#1 Best Place to Work in the UK

How the Wren Kitchens Tech Team are Driving Business Transformation

With over 78 retail stores across the UK, a celebrity fan base and 10 years trading under their belts, Wren Kitchens is a brand name that you have most likely heard of before. You probably know that they manufacture and sell fitted kitchens, and you might even own one of those kitchens yourself, but what you probably don’t know is that their success has been impacted enormously by the dedicated tech team of talented developers in their Barton-upon-Humber HQ – “The Nest”! In just 10 years Wren Kitchens has established itself as the UK’s Number 1 Kitchen Retailer, and more recently been named as Indeed’s number one retail company to work for too! We recently caught up with a few members of the Wren Tech team to learn more about what it’s like to work there and what is on the horizon for Wren Kitchens in the next few months.


“Wren Kitchens to create 1,200 new jobs”

Earlier this month there was an exciting announcement from Wren Kitchens, explaining that they are planning to create 1,200 new jobs as part of a £120m expansion of the Barton-upon-Humber manufacturing site. This investment will be mostly within the manufacturing functions of the company, but with technology playing such a huge part in driving innovation for the business, this growth will be supported enormously through the Wren Tech Team.

“Our growth is so aggressive we’re always pushing for new features, bringing new products to market and the enabler of that is primarily IT. Obviously elements like logistics and manufacturing have a massive impact, but even these areas of our business are dependent on IT. Being at the heart of that is kind of cool, because everything in our business runs through IT - it is the enabler of all things here!”
Luke – DevOps Engineer
“What surprised me when I first joined Wren was that a kitchen manufacturer would have such a massive IT department. I knew that Wren manufactured kitchens and I assumed the IT department would be relatively small – I had no idea that there were so many developers here and so many projects happening in the background.”
Andrius – Network Engineer

The Wren Tech Team currently have openings for 3D Artists, iOS Developers, JavaScript Developers, PHP Developers and Unity C# Developers – visit the Wren Tech Careers Hub to learn more.

“Exciting tech projects”

Developers at The Nest HQ have the chance to work on a variety of interesting projects, using cutting edge technologies that a lot of companies have yet to adopt. Pretty much every member of the Wren Tech Team we spoke to noted the variety of projects as one the things they love most about working at Wren.

“Candidates who haven’t heard of Wren Kitchens from a tech perspective before would probably be surprised to learn how heavily invested we are into the Amazon eco system, as well as the fact that we get to use the most recent updates in a lot of our applications too. We have a number of different projects we work on here; the VR system is one that often gets talked about which is the ability to view your kitchen in Virtual Reality. For me, the diversity of projects you get to work on is what makes Wren Kitchens such a great place to work.”
Harri – Senior Developer

Wren Kitchens is making the most of cutting-edge tech including Doctrine ORM, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch, AWS Auto Scaling, the most up-to-date versions of PHP / Symfony, TypeScript and ReactJS.

“Indeed’s #1 Best Place to Work”

Not only has Wren Kitchens developed a culture and environment that champions cutting edge technology, but earlier this year they were also named as Indeed’s Number 1 top-rated retailer to work for and Indeed’s Number 2 top-rated workplace overall in the UK (second only to Apple!). With a stunning office environment, comprehensive tech resources, an on-site gym, two subsidised canteens, employee discounts, bonus opportunities and a friendly and fun working environment it’s no surprise that the Wren Tech Team love working at “The Nest”!

“I just really enjoy working here. It’s the first job I’ve had where I actually enjoy getting up in the morning to come to work. It sounds like a cliché, but every day really is different when you’re working here.”
Hector – JavaScript Developer
“There are a lot of great perks here, I really like the gym and my managers are also looking to put me through formal Unity training, which is normally a paid qualification so that’s really good. The culture here is quite easy going, a lot of us do get quite excited about the technical aspects of the job – I personally find the work here fun and so does everyone else in the tech team!”
Katie – Junior 3D Developer
“Everybody in the IT department is really friendly and works incredibly well together. In my role I’m always really busy and I love that. I love having work to do, feeling like it’s productive and that we’re really delivering something.”
Anisha – IT Project Manager

If you’d like to learn more about the fantastic technical opportunities at Wren then check out the live job portal here, or if you’d like a bit more insight from the Wren Tech Team themselves get in touch today to hear more! 



JobHoller – 01244 567 967 – info@jobholler.com 

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