How Five Below uses AI video to scale training and cut production costs by 97%

The Challenge

Five Below's Talent Development team had no shortage of content to create. With 2,000 stores, rapid new-hire onboarding cycles, and leadership development programs running in parallel, the demand for training video was constant. The supply was not.

Before Synthesia, producing video meant working with external agencies. Each video ran roughly $12,000 to produce, and any script update after delivery meant starting the process over. The team spent approximately $60,000 one year for just five finished videos. At that price, entire training topics went unmade, not because they were unimportant, but because the cost made volume impossible.

Tools like Articulate offered a partial workaround, but they required extensive storyboarding, long feedback loops, and rarely produced output that included voiceover or video. The result was a small team of Instructional Designers stretched thin, classroom trainers locked out of the production process entirely, and a training library that simply could not keep up with the pace of the business.

The Shift

Today, Synthesia is the team's default production tool, and the results have drastically changed expectations for what a eight-person team can produce.

In their first full year on the platform, Five Below created more than 100 training videos for $40,000 total, bringing the per-video cost from $12,000 down to $400. More importantly, team members who had never built a video before are now creating content independently. Classroom trainers have become instructional designers. The production bottleneck that once lived inside a small specialist team has effectively disappeared.

That shift from vendor-dependent to fully in-house has also changed how the team thinks about content strategy. Rather than rationing video to the highest-priority topics, the team now builds supplemental Synthesia content alongside every instructor-led session, giving employees a five-minute polished recap they can revisit any time on the LMS. Training has gone from a one-time production event to a living, updatable resource.

"Synthesia helped us move from being a scrappy team to an enterprise-ready org," said John Kluxen, Talent Development Specialist. "It turned classroom trainers into instructional designers and gave us the ability to scale training content across 2,000 stores, all without needing a production team."

The Impact

• 97% reduction in per-video production cost, from $12,000 to $400
• 100+ videos produced in a single year, up from a handful annually
• 6x increase in production capacity across the team, with no new hires
• 80% reduction in time spent on content creation annually
• $240,000 in external vendor costs avoided 
• 90%+ learner favorability ratings sustained across content

"Synthesia gave us quality and quantity at the same time — something we simply couldn't achieve before. We reduced production costs by 97%, and our learner favorability ratings have stayed consistently above 90%. For a team trying to reach tens of thousands of crew members across thousands of stores, that combination is everything. It's been a home run for us." - Matt Wozar, Senior Director of Talent Development

Why It Matters

Five Below's story is a signal for how enterprise L&D is changing. For a retailer nearly doubling their storefronts, the ability to produce consistent, high-quality training at scale is not a nice-to-have. It’s a business requirement.

• When production cost drops by 97%, content decisions shift from "can we afford to make this?" to "what should we make next?"
• When non-specialists can create, production capacity scales with headcount rather than sitting inside a bottleneck
• When training video becomes fast and updatable, it stops being a static artifact and starts functioning as a living system
• When quality is high enough that learners cannot tell the difference from premium off-the-shelf content, the case for in-house production becomes self-sustaining

Ready to scale your learning content without scaling your production overhead? See what enterprise L&D teams are building with Synthesia.