Since adopting eduMe, Crate & Barrel has:
Seen over 80,000 lesson completions within 3 months
QUOTE - OVERALL COMMENT ON THE SOLUTION
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 8,000 employees across 100 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 large-scale initiative to shake up their e-commerce 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.
The company's existing training processes were not suited for the level of alignment needed across Crate & Barrel's large, dispersed retail workforce.
QUOTE - PAIN OF THE BEFORE STATE
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, affecting business agility.
Product knowledge was shared in long sessions which made information difficult retain and impossible to revisit post-session. Given 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 posed issues.
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 the overhaul of the technologies that made up their e-Commerce tech stack. This change alone would require rigorous Systems Training for thousands of frontline workers.
In eduMe Crate & Barrel found an always 'on' training layer personalizable by 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.
QUOTE - SOMETHING PERTAINING TO ONE OF THE SPECIFIC POINTS/FEATURES BELOW
Crate & Barrel’s frontline associates' experience of eduMe is as a fully branded knowledge hub, with training organized by category and a visual identity fully continuous with the brand's own. This provides a familiar, seamless user experience. Each associate's experience is personalized - with their view differing by role, department or location.
On the back end, this relevance is driven by eduMe's deep, 360 integration with Workday across Workday HCM, Learning, and Recruiting. An ongoing, bidirectional data sync with Workday ensures users and groups in eduMe reflect those in Workday in real time, with joiners or leavers seamlessly accounted for in eduMe. This eliminates the need for Crate & Barrel's team to manually curate learner lists, segment audiences or otherwise provision users - ensuring personalized training, without the upkeep.
Instead of scrolling through long modules to find a single detail, associates can surface the snippet of knowledge they need in seconds, by speaking to eduMe's AI Chatbot for instant answers, improving on-the-floor efficiency.
eduMe enabled Crate & Barrel shift to a short, visual, social media-style lesson format that breaks down complex topics into digestible, tap through moments, encourages repeat engagement, and feel familiar and enjoyable to a modern retail workforce.
eduMe AI helped accelerate the creation of this content, with file-to-lesson conversion that helped translate existing SOPs and product manuals into eduMe lessons, helping training teams to draft new content faster and aiding production timelines.
eduMe also supported the democratization of content production beyond just the L&D team. SMEs and on the ground 'influencers' alike were encouraged to contribute to lesson development. 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 across the organization, and made training content more relatable to other store associates.
Crate & Barrel gave associates multiple ways to access training, leveraging a mix of in-person and digital touchpoints. This included access directly from the Workday app and via Workday campaigns, further supported by physical QR codes placed contextually in-store to support moment-of-need learning, such as quick product refreshers. The company additionally placed shortcuts on shared in-store iPads, allowing associates to drop into training (via single sign-on) 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. Crate & Barrel also opted for a staggered launch, allowing them to use observations and feedback to refine the experience before expanding to the full network.
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.
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.
QUOTE - HOW EDUME HAS POSITIVELY SHAKEN UP C&B'S TRAINING APPROACH, IN A NUTSHELL
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.