Seven Years on ThemeForest: What Selling Themes Taught Us

Most people know Creiden for custom web platforms, mobile apps and AI products. Fewer know that for seven years, from 2011 to 2018, we also sold WordPress themes on ThemeForest, the largest marketplace for them.

Those years shaped how we build today more than almost anything else. This is the story, and what stuck.

How it started

We opened our ThemeForest author account in December 2011, the same year Creiden was founded in Alexandria. From the start, themes ran side by side with client projects. One side of the team built websites for specific clients. The other built products for thousands of buyers we would never meet.

That second kind of work is very different. A client project has one customer, one brief and a lot of conversations. A theme has no brief at all. It has to work for a dentist in Canada, a photographer in Brazil and an agency in Dubai, all at once, with no one from our team there to explain it.

CircleFlip, Avaris and Diary Land

Our best-known theme was CircleFlip, a WordPress theme with several demo layouts and its own support forum. It was picked up by design and development sites, including Awwwards and David Walsh's blog, some of which still link to it today. Avaris followed and was also well received.

Not everything worked. Diary Land never reached the success of the other two. That taught us as much as the hits did: a well-built product can still miss if it does not solve a problem enough people have.

We also gave things away. Free icon sets, an origami letter set and an image hover plugin were featured on design blogs such as Speckyboy and Line25. Free work turned out to be one of the best ways to get noticed.

Elite Author and 2,001 sales

In 2016 we reached Elite Author status, the badge ThemeForest gives authors who pass a high lifetime sales mark. By the time we stopped, the account had 2,001 sales and 147 buyer ratings.

[Image: ThemeForest profile screenshot]

For a studio that was building client projects at the same time, that was a real milestone. It also meant thousands of real buyers had used our work and told us, often in public, what they thought of it.

What selling themes taught us

Think like a product designer, not just a builder

A theme is used by people you will never meet, for sites you cannot predict. You cannot sit with each buyer and explain how it works. So every decision has to make sense on its own: clear defaults, settings people can find, and layouts that still look good with someone else's content.

That product design mindset is now how we approach every client platform. We design for the people who will use it after we leave, not just for the demo.

Handle support spikes professionally

Support on a marketplace does not arrive evenly. It comes in waves: after a new release, after a WordPress update, or after a busy sales week. Many buyers can hit the same issue at once.

We learned to expect those spikes, answer quickly and calmly, fix the root cause instead of answering the same question over and over, and stay professional even when buyers were frustrated. That discipline carries straight into how we run support after launch for clients today.

Real users judge your work in public

Every theme has public ratings and comments, and there is no account manager to soften the feedback. That made us honest about quality early. If something was confusing or broken, we heard about it fast, and so did everyone else.

Side by side with client work

We never treated themes as a phase we grew out of. From 2011 to 2018 they ran alongside client projects, and each side made the other better. Themes kept our product thinking sharp. Client work kept us close to real business problems that no ready-made theme could solve.

Over time, the custom work grew into what Creiden is today: web platforms, mobile apps and AI products for clients in 15+ countries.

What carried over

The theme years ended in 2018, but the habits did not. We still design for the people who use a product after launch. We still plan for support spikes before they happen. And we still build a lot on WordPress, now as custom builds and headless setups rather than off-the-shelf themes. You can see that work under WordPress engineering on our Web Platforms page, and more about who we are on Inside Creiden.

If you bought one of our themes back then, thank you. You helped shape the company we are today. And if you are building something that needs the same care now, let's talk.