How Anita Canada helps retailers drive business growth with Thinkific Plus
Anita Canada is a heritage lingerie and swimwear brand that sells exclusively through independent retail partners.


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 of history in women’s lingerie and swimwear. It offers multiple product lines for maternity, activewear, corsetry, and, notably, Anita Care for breast cancer and mastectomy survivors. Anita is deeply invested in helping these retailers thrive and succeed and sell Anita’s products effectively and empoweringly.
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, but there's inconsistency in live training, and we were asking sales professionals to take on a training role. When COVID hit, we realized we couldn't do in-store training and felt we had to come up with something.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, in-person training became impossible. However, Anita realized their model had issues from the start. Not only were salespeople delivering it not trained as educators, but 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 partnered with Thinkific Plus and started moving their online retailer training as ACE: the Anita Centre of Excellence.

“Boutique owners or managers are often burdened with training staff. And then, boom, we couldn’t deliver any training in person. Suddenly, 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. ”
Empowering partners with scalable education
Anita is strongly dedicated to helping its retail partners succeed—many of whom faced unprecedented struggles during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Anita recognized many ways to leverage Thinkific Plus and online learning to help their partners train new staff outside of the sales season without additional effort from their brand reps.
They could improve the quality of end customer service and alleviate a huge labour burden 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, and thorough fly-in seminars featuring experiential, empathy-focused learning, including workshops with cancer survivors. Moving to online learning made Anita’s partner's education more convenient, revolutionizing the program in ways the company didn’t even anticipate at the outset and transforming what they could offer in scope, breadth, and depth.

The Creation of ACE: The Anita Centre of Excellence
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.”

Choosing a platform
Thinkific Plus as the solution.
Anita Canada had big plans for their online learning experience, so they needed an LMS partner with advanced capabilities to 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 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.”
Another important factor was Thinkific Plus’ user-friendly interface, designed to hold many kinds of learning content. 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 labour-intensive specialized task, also became nearly effortless through Thinkific. Since Anita Canada retains ownership of the app, all they need to do is register as developers with Google and Apple.
“Just doing the application with Apple was the hardest part. We have the control we need, but we’re subcontracting all the work out to Thinkific Plus. It was effortless on our part. I’ve got so many ideas on where we can go next with Thinkific Plus, like gamification,” he continues. Our customer success team has given us great ideas and recommendations on how we can further the customer engagement we’re already getting.” - Mark Caskenette, Managing Director

“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 do 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—probably the only laptop most or computer most boutiques have.”

A mobile learning model
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. We’ve built a robust content strategy and will be ready to respond as people start providing feedback."
However, 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 between 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 pass through the store. But now, through Thinkific Plus, we can hear their feedback and concerns about the product. Their shared experiences allow us to interact — and show each other how we can improve. ”
- Mark Caskenette, Managing Director
“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."
Anita Canada's Online Learning Tips
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 its partners extend well beyond a traditional vendor-retailer relationship. Anita Canada understands that when its partners succeed, they succeed—which requires support beyond basic product knowledge.
During COVID-19, they offered programs like free legal advice and webinars to help retailers negotiate with landlords when lockdowns prevented them from making rent. They also partnered with Shopify to help stores unfamiliar with e-commerce expand online.
“We’re in the business of helping retailers thrive. That is the core of our business. We just happen to do it by selling lingerie and swimwear.” - Mark Caskenette, Managing Director
Anita Canada's Favorite Thinkific Plus Features

Branded Mobile App
With Branded Mobile by Thinkific, our trusted team of experts created and managed a custom, white-labelled app for Anita Canada's online courses and community so they could focus on growing their business.

Dedicated Customer Success Team
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.
Trained and Empowered Employees That Drive Business Growth.
Investing in your team’s growth benefits individual career advancement and drives engagement, retention, and business results for your organization.
Transform training processes by empowering employees with tailored learning experiences and essential tools to excel in their roles. Thinkific Plus is a comprehensive solution for seamless onboarding, upskilling, sales enablement, and talent development.
Ready to embark on this transformative journey?
Request a demo of Thinkific Plus and start shaping the future of your employee experience today.