Guillevin operates as one of Canada's largest electrical distributors with 100+ locations nationwide. The company distinguishes itself through a decentralized model allowing regional managers to customize product offerings and services. However, its digital experience lagged behind operational capabilities, and with a growing catalog of 100,000+ SKUs, billions of price combinations, and ambitions to expand into a second brand, the gap was no longer sustainable.
This engagement represented a full-scale enterprise digital transformation spanning platform architecture, data migration, identity management, search functionality, and user experience, designed to support the company's highly decentralized operating structure without disrupting it.
Guillevin's platform needed to serve three audiences (guest browsers, B2C customers, and B2B power users) across a highly decentralized operating model. The existing platform, built on Optimizely, had been over-customized to the point where every change required agency involvement. When a mandatory platform upgrade arrived with a six-figure price tag and no new capabilities, leadership chose to find something better instead.
The core problems were consistent across every layer of the business:
- Pricing visibility: Contract rates, volume tiers, and regional pricing still required a phone call. Pricing pages took 7+ seconds to load, with 34,000 client records pulled from the ERP on every visit.
- Product discovery: Search didn't understand trade language or part numbers, and couldn't filter by account context. Buyers gave up and routed through a sales rep instead.
- Low portal adoption: The poor experience meant most customers never regularly used the digital channel, limiting its value to the business.
- Stalled B2B workflows: Order approvals and quoting were stuck on the product roadmap. The platform was too rigid to deliver them.
- No path to a second brand: The architecture couldn't support Guillevin's multi-brand growth plans.
Teifi Digital led an extensive discovery process involving design, development, and stakeholder teams. This included competitive analysis, user research through surveys and interviews, and a full technical audit of existing systems. The guiding principle throughout: connect, don't replace. Guillevin's backend systems would stay. The customer experience would change.
The result was a Shopify migration built on a custom orchestration layer, Teifi Bridge, that unified five enterprise systems into a single, real-time architecture supporting all three buyer types on one storefront.
