WooThemes

WooThemes is a software company known for developing WordPress themes and the WooFramework, a toolkit used by developers to build and customize WordPress themes. The company was founded in 2008 in Cape Town, South Africa, and grew into a notable provider of premium themes and related development tools for the WordPress ecosystem.

The founders are commonly listed as Adii Pienaar, Mark Forrester, and Magnus Jepson. In its early years, WooThemes offered a mix of free and premium WordPress themes and developed the WooFramework, which aided designers in creating scalable, customizable themes for clients and developers.

WooThemes is also renowned for creating WooCommerce, a free and extensible e-commerce plugin for WordPress released in 2011. WooCommerce expanded rapidly and became one of the most widely used e-commerce solutions for WordPress, supported by a large ecosystem of extensions and themes that add payments, shipping, marketing, and other store capabilities.

In 2015, Automattic, the company behind WordPress.com, acquired WooThemes along with WooCommerce. The WooThemes brand was integrated into Automattic, and WooCommerce continued as the primary product under Automattic’s umbrella, with many of the original team members joining the company. The brand presence of WooThemes diminished as the focus shifted to WooCommerce branding and related services.

Impact and legacy: WooThemes contributed to the growth of the WordPress ecosystem by providing accessible design options and a robust e-commerce solution that empowered a wide range of merchants to create and manage online stores.