Wren Kitchens has ploughed more than £3 million into its 28,000sq ft tech hub at the company’s Humberside headquarters.
The facility includes nine videoconferencing suites, a cutting-edge IT monitoring centre, a lecture theatre and two VR studios, to which Wren is now adding a £100,000 hands-on prototype technology area.
The tech team has developed virtual reality software that is featured in more than 100 Wren showrooms across the UK and USA.
At the same time, Wren is also aiming to recruit 60 new tech/IT staff to play a major role in the future of the retailer.
To do this, it held a tech recruitment event at its Barton-upon-Humber HQ, where the technologies it uses were showcased and which also featured speakers from Wren and such other tech industry professionals as the senior technical specialist at Unity, which is Wren’s leading 3D technology partner.
Said Wren head of software development Stephen Hodges: “As we continue to invest in our state-of-the-art tech and world-class facilities, we’re searching for talented developers to come and join us and play a major part in constantly evolving our software and processes.
“From state-of-the-art virtual reality to our cutting-edge kitchen planner program, there’s always something new going on at Wren, and our IT department plays a huge part in bringing these projects to life.”
Positions Wren was looking to recruit for included a PHP or JavaScript developers, a technical development manager, a technical 3D artist and an iOS developer.
Speaking of working at Wren, senior developer Hector Maddock-Greene commented: “Wren has given me the opportunity to grow as a developer and expand my skill set. Over three years, I have rapidly progressed from junior to senior developer. “The projects I help lead are ground-breaking, and I’ve experienced working with an array of technologies from web and mobile as well as native application development including 2D UI, 3D, AR and VR.”
Wren Kitchens developer Charlotte Austin added: “No two days are the same at Wren. There’s so much variety of work and it’s exciting developing and learning new skills in areas of IT I’ve never experienced before. Management is always open to ideas and regularly implement things suggested by the team.”
Wren employs 7,200 people across its sites and has been recognised for the past two years by Indeed as the best place to work in the UK.
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