When the LIT Garden first launched in the summer of 2021, it came with some ambitious plans for health and wellness businesses in Moose Jaw.
The website was conceived by local wellness business owners Lynne and Maggie Brochu as a one-stop shop for all things health and wellness, featuring full business profiles including video, links to websites and just an all-around host of information as a 24/7, 365-day-a-year online tradeshow.
Now the plan is to take things to the next level, beginning with a Saskatchewan-wide focus and featuring a revamped and improved website at the heart of their ongoing project.
“When we did the soft launch in 2021, we learned pretty quickly after that that we needed to expand our vision,” Lynne Brochu said. “By talking to Moose Jaw wellness entrepreneurs, they had wellness products and services but they were also expanding online, and what we felt would help our businesses thrive is if we took the idea and expanded it to all of Saskatchewan.”
And with that, they went back to work. The last year saw LIT Garden performing a host of website restructuring and improvements, all designed to streamline the user process and make it even easier for shoppers to find what they’re looking for.
That led to far more downtime than they would have liked, with the goal now to build up a solid client base so shoppers have plenty of options when they visit.
“We’re just getting that momentum again and are looking to get that word out so wellness entrepreneurs know what we have to offer and what we’re about.” said Lynne, who with Maggie Brochu has over 35 years in the health and wellness industry. “We have four partners total right now and are covering 20 or so categories in wellness, and we’d like to expand that to be hundreds or thousands of partners so there’s a wealth of products and services A through Z for our shoppers.”
Once they get fully rolling, LIT Garden expects one of their biggest advantages to be the centralization of their directory, which will offer health and wellness businesses plenty of exposure just from folks browsing what there is on hand. Where a business might otherwise be missed, LIT Garden will have all its information one click away.
“We’ve found that there are really, really good wellness partners out there but no one knows about them,” Maggie said. “We’re hoping this will change that.”
The LIT Garden initially came into being out of a similar issue: frustration from searching for wellness businesses and finding outdated or unmaintained directories and limited search-engine results.
Bringing all those businesses together so they could be found in one place -- and offering just about everything one would need to know about said businesses in the process -- led to the first soft launch.
“We need to have something that’s a user-friendly, simple experience where people have all the information they need right in front of them in a few clicks,” Lynne explained. “That was a big focus in revamping our website. People can now search keywords or locations and if you’re interested in Moose Jaw, all the businesses in Moose Jaw will pop up. Or if you’re interested in online or different categories, you can search for any of those and they’ll be there.”
Then there’s simply creating a brand new and updated online presence, something that can be a struggle when you’re a small wellness business just getting things going.
“I used to run a holistic physical therapy business and closing that to go into an online wellness business was a very different ball game,” Lynne said. “So I learned very quickly how difficult online real estate is to establish as opposed to having a storefront. That’s part two of why we’re doing the LIT Garden, to help anyone who has a wellness business or product to succeed and thrive.”
As the saying goes, it’s easiest to figure something out by doing it, and the easiest way to see what LIT Garden has to offer and can do is by visiting their website at www.thelitgarden.ca. You can learn all about what they have to offer and how to join, including all the perks and benefits that come with being a member of a growing wellness community.
“There are several directory-style partnerships out there, but we’re very focused on a wellness service and product and very focused on all of Saskatchewan,” Lynne said. “We’re trying to bridge wellness in all of Saskatchewan and that’s how we’re different compared to our competitors… the ultimate goal is to create a LIT Saskatchewan, a community of very well people.
