WIMTACH partners with Quince Flowers on the enhancement of an E-commerce website

Quince Flowers is one example of a retail business that has benefitted from a partnership with WIMTACH-CEDA. In 1997, owner Rosie Jeffares-Levitt started her floral business out of her kitchen. Then she established a brick-and-mortar boutique within a well-known furniture store. Next came new shared retail ventures and a flagship store of her own. Now Quince is one of the most recognized floral establishments in Toronto. Quince is synonymous with expert floral design. Quince serves a diverse clientele ranging from corporations to wedding clients, to individuals.

With the advent of Covid-19, like other businesses, Quince was under threat. Jeffares-Levitt decided to expand the presence of the flower shop to an online space. For the success of this new venture, she relied on the assistance of WIMTACH-CEDA to bring her vision to light. “It became imperative for me to sell flowers online,” she said. “That had never been my model before.” To do so, customers must be able to find Quince online.

Initially, Jeffares-Levitt developed a Shopify website with an employee but they were challenged with enhancing its visibility. As a result, the partnership with WIMTACH-CEDA was aimed at improving the digital footprint of the website using Search Engine Optimization strategies with a central goal of improving the business’s reach and customer engagement.

After one month of development, the WIMTACH-CEDA team was able to successfully implement several SEO strategies. Some of these strategies included Meta Tag Enhancement, Website Optimization for Load Speed, a blog integration and assistance with developing a Google Ad campaign. The most important element of this partnership for Jeffares-Levitt is that is saved her time to be able to focus on her business. “You see, those little glitches would hold me up for hours and everything that I do, I do it by hand,” she said. “As a small business owner, we wear many hats, there’s so many things to juggle, and digital is a whole new layer that really should be a fulltime job.”

Jeffares-Levitt was quite impressed with the contributions of the WIMTACH-CEDA team. The team assisted her greatly and with involvement of faculty members and Project Management staff, the project was made accessible to her needs. Project Managers organized the project development cycle to ensure that she was able to continue running her business operations. As well, over the course of the project, Student Researchers like Ariya Suresh, worked with faculty members to take full account of the development requirements, ensuring to resolve bugs and adjusting their programming to meet business needs. It helped these students to apply their knowledge in an industry project and fully appreciate the real impacts of their work in a business setting. “My knowledge of all things related to the web are fairly limited but I know what SEO is and I know it’s important and I felt like it was a really good deal as well, it was affordable,” she said. “They were great to work with, very pleased with the partnership.”

As the project collaboration has settled, Jeffares-Levitt is hoping that the improvements will make a difference and ultimately, she is pleased that the WIMTACH-CEDA team was able to help her in executing her idea. An added bonus of the project was that it assisted her in learning about what her competitors were doing differently in the digital space and the collaboration introduced a different way of doing business. For instance, she found that learning about how to use keyword research helped her to understand how to improve her blog posts for searchability. Through the course of the collaboration, she was also able to learn that her competitors were offering free delivery options and considered how she might be able to implement ideas like this into her own marketing strategies. “This all came together with a great price, a great team, great communication. I really enjoyed it,” she said. “It was a good learning experience for me.”

She has already recommended WIMTACH-CEDA to another business and she believes that more businesses would benefit from the program. “It’s a very safe bet, it’s vetted, it’s tried, you have college professors leading and making sure that everything is going right,” she said. “The other route for example is to find someone who offers the service and it would take a lot of leg work … those questions are already answered … we know we are getting our money’s worth.”

For further information, please send press inquiries to ptyagi@centennialcollege.ca