The Walking Company - Secure Kiosks

The fastest growing specialty retailer in the country, The Walking Company, a division of Big Dog Holdings, sells top-of-the-line comfort footwear from around the world. With more than 175 locations nationwide, the retailer carries name brands such as Dansko, Ecco, Merrell, Ugg, and Keen and Clarks. The company's rapid expansion, emphasis on comprehensive customer satisfaction, and highly specialized inventory enhances the company's competitive advantage over other footwear retailers, have created an increased need for customer access to product information within the stores.

The Walking Company seeks to continue building its brand as the top name in comfort and specialty footwear, with one of its biggest features being a diverse inventory and customer accessibility to exclusive designs and hard-to-find European styles. This specialized or 'long tail' portion of its business model is supported by providing customers the opportunity to search and shop entire product lines through in-store kiosks linked to its website, www.thewalkingcompany.com.

The website features innovative filters that enable shoppers to search by comfort categories including foot conditions, arch type and foot width, providing an unmatched online shopping experience that helps differentiate TheWalkingCompany.com from competitive online shoe stores. The Internet-enabled kiosks provide in-store customers access to a large selection of shoes, from exclusive designs to hard-to-find European brands, as well as popular bestsellers. Customers are able to view products, make an online purchase and have it shipped to their homes.

To carry out this project, The Walking Company partnered with Visus LLC (visusllc.com), a premier application development firm, and Lanspeed, a leading provider of professional IT solutions and a SonicWALL Gold Partner. While Visus LLC created the kiosk application, Lanspeed was responsible for configuring the system's security.

For The Walking Store, there were two critical requirements for the kiosk's security system. First, it was important that customers be able to access TheWalkingStore.com and make online purchases with credit cards in a secure environment. Second, and equally important, was the ability for administrators to manage and monitor all of the kiosks' security systems from one central location.

"Our major concerns with the kiosks were controlling web traffic, securing the system, and configuring and managing security from one place rather than constantly sending someone to each store to make updates and changes," said Ralph Kimball, director of MIS for The Walking Company.

To meet these security and management requirements, Lanspeed installed SonicWALL's TZ180W TotalSecure firewall solutions at each kiosk. The devices are ideal for distributed networks and retail/point-of-sale deployments. The TZ180W features a high performance deep packet inspection firewall, integrated gateway anti-virus, anti-spyware, intrusion prevention and content filtering along with optional 802.11 b/g Wireless LAN access to deliver comprehensive Unified Threat Management (UTM) protection. UTM protection scans inside and outside the network to help eliminate threats no matter where they originate.

To manage the devices, The Walking Company deployed SonicWALL's Global Management System (GMS). GMS provides IT administrators with integrated tools to deploy and manage all security devices, policies and services. Through a single interface, The Walking Company can monitor all SonicWALL devices in real-time and produce compliance reports. GMS helps to reduce the staffing requirements, speeds up deployment and lowers the cost of managing security services.

"The security and management capabilities SonicWALL's solutions and management services provide, along with its top-notch support, made this the right solution for our kiosk program," said Kimball. "SonicWALL offered a competitively priced solution that met all of the requirements for our kiosks, while providing us the capabilities to centrally configure, manage and monitor all of the security appliances in each store. The TZ180 provides us the highest level of security we need for our consumers, while the ability to monitor each device from our central office truly simplifies the management of the entire kiosk program."

By deploying the kiosks with SonicWALL's devices, The Walking Company has created a trusted and secure shopping environment. The results have been positive, as The Walking Company has seen an improvement in the overall customer experience, as well as an increase in revenues. In addition, the company's IT staff now has a convenient way to manage all of the devices and can rest assured that they have a secure system in place.

"The combined solution of having a secure, centrally managed kiosk solution has significantly increased customer satisfaction and revenue," added Kimball. "The kiosk's web interface is user-friendly, secure, and offers customers more choices and information regarding the footwear and accessories they are looking for. If there's something they like, a style, a size, a color that we don't have on the store shelves, with the kiosk, we won't miss out on the sales opportunity. We are now able to offer customers the competitive advantage of going right to our website and making their purchases online instead of waiting to get home or going to another retailer. With SonicWALL, our customers can do this in an environment that's they can trust and that we can easily manage."