Snag had outgrown its warehouse management system. Since implementing Linnworks in December 2025, the business has cut manual label fixes by 97%, turned what was usually weekly replenishment into a single afternoon, nearly doubled parcel volumes and built 19 applications of its own on top of the platform.

For a fast-growing direct-to-consumer brand, one promotion can put more strain on operations than a normal month of trading. Stock has to be accurate to the minute. Orders have to reach the warehouse without anyone touching them. Parcels have to go out on time.

When the systems underneath cannot keep up, the cost is not only operational, but damages the trust the brand was built on.

Snag, a purpose-led fashion retailer selling to three million customers worldwide, knows this well. Its previous warehouse management system caused overselling on sales and launches, ran replenishment on printed paper and left the team without a single view of stock. By implementing Linnworks, Snag reduced manual label corrections by 97%, cut a usual week-long replenishment backlog to one afternoon, shortened stock counts from a multi-day shutdown to a single pass and nearly doubled monthly parcel volumes. Using Linnworks, Snag has processed nearly 600,000 orders from 16 sales channels and 76 countries in its first nine months.

We sat down with CTO Tom Martin and Systems Administrator Tom Mackenzie to find out how.

About Snag

Founded eight years ago, Snag is a £40m+ direct-to-consumer fashion and apparel retailer selling tights and clothing worldwide. The business has been pure DTC from day one. It now handles close to a million orders a year and ships to more than 100 countries from its own warehouse in Livingston.

The business exists to serve people the fashion industry excludes, and it puts value to the customer ahead of margin on the product. Inclusion comes regardless of size, gender, race or ability, and no product reaches market until the team is confident in the ethics and sustainability of the whole supply chain.

Snag runs lean, too. Around 100 staff, no office and no servers. Roughly 35 people work in the warehouse and 15 in customer service, and the entire technology function is four people.

We asked CTO Tom Martin what makes the business special and the answer is four words. “Our clothes actually fit.”

“The fact that some of the biggest brands in the world are dealing with us is great,” the co-founder explains. “We can push that back onto our customers and give them the best prices, because we’ve got those relationships and the infrastructure to buy in serious volumes.”
— Co-Founder, Stockk

Life before Linnworks: Overselling on every sale and launch: 8,000 orders cancelled

Snag had run the same warehouse management system almost since launch. It served a startup well. It could not serve a business approaching a million orders a year.

As volumes grew, the gap between what the business wanted to do and what its systems could support grew every month.

Overselling that damaged customer trust

When a lot of orders landed at once the previous platform could not keep pace, stock levels lagged and every sale and launch carried risk. When orders had to be cancelled, customers who had been let down did not come back.

The clearest example came two years ago. A free-gift offer went out against 200 units of stock. The stock sync was so delayed that Snag took around 8,000 orders it could not fulfill, and cancelled every one.

““Before Linnworks, a sale or a launch meant overselling, because the stock sync just couldn’t keep up. We’ve run plenty of free gift promotions and sales since, and they’ve been absolutely fine“
— Tom Mackenzie, Systems Administrator, Snag

Every system held part of the picture

Orders and inventory sat across disconnected systems. Multiple Shopify accounts, a separate 3PL, Sage 200 for purchase orders and Tableau for reporting.

None of them held the whole picture. Building a true view of stock meant gathering and reconciling data by hand, and even the reporting was compromised, because not all of the data reached Tableau in the first place. Movements between businesses in the group were harder still to track.

Warehouse operations built on workarounds

•      No true view of stock location: the same SKU could not be tracked across multiple bin locations, so the warehouse never knew exactly where stock sat.

•      No way to plan replenishment: the team could not identify which products needed moving from storage to picking bins to meet fluctuating demand.

•      One process for every order: multi-line and single-line orders could not be picked differently, creating bottlenecks and putting delivery promises at risk.

•      Pre-orders and back-orders were not possible: with no way to separate orders containing pre-sold items, they disrupted daily warehouse operations.

•      Unnecessary stock counts: a lack of confidence in stock accuracy meant counts ran whether or not they were needed, closing the warehouse from Wednesday afternoon.

•      No productivity data: picker and packer rates could not be extracted from the existing systems.

•      Slow access to new couriers: delays in adding carriers pushed up the cost of getting parcels to customers.

The commercial cost was harder to measure, but the effect was clear. Operations began asking marketing to not run certain campaigns.managed centrally too, allowing Stockk to account for different customer fees, charges and commercial agreements while protecting margins across every sale. For a business that thrives on speed and opportunity, having reliable, real-time data has become indispensable.

“Discount sales, pre-orders, bundles — anything more sophisticated than taking normal sales and we were very constrained. It was holding us back as a business considerably.”
— Tom Martin, CTO, Snag

Choosing the right platform

Snag ran a full review of the market, speaking to effectively every warehouse management vendor in the space. The requirements were specific:

•      A single source of truth for orders and inventory across every channel

•      Stock tracked accurately across multiple bin locations, with replenishment driven by open order demand

•      Different picking and despatch processes for multi-line and single-line orders

•      Pre-orders and back-orders clearly separated from daily warehouse operations

•      Direct connections to multiple Shopify accounts, couriers, the group’s 3PL and Sage 200

•      Picker and packer productivity reporting

•      Stock counts run on demand rather than on a fixed cycle

With two experienced technologists in-house, Snag could have built its own system. The team looked at the option seriously and decided against it.

“The experience behind Linnworks is invaluable. There’s far more to a warehouse management system than you’d ever anticipate, and that’s what you’re really buying.“
— Tom Mackenzie, Systems Administrator, Snag

For Tom Mackenzie the biggest advantage is also the simplest. “If something breaks, it’s handled for us,” he said.

Two things settled it: the depth of the warehouse functionality, and the breadth of the API, which meant the technology team could keep building its own tools on top rather than working around a closed platform

“We picked a platform we’re confident will be good for the rest of our journey as a brand. We never want to go through this process again. What we’re buying isn’t just a WMS. It’s years of domain knowledge, and the security of the support and development behind it.“
— Tom Martin, CTO, Snag

Getting started: live in time for peak

Snag went live in December 2025 and landed straight into peak trading. On 16 December, in its first month on the platform, the warehouse despatched nearly 13,000 parcels in a single day.

Optimising warehouse operations

Replenishment was the clearest example of what changed.

Previously, tasks were printed rather than sent to scanners — a booklet an inch thick for one week’s work. Tasks were generated at the moment of clicking, so any later order for the same SKU was lost in the sheet, and a single pick could end up split across three or four separate tasks.

If an express order came in, it was effectively unfindable.

Between 6,000 and 8,000 replenishment tasks would be waiting on Monday morning. They were often still not cleared by 4pm on Friday.

With Linnworks, replenishment moved to scanners. The Monday backlog is now largely cleared by Monday afternoon.

Stock counts changed just as sharply. What used to close the warehouse from Wednesday afternoon is now a quick Thursday pass and a Friday tidy-up, with no CSVs — and counts run only when they are genuinely needed.

For the warehouse team, the difference was immediate.

“The experience behind Linnworks is invaluable. There’s far more to a warehouse management system than you’d ever anticipate, and that’s what you’re really buying.“
— Tom Mackenzie, Systems Administrator, Snag

One platform, sixteen channels, ten carriers

Linnworks now brings 16 channel integrations into one place, including 14 Shopify stores, Amazon and a direct TikTok Shop connection that previously had to route through Shopify. Ten carriers and 15 shipping services cover 76 destination countries.

Inside the warehouse, 13,529 SKUs and £4.2m of stock are tracked across 3,255 bin racks, with 272 composite parents supporting the bundling the old system could not handle. Thirty-nine automated rules take care of the routing, address and label logic the team used to manage by hand, running more than 10,000 times in the latest reporting period.

The API is what lets the technology team go further. Snag raises purchase orders conversationally through its own AI layer, queries its data warehouse directly instead of using a separate reporting tool, and has built a Chrome extension that shows order status at a glance — including pre-orders and anything held in a pick wave.

“There’s a really robust API. I’ve yet to find anything I can do in the interface that I can’t do through the API — which means we can automate it, orchestrate it, plug it all together.”
— Tom Martin, CTO, Snag

They could have built it themselves. So why didn’t they?

Snag has multiple in-house developers and IT experts, full API access and around 30 people using AI day to day. The team has built 19 applications of its own against the Linnworks API — Chrome extensions, tools that flag pre-orders, identify true back-orders,departmental UI dashboards, and supporting replenishment. 

“Throwing more AI into the mix, I wouldn’t have been able to develop and add in all the automations that I’ve been able to do, and the Chrome extension to make the admin team’s life easier.“
— Tom Mackenzie, Systems Administrator, Snag

So the capability is there. What stopped the team going further and building the platform itself is everything that sits underneath it.

“The ability to write code is not the ability to architect a complex operational system. The front-end code is the least important part of any system — and that’s all an LLM is going to do for you.“
— Tom Martin, CTO, Snag

The first version is rarely the problem. One storefront, one location, one courier, and a fortnight gets you something that works. Then the business adds a location, another carrier, a bundle, and every change is harder than the one before it.

“You can’t just vibe code something, because there’ll be another thing you hadn’t thought of, and then another. You could spend months or years on it and end up spending a lot more than Linnworks costs just in testing and development — and still have something half broken.“
— Tom Mackenzie, Systems Administrator, Snag

So the split is deliberate. Buy the platform that holds the data and comes with people to keep it that way. Build everything above it.

The impact: label errors down 97%

Snag now uses Linnworks across the business every day. Beyond the headline numbers, day-to-day life in the warehouse looks fundamentally different.

•      Manual label fixes down 97% — from 60 corrections a day to one or two

•      A week of replenishment now clears in an afternoon — the 6,000–8,000 task Monday backlog is largely done by Monday afternoon. “All the tasks are done,” said Tom Mackenzie. “Apparently it’s actually too fast now.”

•      Stock counts no longer close the warehouse for days — and run only when needed, rather than to compensate for poor visibility.

•      Monthly orders up 66% and monthly GMV up 67%

•      Parcel volumes nearly doubled in just 9 months, shipping to 76 countries.

•      19 custom applications live on the Linnworks API — all but one built since go-live.

•      The equivalent of one and a half roles freed from entering and moving data between systems, with those people now doing work that drives the business forward.

•      A happier warehouse — daily frustration with the system has dropped sharply and productivity has risen. “The warehouse are a lot happier,” said Tom Martin. “Productivity has gone up and the daily frustrations have gone right down, and that’s a non-trivial thing.”

“We can trust our stock now. Replenishment just works. And stock count has gone from a huge ordeal to a quick job.“
— Tom Mackenzie, Systems Administrator, Snag

Growing with confidence

What has changed most is the absence of a ceiling. The work that used to scale with order volume is now handled by rules, so a bigger month no longer means a longer week.

“We’re running far more promotions and events than we were six or nine months ago. The business has been freed from constantly worrying that we’re going to overwhelm the previous platform..“
— Tom Martin, CTO, Snag

Tom Martin is clear about the long term. “Linnworks will be with us for a long time,” he said.

What’s next for Snag

With Linnworks providing a stable, scalable foundation, Snag is focused on growth: more orders, more channels, more sophisticated bundling and promotions, and more carrier options — with its own AI layer continuing to absorb the work in between.

TikTok Shop going direct into Linnworks is the most recent addition. Ahead of that sit native marketplace integrations built for the fashion vertical, among them eBay, SHEIN, ASOS, Zalando, Tesco, Secret Sales, Brand Alley, Walmart, Macy’s and Nordstrom — each one a new revenue opportunity running on the same centralised stock, ordering and logistics.

For Snag, Linnworks has become more than a warehouse management system. It is the operational foundation that lets a purpose-led brand grow without compromising the promise it was built on.