Anita is a lingerie and swimwear brand.
Anita has been operating in Canada for 10 years.
A European heritage brand establishing itself in Canada
Selling through a network of over 400 independent stores across the country, Anita considers these boutiques to be trusted partners, and helping them thrive is the heart of their business.
Anita Canada is the Canadian-owned branch of Anita Dr. Helbig GmbH, a German heritage brand with over 130 years’ history in women’s lingerie and swimwear. They offers multiple product lines for maternity, activewear, corsetry, and notably Anita Care, for breast cancer and mastectomy survivors. They are deeply invested in helping these retailers thrive, succeed, and sell Anita’s products in an effective, empowering way.
Retail partner training has always been important for Anita—especially since some of their products, like the Anita Care line, require special sensitivity training. Their old model had Anita salespeople train retail staff on the specific items they stocked, during regular sales visits.
“It wasn't a bad model,” says Mark Caskenette, Managing Director of Anita Canada. “But obviously there's inconsistency in live training, and we were asking people who are sales professionals to take on a training role. When Covid hit, we realized we couldn't do in-store training, and we felt we had to come up with something.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, in-person training became impossible. But Anita realized their model had issues from the start. Not only were salespeople delivering it not trained as educators, and the training sessions could be difficult to fit into a busy sales season—both for Anita’s own team and retail partner staff.
In December 2020, Anita Canada decided to partner with Thinkific Plus, and start moving their retailer training online as ACE: the Anita Centre of Excellence.
QUICK STATS
500+
CLIENTS
3, 10
CERTIFICATIONS, COURSES“There's a big burden placed on boutique owners or managers to train staff. And then boom, we couldn’t deliver any training in person. All of a sudden, we had these two paths coming together and converging. We saw it so clearly — digital engagement is our future. This is what we need to be doing to help the stores.”Mark Caskenette, Managing Director of Anita Canada.
Retail is an industry known for high turnover, and busy owner-managers who wear many hats.
Employee wellness for companies of all sizes
Anita’s mission, nearly equal to selling bodywear, is to help this network of retail partners succeed—many of whom, during the COVID-19 pandemic, were facing unprecedented struggles. In Thinkific Plus, Anita recognized a plethora of ways they could support that goal. Online learning could support their partners in training new staff, outside of the sales season, and without additional effort from their brand reps.
Not only would that improve the quality of end customer service, but it would help alleviate a huge burden of labor for their valued partners. Before moving to online learning, Anita’s retail partner training was conducted on-site, in retail stores, by busy brand reps in the middle of their sales season.
The training was highly product-specific, focused exclusively on the features and benefits of different styles. The exception was Anita Care, the brand’s line of post-mastectomy lingerie. These products required a special certification course to sell, conducted thorough fly-in seminars featuring experiential, empathy-focused learning, including workshops with actual cancer survivors. Moving to online learning made Anita’s partner education more convenient. But it revolutionized the program in ways the company didn’t even anticipate at the outset, transforming what they were able to offer in scope, breadth, and depth.
After partnering with Thinkific Plus, the company immediately launched modules offering broader, baseline knowledge, such as into Anita’s 130-year history. But as they got familiar with the Thinkific Plus platform, Anita’s staff began to realize the possibilities.
The Creation of ACE: the Anita Centre of Excellence
THE OPPORTUNITY
Transforming student engagement with a branded mobile app and learning communities.
The Anita Center for Excellence uses three main strategies to empower retailers—training bundles, a branded mobile app, and peer-to-peer learning communities.
Because Anita Canada offers multiple product lines, bundling content is a critical strategy to help partners access only the information they actually need. The company offers bundles for each product line, but also for groundbreaking knowledge to h elp staff sell their products in a sensitive, empowering way.
For example, Anita has partnered with Portsmouth University, in the United Kingdom, and their Research Group in Breast Health to create a certification program on sports & breast health to assist their retailers helping women achieve their potential in sport.
Mobile learning has been a crucial tactic to design education around the practical needs of retail staff and owners. Every store carrying Anita Canada becomes its own learning group, meaning that the owner or manager can track and oversee their employees’ progress through the content.
Finally, Anita’s forums and learning communities allow participants to learn from the brand directly, but also from one another. Social learning is key nowadays as people learn from one another, they don’t need to rely on one instructor. Anita can expand the social learning aspect in more depth with the Thinkific communitiesir
Through their Thinkific Plus-powered learning platform, retail staff can engage with Anita Canada directly through their Q&A feature. But users can also respond to each other’s questions, creating a shared learning community.
“Through Thinkific Plus and the Anita Center of Excellence, we have a chance to really help people understand and respond to any work environment challenges they’re having, or even just topics from our courses they want to dive deeper into,” – shares Caskanette.
“We’re really all collaborating, as one large community.”
“When I look at our retailers, their stores don't have laptops sitting around for people to do training on. That means staff don't have the time to do the training in the store, and they may end up doing it at home on their own time. Instead, mobile learning gives us the best opportunity to engage with everybody in the store, when it's most convenient. They’re learning without tying up store resources such as the POS system—which is probably the only laptop most or computer most boutiques have.”
Exclusive online training platform for lingerie. A game changer you were waiting for to train your team and make a difference.
A sophisticated learning partner, invested in Anita’s success
THINKIFIC PLUS AS THE SOLUTION
Anita Canada had big plans for their online learning experience — so they needed an LMS partner with advanced capabilities, that would support them every step of the way.
Caskenette highlights Thinkific’s Customer Success and scale team as a key differentiator that helped Anita succeed. “They've been great at really educating us on best practices for different tasks, or just jumping in to help if we’re ever stuck and don't know what to do,” he says.
“The transition became really easy, because we had a partner on the training side of our business — and our success, ultimately, helps their success. That’s been really positive for us.”
Thinkific Plus’ user-friendly interface, designed to hold many kinds of learning content, was another important factor. Anita Canada loves how they can load many different types of content into Thinkific, wherever it was created initially, and easily create interactive, dynamic courses.
Building out their mobile app, normally a time-consuming and labor-intensive specialized task, also became nearly effortless through Thinkific. Since Anita Canada retains ownership of the app, all they needed to do was register as a developer with Google and Apple. “Just doing the application with Apple was the hardest part,” says Caskenette. “We have the control we need, but really, we’re subcontracting all the work out to Thinkific. It was effortless on our part.”
“I’ve got so many ideas on where we can go next withThinkific, like gamification,” he continues. “We’ve gotten great ideas and recommendations from our customer success team on how we can further the customer engagement we’re already getting.”
https://en.anitacentreofexcellence.com/
A modern learning model, designed for community
THE VISION
The most innovative part of Anita Canada’s solution—the mobile app—is still in its infancy. The Anita Center for Excellence app has just gone live on the Apple Store, and Anita has hired their first-ever bilingual training manager, who will push it out to retailers in earnest.
The company can already see the power of the Thinkific Plus-powered mobile app, and the value it will bring to their partners. “We have so much content, and everything already looks great,” says Caskenette. “Right off the bat, we’ve built a robust content strategy, and we’ll be ready to respond as people start providing feedback.”
But the Thinkific Plus partnership has already strengthened Anita’s relationships with their network of retail partners. For Anita, these retailers are everything—customers, partners, vendors, and the only point through which their products flow into the market.
Online learning has opened the lines of communication Anita Canada and their partners, building closer, ongoing relationships in a way that simply wasn’t possible before.
“In the past, we’d have a relationship with the store owner or manager, and our sales team might get to know the staff when they’re passing through the store,” explains Caskenette.
“But now through Thinkific, we have a way to hear their feedback and concern about the product. Whatever experience they’re having, it gives us a chance to interact — perhaps showing them there’s a better way to do something, or showing us where we can do something better.”
“We’re creating a crowd learning experience, with over 400 points of contact in these stores, across Canada,” he says. “I think all these retailers, and our company too, share the same experiences. Now, we can all learn from each other.”
A modern learning model, designed for community
BUSINESS GROWTH WITH THINKIFIC PLUS
The most innovative part of Anita Canada’s solution—the mobile app—is still in its infancy. The Anita Center for Excellence app has just gone live on the Apple Store, and Anita has hired their first-ever bilingual training manager, who will push it out to retailers in earnest.
The company can already see the power of the Thinkific Plus-powered mobile app, and the value it will bring to their partners. “We have so much content, and everything already looks great,” says Caskenette. “Right off the bat, we’ve built a robust content strategy, and we’ll be ready to respond as people start providing feedback.”
But the Thinkific Plus partnership has already strengthened Anita’s relationships with their network of retail partners. For Anita, these retailers are everything—customers, partners, vendors, and the only point through which their products flow into the market.
Online learning has opened the lines of communication Anita Canada and their partners, building closer, ongoing relationships in a way that simply wasn’t possible before.
“In the past, we’d have a relationship with the store owner or manager, and our sales team might get to know the staff when they’re passing through the store,” explains Caskenette.
“But now through Thinkific, we have a way to hear their feedback and concern about the product. Whatever experience they’re having, it gives us a chance to interact — perhaps showing them there’s a better way to do something, or showing us where we can do something better.”
“We’re creating a crowd learning experience, with over 400 points of contact in these stores, across Canada. I think all these retailers, and our company too, share the same experiences. Now, we can all learn from each other.”- Mark Caskenette, Managing Director of Anita Canada.
https://www.anita.com/
Anita Canada’s entrepreneurship lessons
Anita Canada’s story proves the power of investing in business relationships — how uplifting your most important partners, in turn, will elevate your business as a whole.
The support and resources Anita provides their partners extend well beyond a traditional vendor-retailer relationship. Anita Canada understands that when their partners succeed, they succeed — and that takes so much more than product knowledge.
During COVID-19, they offered programs like free legal advice and webinars to help retailers negotiate with landlords when lockdowns meant they couldn’t make rent. They partnered with Shopify to help stores who were unfamiliar with ecommerce expand in the online sphere.
“We’re in the business of helping retailers thrive,” says Caskenette. “That really is our business. We just do it by selling lingerie and swimwear.”
Anita's favorite Thinkific Plus features
Dedicated Customer Success Team
ONGOING SUPPORT
Anita Canada gets consistent support from the Thinkific Plus dedicated Customer Success team. Anita’s Customer Success Team support acts as their partner as they scale their business, and guides their team in getting the most value from Thinkific Plus and their branded mobile app.
Branded Mobile by Thinkific
BRINGING TRAINING TO THE STORE
With Branded Mobile by Thinkific, our trusted team of experts took care of creating and managing a custom, white-labeled app for Anita Canada's online courses and community so they could focus on growing your business.
