How Keune Haircosmetics expanded training into 21 languages using Easygenerator

Keune Haircosmetics, a family-owned company with a century-long legacy, is an international haircare brand active in over 90 countries. Nancy Simpson, Global Educator at Keune, plays a key role in expanding the company’s training outreach. She creates and manages training for hair stylists, salon owners, and distributors worldwide.

Jon Withrington, Global Customer and Capability Education Manager, oversees the broader education strategy. Together, their team ensures that training reaches hair professionals across more than 70 countries through the Keune Online Academy, the company’s award-winning e-learning platform.

Before adopting Easygenerator, Keune’s training team had a complex process for localizing e-learning courses. They created learning content in XLIFF files and sent them to an external translation platform, where each sentence was translated individually.

After each translation, the files had to be re-imported back into the course, checked for errors, and adjusted for formatting, repeating this process several times to get everything right. It typically took weeks to publish content.

Nancy recalls that it was very inefficient, and that every translation was a back-and-forth process.

Keune adopted Easygenerator to simplify course creation and translation. The platform’s user-friendly design lets Nancy quickly build courses, while EasyTranslate makes localizing content simpler and more efficient.

Keune now uses Easygenerator to share learning content in 21 languages. To ensure accuracy, 20 native speakers from Keune’s global partners review the translations, one for each language. They can easily log in as co-authors, edit the content, and share the localized course with their teams directly on the platform.

That review step matters. Jon explained that for a brand like Keune, translation tools alone are not enough. “Within our industry, we have a lot of industry-specific lingo. So you would never just use a translation tool and leave it as is. It has to always be checked by a professional, and not even by a translator. It really needs to be someone who can translate but who is also within the industry, so they can really curate it to the needs of the audience.”

Getting to this point took time. Jon is candid about the early days. “In the beginning, we jumped straight into it. And then what ends up happening is you maybe have one or two people developing everything, and sometimes you have a little bit of bias involved. Piloting or testing is not quite that robust.”

Today, the process looks very different. The team starts the year with a roadmap tied to the marketing calendar, mapping out which modules need to be updated, adjusted, or newly introduced. “We set up a roadmap for the whole year,” Jon explained. “Everything that we do or our priorities are dictated by all the new products or updates or whatever that needs to come.”

Content development follows a clear sequence. The content team builds all the necessary material first. It is then tested with a set of pilot countries across different regions before it goes out to all territories. The digital team manages the rollout and coordinates with translation teams globally. “The digital team will meet the translators at least once per week to keep the project on track,” Jon shared.

Regular communication keeps everything moving. The team runs a weekly stand-up to surface challenges and blockages, and a quarterly review cycle to step back and assess the bigger picture. Jon sums up the philosophy behind it: “It’s really about working as a collective, communicating as a collective, and cultivating a culture where everyone is fighting for the same team and for the same goal.”

To roll out Easygenerator, Keune first set up 20 co-authors from its regional teams who could log into the platform to review and edit the translated content. Next, they introduced the platform through demos and onboarding sessions.

This approach allowed each region to fine-tune training content directly, creating a faster, more efficient process across global offices. Today, the company has over 500 courses in 21 languages that are continuously updated. In 2024, the company won the Silver Award for “Best Learning Technologies Project – Commercial Sector – International” at Learning Technologies in London for its Online Keune Academy project.

Keune is continuing to expand. The platform is on track to reach 15,000 users by the end of the year, and the team is working to bring more territories and languages on board.

Looking further ahead, Jon sees personalization as the next priority. “Personalization is going to become much more of a key topic area and a tailor-made pathway,” he said. That means pulling local teams into the content process earlier, so what gets built reflects what each market actually needs. “Bringing in different territories earlier into that process means the content is much more engineered to what the local teams are expecting to see.”

For a brand operating in 95 countries, that ambition is significant. But with the process, the platform, and the people now in place, Jon sees a clear path forward. “The ultimate goal is personalization. That is absolutely our future.”