All the latest news and announcements, straight from the WooThemes HQ!
Fresh Fox in the house
26. Feb, 2009 by Adii Rockstar in WooThemes News
It’s incredible to think that we’ve actually managed to contain our excitement and delay the announcement of this news for almost 6 weeks now… I’m actually pretty proud of us, considering how massive this news is. 
So let’s get to the story then…
In the middle of January, we were approached by an extremely big multi-national corporate about possibly acquiring WooThemes. It was only a preliminary meeting for the company to guage our interest in a possible deal, but the figures and details were pretty concrete. Without mentioning any figures, I can however divulge that offer was very lucrative and it made us think twice. BUT – I believe we made the correct decision in declining the offer, based on quite a few business / personal reasons.
The main positive to come out of the meeting though, was the fact that we were obviously moving in a direction, where we have a much more mainstream appeal and audience. So to pursue this, we have decided to add 2 members to our core development team… WooThemers, please meet and say welcome to FRESH01 & Foxinni.
I have known both of these guys for quite some time now and we’ve been working together on custom design / development projects at Radiiate. As of 1 March, they will however (virtually) move over to WooThemes and our Radiiate offices in Cape Town, South Africa will become the semi-WooThemes HQ (because every Rockstar needs an HQ).
What does this mean for you?
The first thing that Fresh & Fox will be working on, is helping us get through the massive backlog of theme concepts that needs to be developed & released; so you can expect quite a few new releases during the next 2 months. In the short to medium term, you will also see us improving our member’s control panel / backend, as well as upgrading all of our support resources.
And then, from about mid-2009, you can expect WooThemes to start offering our most popular WordPress themes on some of the other great CMS platforms. We’re hoping to release some BuddyPress themes soon as well and Foxinni has already started playing with Magento. We’re also considering our options in terms of the upcoming release of ExpressionEngine (we have already started working with a new partner to start porting over the themes) & the new version of Drupal.
So these truly are exciting times. Climb on board now; you won’t be sorry.
26 February 2009 at 7:21 am #
Great news guys, big congrats!!
26 February 2009 at 7:24 am #
That awesome. Well done to Foxinni and Cobus.
26 February 2009 at 7:30 am #
Great feeling about this I have.
26 February 2009 at 7:33 am #
Welcome on board guys! Fasten your seat belts!
26 February 2009 at 7:34 am #
Brilliant
26 February 2009 at 7:40 am #
What happens to Radiiate now? Is there enough time for Fox and Fresh to do both?
26 February 2009 at 8:15 am #
great news guys…keep rocking…
26 February 2009 at 8:16 am #
Stoked.
I’m extremely happy to be a part of the WooTeam, having watched them from the sidelines for so long. Looking forward to what the future has in store for us!!
26 February 2009 at 9:01 am #
That is excellent news guys. Looking forward to seeing some new themes especially on other platforms. Looking forward to a Magento theme.
26 February 2009 at 10:58 am #
That is awesome for two reasons.
1. As you said you are moving in the right direction
2. You will continue moving in that direction.
What I see that sets you all apart is:
Great concepts and delivery of products
Great support of those products
Desire to listen to what you customers want, and actually delivering on that.
I am proud to use your themes in my dev work, look forward to renewing my dev membership for a LONG time to come.
26 February 2009 at 11:22 am #
This is great news guys, looking forward to seeing the new themes and I’m positive that FRESH01 & Foxinni will be great assets to your team.
26 February 2009 at 12:14 pm #
@David McDougal – Thanks for the extremely kind words!
Ultimately all of our business decisions needs to add value for our users; so your compliments very much fuels decisions like these (along with everything else we do on a daily basis).
@David Perel – Fresh & Fox will be dedicating 90% of their time to WooThemes-related work. They will only service existing Radiiate-clients.
26 February 2009 at 4:10 pm #
Any plans for bbPress themes?
26 February 2009 at 4:26 pm #
I would strongly vote for ExpressionEngine. Right now a theme market for EE is virtually non existant, which makes it a big exception among popular CMSes. Porting over your existing themes would also be very easy because of the great flexibility of the EE system.
26 February 2009 at 9:29 pm #
I’m glad you didn’t sell WOO THEMES to multi-national corporate.
I think you have great future with your plans
27 February 2009 at 3:51 am #
Dudes, Rock on! Keep selling your themes and take the money for yourselves. Respek for not selling.
27 February 2009 at 4:42 am #
Again welcome to the pack Fresh and Fox. Great to have you on board.
Thanks for all the positive comments guys. We are all very excited at WooThemes HQ.
1 March 2009 at 10:49 am #
You guys have mastered the art of customer service and really do an awesome job of supporting what you sell!! I have been so pleased with all aspects of woothemes. Im sure the future holds only great things for this company! I will always refer everyone i know to this site because in one word it is “spectacular”!
3 March 2009 at 5:03 pm #
power too the woooooo!
good you declined!
4 March 2009 at 4:32 pm #
BuddyPress and Magento themes. WOW! Can’t wait. That’s huge! I am especially excited to see what you can do with BuddyPress.
10 March 2009 at 9:33 am #
When you guys start offering versions for CMSes, please add MODx to the list. They will be *really* easy to port. Thanks!
12 March 2009 at 2:17 pm #
Double congrats…first the kudos that you are on the right track given that you were appoached for purchase and second…that you did not sell. You guys are doing a fantastic job of creating great products, providing support and there’s alot more company to build.
You can continue to operate your way which has been really successful. Further down the road it may make sense to sell…but for lot’s more mula:)
15 April 2009 at 7:25 pm #
I second the comment about MODx templates. MODx simply rocks. We want MODx templates.
15 May 2009 at 2:35 pm #
Proudly South African!!! Well done fellas!