How KAYALI built its own Learning Academy to match its global growth with Thrive

Scaling employee training across a growing team

KAYALI has grown fast. Appropriately named after the Arabic translation for ‘My imagination’, the United Arab Emirates-based fragrance house has expanded from a dream into a global business. As they continued to scale, KAYALI needed a way to give every employee – no matter where they were based – the same access to training and brand knowledge without slowing the pace of growth. 

KAYALI's workforce sits closer to the shop floor than a head office, so its learning strategy had to reflect that. It needed a dedicated digital space, built around its own people and culture, that could keep pace with a workforce growing fast and working mostly off-site. Thrive was able to implement and host the Academy locally, backed by Account Directors and Customer Success teams working in the same timezone as KAYALI. 

KAYALI Academy: a mobile-first learning platform

KAYALI Academy is the product of that partnership. Instead of a generic training portal, employees now have a dedicated home carrying KAYALI’s specific identity. They’re using Thrive’s Spaces feature to bring people together, no matter which market or store they’re working from. Everything from training materials to launch briefs now live in one place through Thrive’s Hub, available in Arabic with full right-to-left support. 

Because so much of the KAYALI team works away from a desk, Thrive's mobile LMS puts KAYALI Academy in every employee's pocket. Now, learning fits around a shift on the shop floor rather than competing with it. Behind the scenes, Thrive's AI content creator and Kiki help the KAYALI Academy team turn new product launches and brand stories into learning content at the pace the business moves, so onboarding and product knowledge never lag behind the next launch.

Career development software built to scale

KAYALI Academy gives employees a single, branded home to build skills, develop their careers and grow alongside the business, rather than a patchwork of onboarding documents and one-off training sessions. As employees move into more senior roles, features like Thrive's Mentoring give them a way to keep learning from each other – built to scale with KAYALI itself as its community keeps expanding.

KAYALI's partnership also reflects how established Thrive's own presence in the UAE has become. Thrive runs its implementation work directly from the region, with local hosting that keeps data close to home. As more organisations across travel, aviation, retail and leisure choose Thrive to support their fast-growing GCC teams, KAYALI stands as a marker of how far that regional footprint now reaches.

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