From no intranet at all, to the soul of a company
Browns Shoes is an an established and reputable 86-year-old Canadian retail brand with nearly 80 store locations — entrepreneurial, fast-growing, and until recently operating without any intranet at all. When their office population doubled post-COVID, the absence became impossible to ignore. New employees expected a modern digital experience. What they had was email chains, scattered file folders, and no single place to go for anything.
Leadership didn’t just approve a platform. They drove the initiative. Working with StitchDX and Powell Software, they built SoleTrain — named deliberately, because they wanted it to be the soul of how the company communicates and connects with its people.
StitchDX has almost become like part of the Browns family… it’s that relationship that allowed us to move forward faster and better.”
Eric Wagstaff · Senior Director – Human Resources and Retail Support, Browns Shoes
— BEFORE SOLETRAIN
- No intranet — employees expected a modern digital experienced
- Inbox overload — information buried in email, easy to miss and hard to find later
- Scattered files — documents lived in folders nobody could navigate
- No digital home — new hires arrived with nowhere to land
- Disconnected stores — no way to reach 70+ locations from one place
— AFTER SOLETRAIN
- ~40% less email — information moved out of inboxes and into a central place
- One hub — news, documents, people, and culture all in the same destination
- Teams-integrated — one click between the intranet and daily work
- Fully bilingual — English and French, seamless on any device
- A living platform — SoleTrain 2.0 launched a year after go-live, built almost entirely from employee feedback
Highlights worth watching twice
Short clips from the webinar, each covering a moment that matters for anyone thinking about intranet, adoption, or employee experience.
Why They Worked with StitchDX
Eric opens with “I don’t want this to seem like a shameless plug” — and then says it anyway. StitchDX became part of the Browns family not because of the software, but because of the relationship. Weekly check-ins, real understanding of the business, and best practices from other clients. That’s what moved things forward.
Building on Microsoft Teams
Browns made the call before the intranet even existed: Zoom and Slack were out, Teams was in. So the intranet had to live inside that world. The goal was a “virtuous circle” — one click from Teams to SoleTrain, one click back. This clip explains why platform consolidation made adoption far more likely.
What Real Exec Buy-in Looks Like
There’s a difference between executives who say the intranet matters and executives who actually use it. Browns’ leadership asked for a people directory filtered by job level — and then used it themselves. This clip makes the case that adoption flows from the top, but only when leadership has something real to get out of it.
— FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
Yes — SoleTrain was built on SharePoint and integrated directly with Microsoft Teams, and that Teams integration was one of Browns’ non-negotiables from the start. If your organization is already in the Microsoft ecosystem, you’re in the right place. If you’re not there yet, that’s a conversation worth having before anything else.
The initial launch — SoleTrain 1.0 — came together relatively quickly because the executive team was aligned and driving it. A full relaunch (2.0) followed roughly a year later, built almost entirely from employee feedback gathered after the first version went live. The honest answer is that the timeline depends on how clear your brief is and how involved leadership wants to be — both of which Browns had locked down early.
Listening. Browns ran focus groups, sent out surveys, and collected continuous feedback through a dedicated feedback button built right into the homepage. Most of what went into 2.0 — the people directory, featured staff lists, the promotions section, the document hub redesign — came directly from what employees asked for. As Eric put it: “We listened even more, and built features we hadn’t even thought of before.”
Browns and StitchDX have weekly check-ins and a shared roadmap — it’s not a handoff. New features get scoped, tested, and released on an ongoing basis. That’s how things like the promotions recognition section, permission-based document access, and the event galleries came to life well after launch. The relationship Eric described — “you’ve almost become part of the Browns family” — isn’t marketing language. It’s what embedded partnership actually looks like in practice.
AI tools — whatever you’re considering — need structured, reliable, findable information to work from. What Browns built is exactly that: governed content, clear ownership, organized documents, and a single source of truth. Organizations that try to layer AI on top of scattered, inconsistent knowledge environments find that the AI just reflects the chaos back at them. The intranet isn’t a precursor to AI readiness. For most organizations, it is AI readiness.
What you’ll take from this webinar
Four things every organization dealing with scattered information, low adoption, or a pending AI initiative should hear.
Adoption is an engagement problem, not a platform problem
Browns didn’t drive usage by requiring employees to log in. They gave people a reason to come back — recognition, birthdays, real feedback loops, event galleries. People don’t use intranets for documents. They use them for connection.
Executive involvement is not the same as executive support
The executives at Browns weren’t cheerleaders. They were active users who drove the initiative, set the brief, and pushed for specific features. That’s the difference between “leadership bought in” and leadership actually moving things forward.
A launch is not a finish line
SoleTrain 1.0 was good. SoleTrain 2.0 was built almost entirely from what employees asked for. The organizations that get the most from their intranets treat it as a continuously improving product — not a project that got completed.
Structure enables everything, including AI
Browns built a governed, findable, well-organized information environment. That’s not just good for employees — it’s the foundation for any AI capability you want to layer on top. AI doesn’t fix broken knowledge. Structure does.