Crate & Barrel | >80,000 completions in 3 months

Since adopting eduMe, Crate & Barrel has:

• Seen over 80,000 lesson completions within 3 months 

• Achieved a 76+% training completion rate

Crate & Barrel, a U.S. retail giant renowned for its design-led homeware, found itself in a situation that demanded a new approach to frontline enablement. With over 5,000 employees across 120 stores, the company needed a way to ensure every associate -  regardless of email status, device ownership, timezone or branch - received training relevant to their role's goals.  

In the face of an omnichannel retail environment and thousands of product SKUs, leaders in the organization recognized that their store network needed simpler access to Product Knowledge Training, Behavioral, and Systems Training - particularly in light of a large-scale initiative to shake up their tech stack.

As a result, Crate & Barrel set out to build a system that connected stores, standardized training quality, and supported their entire frontline through every stage of the employee lifecycle - from pre Day-1 to promotion, and beyond. 

To do that, they partnered with eduMe.

Crate & Barrel’s Challenge

The company's existing training processes were not suited for the level of alignment needed across Crate & Barrel's large, dispersed retail workforce.

Most store associates did not have corporate email addresses, which made reliance on mass announcements unfeasible. Information was often cascaded through already time pressured managers, with verbal dissemination creating a visibility gap for HQ, and resulting in uneven knowledge store-to-store.

Legacy training tools in use by the company - and the time it took to author content on them - decelerated the turnaround of new training. End-to-end training production times were further bottlenecked by lengthy SME feedback and review processes, which pushed launch times out and affected business agility.

With several large-scale change initiatives on the horizon, we needed a platform that would allow us to quickly create and distribute training in a way that was accessible, timely, and easy for associates to consume.

Product knowledge was shared in long sessions which made information difficult retain and impossible to revisit post-session. With tens of thousands of ever-growing and updating product SKUs retailed by the company, and the frequent changes to communicate around them, over-reliance on in-person training was unsustainable. 

Ultimately - Crate & Barrel sought a way to better unify knowledge across a national workforce. This pain was made all the more acute by a looming project involving a change of the technologies that made up their e-commerce stack. This change alone would require rigorous Systems Training for thousands of frontline workers. 

eduMe’s Solution

In eduMe Crate & Barrel found an always on training layer personalizable by an individual's location & role, that supplemented in-person training, integrated with the company's existing tech stack - namely HRIS Workday - and supported the entire employee lifecycle - from new hire to ongoing development.

I'd highlight accessibility through Workday and ease of content creation.

Crate & Barrel's Four-Pillared Frontline Training Strategy 

1. Providing each associate with a branded home for learning, across their lifecycle

Crate & Barrel’s frontline associates' experience of eduMe was as a fully branded knowledge hub, with training organized by category and a visual identity continuous with the brand's own. This provided a familiar, seamless user experience, one supported by a high degree of content personalization - what was shown to each associate was customized by role, department or location. 

On the back end, this relevance was driven by eduMe's deep, 360 integration with Workday across Workday HCM, Learning, and Recruiting. An ongoing, bidirectional data sync with Workday ensured eduMe users and groups reflected those in Workday in real time. This  eliminated the need for Crate & Barrel's team to manually curate learner lists, segment audiences or otherwise provision users - ensuring personalized training, without the upkeep. 

From the associate-side, efficient, relevant learning was further supported by eduMe's AI Chatbot.  Instead of scrolling through long modules to find a single detail, associates could ask the AI for an instant answer, improving their on-the-floor efficiency.  

2. A multi-stakeholder, multi-directional approach to content sourcing

eduMe's visual, social media-style formats allowed Crate & Barrel to translate complex or lengthy content into engaging tap-through moments. 

eduMe allows us to deliver learning in a format that feels familiar to associates and aligns with how they already consume information."

eduMe AI accelerated the creation of this content, with file-to-lesson conversion functionality that enabled the company to upcycle existing SOPs and product manuals into eduMe lessons.

eduMe also supported the democratization of content production beyond just the L&D team. SMEs and on the ground 'influencers' were encouraged to contribute media to lesson development. 

eduMe stood out for its ability to leverage content creators across both corporate and field teams.

This bottom-up content-sharing had three-in-one benefit: it took the onus of sourcing content off the shoulder's of the L&D team alone, it allowed expertise to be pooled in from all corners of the organization, and it increased the relatability of training to associates. 

3. Multi-channel delivery, bolstered by a robust L&D-led internal comms campaign 

Crate & Barrel gave associates multiple ways to access training. This included access directly from the Workday app, and physical QR codes placed contextually in-store to support moment-of-need learning. The company additionally placed shortcuts on shared in-store iPads, allowing associates to drop into training in seconds.

By building out multiple routes to training, and embedding entry points into already-used, high traffic workflows, Crate & Barrel maximized the likelihood of engagement.

Critically, the launch of eduMe was supported by a robust internal communications campaign, led by the L&D team, that helped drive awareness and adoption. Senior leaders were briefed early, stores received printed promotional collateral, and in-person visits supported teams through the initial roll out. 

We partnered closely with senior leadership to ensure strong sponsorship. That leadership buy-in was critical in positioning eduMe as  not just another learning platform, but as a genuinely valuable tool that supports associates in day-to-day work.

4. Better synchronized, more visible performance data

eduMe’s integration with Workday ensured Crate & Barrel’s training data flowed directly back into their primary system of record, giving the business one unified view of completion and engagement. This eliminated the need to compare reports across disconnected tools and provided teams at HQ with a real time picture of how training was landing across stores.

Managers on the ground also played a critical role. Through eduMe’s performance dashboards, store leaders could see which lessons had been completed, where engagement lagged, and what topics needed reinforcement.

This visibility allowed stores to adjust quickly, close knowledge gaps, and feed insights directly back to L&D, creating a more connected and data informed cycle between frontline teams and headquarters.

The Results

Crate & Barrel saw immediate and significant improvements in both training engagement and operational efficiency.

Within the first three months of adoption, employees completed more than 80,000 lessons, demonstrating high engagement and strong adoption of the new learning experience. Training content became faster to produce and easier to distribute, allowing the company to support large scale systems changes with confidence.

The company also established consistent, always available learning across all stores, creating a digital layer that supported and strengthened in person training. The seamless access through Workday and in store devices meant associates could complete training during shifts without disruption.

Managers gained the ability to monitor completion, identify gaps, and reinforce training more effectively, leading to improved alignment across stores and departments.

The initiative also laid a foundation for future programs. Crate & Barrel now has the infrastructure to expand eduMe into corporate onboarding, leadership training, and upskilling on large and complex tools such as Workday itself.

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