What began with Wren Kitchens urgently needing 20 PHP developers in days grew into a years-long partnership.
Together, we cut cloud costs by up to 70%, shortened shipping workflows from hours to minutes, and kept our engineers consistently above Wren’s KPI averages.
Partnership goal:
→ To scale Wren Kitchens’ development capacity through agile team augmentation.
The client
Wren Kitchens is the UK’s leading kitchen retailer, operating nearly 150 showrooms and a manufacturing facility in its North Lincolnshire factories. The company employs nearly 7,000 people and delivers over 130,000 kitchens per year, holding an impressive 11% of all UK consumer spending in the kitchen market in 2018, a figure that only continues to grow.
A key part of its tech offer is the Kitchen Planner, a 3D modelling tool that lets customers visualise layouts, test colours and textures, and receive accurate cost estimates before ordering. Once the design is approved, Wren manages everything: production, delivery using its own fleet, and installation by qualified tradesmen.
Sustainability is central to Wren’s manufacturing approach. Up to 25% of materials come from sustainable local woodland, and 45% from nearby sawmills, where Wren repurposes unused off-cuts.
Wren Kitchens has grown into a major British manufacturing brand, known for end-to-end service, scale, and innovation in customer experience.
INDUSTRY
Manufacturing & retail
COUNTRY
The United Kingdom
SERVICE
Team augmentation
Challenge
Wren Kitchens was growing quickly, but couldn’t scale its technical capacity fast enough. After ending their collaboration with a previous vendor, they urgently needed to rebuild their development capacity – specifically, 20 PHP developers, available immediately.
The company’s pain points included:
Limited number of available specialists in the local market
The need to build and scale teams quickly, for long- and short-term initiatives
Difficulty in planning technology work several quarters ahead due to a variable roadmap
High expectations for quality, reliability, and on-time delivery to support a fast-growing business
Other than developers, Wren needed a reliable partner who could transfer knowledge, handle higher-risk work, and scale teams up or down to keep development projects moving as the business grew.
Project takeover
Wren Kitchens needed a fast replacement of their previous vendor with no chance to connect them to the new partner. We stepped directly into a strong internal IT department, so the project came with full documentation and clear technical ownership, which gave us a reliable knowledge base from day one.
Team augmentation
In total, 31 people (including backend developers, QA engineers, iOS mobile developers, an engineering manager, and a project manager) supported . Each required different skills, domain knowledge, and integration work, and our specialists became an extension of Wren’s internal organization.
Installations
.We worked alongside Wren Developers on the systems that manage Wren’s installer network and the customer installation lifecycle – from presenting the plan to the fitters to final acceptance, with uploaded photos of the already-installed kitchen.
Key responsibilities
Supporting installers registered under Wren, manage measurements, appointments, and installation dates
Building UI features so stakeholders can independently manage installation-related fees (previously hardcoded by developers)
Building UI features so stakeholders can independently manage installation-related fees (previously hardcoded by developers)
Calculating installation-related charges that include customer fees, installer payouts, and Wren’s margins
Integrating Wren’s internal iPad installer system with backend services
Integrating Salesforce via a custom API
Impact
Stakeholders gained full control over pricing models, fee structures, and installer compensation without developer support.
Logistics
We supported mission-critical logistics systems that keep Wren’s distribution operations running.
Key responsibilities
Integration with multiple UK couriers
Reduced internal audit processing time from several hours to 40 minutes
Ongoing maintenance of complex warehouse and transportation workflows
Delivering “easy wins,” such as optimizing heavy database queries
Reduced the load time of a key product-browsing service from 1 minute to ~5 seconds
Impact
Wren improved label accuracy, eliminated penalties, and stabilized overnight operations for critical delivery processes.
Product
Our specialists supported Wren’s new in-house developers in sharing domain knowledge during the onboarding process.
QA Support
Complete pre-production verification and testing
Training Wren’s internal QA team on Salesforce
Improving testing standards and processes
iOS Development
Support in development and maintenance of Wren’s iPad-based internal app system
Legacy integrations made feature development difficult, so we stabilized the system and modernized its workflows.
Managed certificates, updates, and continuous delivery
Impact
Wren improved release stability, strengthened QA capabilities, and revitalized iOS apps that support internal operations.
Our partnership
Outcomes
→ Major cloud cost reductions. The improvements reduced EBS storage by 70% and EC2 compute by 50%.
→ Higher operational stability. We helped Wren stabilize pipelines powering 300+ monthly builds, and cut shipping workflows from hours to minutes.
→ Faster internal tools and teams. We modernized legacy iOS apps, made query times 12x faster. By automating incident resolution, the team avoided failed, lengthy builds.
Next steps
The Software House continues to support Wren Kitchens as it modernizes its development workflows and explores new ways to increase delivery speed and efficiency.
The next phase focuses on exploring AI-driven tooling and automation, including:
AI-assisted development to accelerate coding and improve delivery consistency,
AI code assistants to support developers in everyday tasks and improve productivity.
These initiatives will help Wren Kitchens streamline development, boost engineering performance, and prepare their teams for the future of technology-driven improvements.
