and warehouses.

Focus Group fully managed the migration from the incumbent MPLS provider, including on site engineers at all sites globally throughout the transition phase, to a Focus Group Managed SDWAN with Ethernet and Broadband Underlay.

The Solution

Focus Group’s IaaS deployment was based on Cisco Meraki LAN, WLAN, SD-WAN, Next Generation Firewalls & IPS. All services integrated into AWS with a bespoke customer-facing Wi-Fi Splash Page supported by Cisco Umbrella.

Molton Brown is a complex organisation with a large number of suppliers and stakeholders, owned by a Japanese manufacturing multinational with many disparate consumer brands. Focus Group is accustomed to working with this level of operational complexity and, in this instance, Focus Group undertook management of multiple embedded partners, including:

Incumbent MPLS provider
Retail Commerce Systems provider
Cloud Hosting partner
Group IT provider (global outsource)
Site Retail IT support provider
3rd Party Application providers

The Results

The cloud-based design provided Molton Brown with an infrastructure that enabled critical line of business and POS applications to be delivered securely and crucially, without any risk of downtime due to the resilient SD-WAN design. In-store customer experience has been improved through the use of applications across the Wi-Fi. At the same time, Molton Brown have been able to gain better insights into their customers which has in turn driven improved customer loyalty and spend both in-store and on-line.

Post migration, Focus Group continue to deliver additional service elements (phase 2) including: -

Cellular primary 5G sites (and 4G resilience across every store)
Migration from PSTN based telephony to Focus Hosted VoIP
Quick-deploy ‘Pop Up Store’ technology stack, deployed at short notice into temporary retail spaces
Addon AWS SDWAN services, including VPC onboarding, IaaS and 3rd party inter VPC connectivity
Support for Molton Brown’s PCI assessments
Bespoke customer Wi-Fi landing pages with event driven branding
Ongoing management of continuous rolling programme of site relocations, site refurbs and new site deployments
Supporting roll out of instore Wi-Fi-connected services, including customer experience applications (e.g. kiosk based ‘Fragrance Profiler’)