Media & Entertainment
Luxury Brand Partners
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IT Director
We spoke to Michael Schiavinato, IT Director, at Luxury Brand Partners about how Kisi helps the Miami-based company control access across many floors and geographical locations. Michael runs Luxury Brand Partner Holding’s IT department and supervises the IT of their owned brands as well. For door security he uses Kisi and he was behind the Kisi set up from an infrastructure perspective, then handed over user creation and de-activation to HR.
Luxury Brand Partners, established in 2012, is a U.S. company that develops and nurtures artist-driven beauty brands. The team has extensive experience in the consumer market, specializing in beauty products and brand development. The company grew quickly, with headquarters in Miami and satellite offices in New York City. With a dedicated focus on innovation and creativity, Luxury Brand Partners has successfully nurtured many brands, like BECCA, IGK, V76, and Oribe, to name a few.
"Our headquarters is located in a seven floor building and we occupy six floors of them - Blue Bottle Coffee is occupying the 1st floor which is a retail floor. Some of our owned brands are located on the third and fourth floor which we can now flexibly manage through the Kisi system.
Michael: All doors are locked all the time, this allows them to monitor user activity day in day out and separate users per floor and level.
Michael: When I first shopped around for cloud control, off-site control, easier management and analytics, it was a bit of a battle to pull away from people’s old-school thinking from the 90s. I found the cloud based model very efficient as long as the IT is resilient enough. Before you needed another server on site to manage. By pushing to the cloud, all responsibility is off of me and I’m relieved of that duty. I’ve explained: We can get one of those legacy systems but we have to manage more hardware, maintain those systems, and on top of that manage the licenses. When going the legacy route, I would have to put more resources into managing the software and the hardware which ultimately would have led to the path of hiring more IT resources which we managed to avoid with the Kisi cloud-based model.
Michael: Kisi is limiting the use of hardware as much as possible which makes it very attractive for me as lean IT team. The more things we can remove, the faster and leaner we can run. I also like the API functionality because it keeps the options open for future customization for e.g. more analytics.
Also I really liked the PoE feature of the readers to get rid of the power supplies, plugs in directly in the PoE switch. He uses the Ubiquity switches - on each floor he uses an industrial battery for the PoE switch as backup which would last 20mins. If there is any flicker in power, the system doesn’t even see the power failure and the system doesn’t have to reboot. Being in Miami with storm power outage situations, this has been a great use-case.
We are planning to expand to another building and maybe will leverage the time sharing option of Kisi since we’ll lease out one of the floors and we’d like a 3rd party to monitor that as well.