Selling equestrian products online is more complex than it looks. A single rug can come in dozens of sizes, weights and colours, each one its own SKU, and what sells changes with the weather, not the calendar.

Just Horse Riders, one of the UK’s largest online equestrian retailers, knows this well. Its previous systems were slow, its warehouse ran on paper, and its orders, stock and channels were spread across a patchwork of tools.

By moving to Linnworks, Just Horse Riders have grown from 205,000 orders a year to over 320,000, with a team that has grown by only a few people. It now builds its own tools on top of the platform, and three of them are available to Linnworks sellers through the Linnworks app store.

We sat down with Founder and Director Aaron Englander to find out how Linnworks made that possible. .

About Just Horse Riders

Just Horse Riders began in 2010, when Aaron started selling from a shipping container at Carrington Riding Centre, near Manchester. Today, it sells everything for horses and riders to customers across the UK. Customers can shop on Amazon, eBay and the business’ own Shopify website, with Amazon accounting for about two-thirds of orders.

It is still a family business, run by Aaron, his wife and his mother, alongside a team of under 10 people, and it is rooted in the riding community. Their children ride with Fylde & District Pony Club, the business sponsors events and helps fund the branch, and in 2025 the family received a special recognition award. Aaron also hosts the Just Horse Riders Podcast, which has become one of the main ways riders find the business.

“We’re horse people selling to horse people, but we run it like a tech business,” Aaron explains. “Most retailers our size buy their software. We build a lot of ours, and that’s what lets a small team run a very big catalogue.” 

A growing catalogue on systems that couldn’t keep up

Before going live on Linnworks in 2021, Just Horse Riders ran its website on Magento, with a separate system for orders and stock. As the business added products and channels, that setup became slower and less reliable.

“The software just wasn’t keeping up with us. We were growing, adding products and selling on more channels, and we’d outgrown a patchwork of tools. We needed one whole system.”

Aaron Englander, Founder & Director, Just Horse Riders

Equestrian retail made it harder. One style of turnout rug can come in a dozen sizes in three-inch steps, several fill weights and a few colours, which means 50+ SKUs from a single style, and boots come in adult and kids’ sizes, standard and wide calf. In the warehouse, staff printed delivery notes and walked the aisles to pick them, and goods-in and returns were manual too. If an item was put away in the wrong bin, it was effectively lost.

Eventually, Aaron reached what he calls an “I’ve had enough now” moment. More volume meant more people, and the business could not carry the cost.

“Without the systems we have now, we’d need a lot more staff to handle the same volume, and the wages and costs that come with that would probably have put us out of business.”

Aaron Englander, Founder & Director, Just Horse Riders

A shortlist of three, and one clear choice

The team shortlisted three platforms and the requirements were specific: strong Amazon and eBay integrations, the ability to handle a huge catalogue with lots of variations, shipping integrations with its carriers, an open API to build on, and automation so the business could grow without adding headcount at the same rate. Above all, it had to be fast and reliable at its catalogue size.

Linnworks covered orders, stock, channels and shipping in one place, and the deciding factor was the people behind it.

“Linnworks were the most responsive and invested in working with us. There is still nothing else in the market that can give us the same mix of channel integrations, automation and an API we can build on.”

Aaron Englander, Founder & Director, Just Horse Riders

27,000 decisions a month, made automatically

With every channel now running through Linnworks, orders land within minutes. The warehouse day is built around making the last courier collection, Monday to Saturday.

The Rules Engine does the most work. Five rules apply the right shipping service and label to every order, based on what it needs, such as whether it is next-day or came from Amazon. Over the last 12 months, they ran more than 320,000 times, around 27,000 a month.

Before, that meant someone looking at each order and choosing a service, which Aaron describes as “slow, inconsistent and where late deliveries come from”.

Those orders go out through Amazon Buy Shipping, Evri and Royal Mail. Over the same 12 months, the business shipped more than 330,000 consignments.

Peaks that follow the weather

Orders average close to 900 a day across the year and run well over 1,000 on a busy despatch day, with peaks in June and July and again from October. “The first cold snap sells rugs overnight,” Aaron says.

Supplier stock without the spreadsheets

Scheduled imports and exports do the same job for data. In total, 26 imports and 13 exports now run automatically, most of them supplier stock feeds, so the business can list products it doesn’t physically hold and sell them on dropship and live-stock terms without anyone touching a spreadsheet.

Buying on data, not gut feel

Query Data lets the team run SQL straight against its own Linnworks data, so buying decisions rest on facts. This year, the data showed that only about a third of a large brand’s previous forward order had sold through, so the team turned down a sizeable new one and kept buying proven lines on replenishment. “That kept a lot of stock from ending up on clearance,” says Aaron.

From customer to app developer: Building on Linnworks

Just Horse Riders has gone a step further than running its warehouse on Linnworks. It builds software on top of the platform and has created three apps for the Linnworks app store through Englander AI which will soon be available to other Linnworks sellers. More and more of Aaron’s time now goes into this work, time that has been enabled through the implementation of Linnworks.

Built in the warehouse, for the warehouse

Linnworks gave Aaron something he wanted from the start: a platform he could build on, and the team started building its own tools within weeks of going live. “It started with scratching our own itches,” he says. Whenever something in the warehouse was slow or error-prone, Aaron used the Linnworks API and AI coding tools to build a fix, and the business now runs its own custom-built tools every single day for goods-in, putaway, forecasting and returns. The returns tool, for example, scans each item in, photographs it, decides whether it is good or faulty and puts good stock straight back on sale. Aaron says picking, goods-in and returns became “easily ten times quicker”.

Proven in a real warehouse first

Englander AI is the trading name Just Horse Riders uses for the software side of the business. The retailer is its own testing ground: every tool runs in Aaron’s warehouse first, and the ones that work well go on the Linnworks app store for other sellers.

The latest to launch is Location Confirmation, and it started with a problem Aaron knew well. When staff put stock away by hand, items sometimes went into the wrong bin and were “effectively lost”, because nobody knew where they were. The app is a computerised double-check: when someone puts an item away, it confirms the item is going into the right location, so pickers can always find it. As converted farm buildings have added space, the warehouse has grown from around 2,100 bin racks to nearly 3,300, and with so many near-identical products, such as the same rug in different sizes, Aaron says it has made “a real difference”.

Why build on a platform, not from scratch

“Linnworks does the hard, critical stuff: channel integrations, order downloads, stock sync, carriers. It keeps up every time Amazon, eBay or Shopify change their APIs. That would be a full-time team on its own. We can therefore spend our time on the bits that are specific to how we work and actually make us better than the competition.”

Aaron Englander, Founder & Director, Just Horse Riders

The impact: 58% more orders, absorbed by automation

IAsked what impact Linnworks has had on the business, Aaron says it has “let us grow without the operation falling over”. Comparing its first year on Linnworks with the last 12 months, Just Horse Riders has grown on every measure:

• 58% more orders — from around 205,000 to over 320,000 a year, close to 900 a day
• Shopify orders up more than 300% — from around 17,000 to over 70,000 a year since moving from Magento in 2021, lifting its own website from under 10% of orders to more than a fifth
• 150%+ growth in SKUs — from around 54,000 to over 135,000, with no change to how orders are processed
• 27,000 automated decisions a month — five rules doing work that used to need a person
• Warehouse work easily ten times quicker — picking, goods-in and returns, once the team’s own tools replaced paper

Growing without growing the team

What has changed most is that growth no longer means hiring at the same pace. Orders are up by more than half and the catalogue has more than doubled, while the team has grown from around 7 people in 2021 to 10 today. “The extra volume has mostly been absorbed by automation rather than extra people,” Aaron explains. It is the opposite of the picture he paints for life without Linnworks, where far more staff would have been needed to handle the same volume.

Doing it all by hand at this size would take “hours and hours every day”. The time now goes into customer service, content, listing new products and building new tools.

“Before, the systems were a ceiling on how fast we could grow. Now they’re the thing we grow on. Adding a channel, a carrier or 10,000 new products is a setup job, not a crisis.”

Aaron Englander, Founder & Director, Just Horse Riders

A website the business owns

The time Linnworks has freed up has gone into building the brand: the podcast, YouTube, SEO articles and email, alongside Englander Equestrian and repeat-order autoship. That has made the website the fastest-growing channel by a distance. “Our own site matters because the customer is ours,” says Aaron.

Fewer mistakes, happier customers

Cancellations and mis-picks fell after the move to Linnworks and dropped further once the team’s own tools were in place. The business reports a 99.7% on-time delivery rate and a 4.9 out of 5 rating on Google. “Fewer mis-picks, fewer oversells and faster despatch all show up in reviews,” Aaron says.

Taking Englander Equestrian to the US

With those foundations in place, Just Horse Riders is taking Englander Equestrian to the US on Amazon, with clothing in development to grow the range. The business also plans to run more brands and to keep growing Englander AI so the tools it builds for itself help other Linnworks retailers too.

Aaron sees the relationship with Linnworks growing into a two-way partnership, with Just Horse Riders as both a customer and a developer on the platform. 

Advice for prospective Linnworks customers

Aaron’s advice is to get product data clean before you start, then automate one job at a time. “Use the Rules Engine for any decision someone makes the same way every day, and scheduled imports for anything that comes in on a spreadsheet,” he says. “And don’t be scared of the API; that’s where the real value is.”

For Just Horse Riders, Linnworks has become the backbone and foundation the business grows on, handling the channels and carriers so a small team can focus on the parts that set it apart.