Brookstone

» see brookstone.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

brookstone is the other one. sharper image had the chrome aesthetic, brookstone had the wood-grain. the two stores anchored opposite ends of the same mall corridor for thirty years and sold the same product class to roughly the same customer. neither one reached me in turkey. the chain was a piece of american mall infrastructure i can read about in retrospective writing but never saw in operation, and the airport-terminal version of brookstone was already on its second foreign ownership by the time the chapter 11 hit.

pierre de beaumont was a yale-trained mit grad living on a farm in the new hampshire berkshires when he and his wife mary placed a classified ad in popular mechanics in 1965 to sell hard-to-find hand tools by mail. the company name came from the farm. the catalog ran for eight years before brookstone opened its first physical store in peterborough new hampshire in 1973. the format from the beginning was the touch-it-yourself store, where every product on the shelf was wired up or unwrapped so customers could play with it before deciding.

the catalog and the early stores leaned engineering, the brand sold high-end shop tools and esoteric hardware before drifting toward consumer gifts in the eighties. by the late nineties brookstone had grown to around 150 stores across 32 states with another hundred-plus airport and mall kiosks. the massage chair section near the front was the load-bearing piece of the store, a row of leather recliners running cycles that customers could try while their partner shopped elsewhere in the mall. quirky gadgets filled out the catalog. an indoor weather station next to a remote-control helicopter that did not survive its third flight, on the same end-cap display as a wine bottle opener that ran on aaa batteries.

private equity took the company in 2005 for around 460 million, then sanpower of china bought it out of its first bankruptcy in 2014 for 173 million. the leverage from those two transactions caught up with the chain at the same time the american mall did. brookstone filed chapter 11 a second time on august 2 2018 and announced it would close every us mall store. airport stores stayed open under sanpower for a while, then were sold to apex digital in 2019 along with the brand and the catalog. there are still brookstone-branded airport kiosks in 2026 but they share no continuity with the company de beaumont built in his farmhouse.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what it sold ~

the touch-it-yourself format was the brand promise. the row of massage chairs running their cycles near the entrance, with the heated foot bath plugged in next to the register and a personal-air-purifier on the demo table that competed with the sharper image ionic breeze. the catalog read like a wish list for the older male relative on christmas, which was who the brand had been selling to since the catalog years of the seventies.

the airport store was a separate cultural artifact. the terminal-c brookstone with the headphones and the over-priced neck pillow existed because the average traveler had thirty minutes to kill before boarding and forgot to pack something. that customer pattern survived longer than the mall pattern. the airport stores were the last brookstone footprint to close.

~ the de beaumont catalog ~

the first brookstone catalogs were typewritten and mimeographed. de beaumont's introduction explained that he had personally tested every tool listed. the early catalog was sixteen pages and shipped only to people who responded to the popular mechanics classified. by the time brookstone went public on the new york stock exchange in 1992 the catalog had grown to a hundred and fifty pages and shipped four million copies a year. de beaumont himself sold his interest in 1980 to a partnership that eventually became the publicly-traded chain. he died in 1995 at seventy-six.

~ the long tail ~

apex digital runs the brookstone trademark and the catalog as of 2026. there is no us mall presence. the airport stores have shrunk to a handful of terminals. brookstone.com loads as a sparse e-commerce front, the massage chair section is gone, and the product mix has shifted to bluetooth speakers and travel pillows. the chain that pierre de beaumont and his wife built from a popular mechanics ad is essentially a licensing operation now.

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