In what has become a trend of late, another WordPress commercial theme shop has exchanged hands. ThemeShift, originally owned and operated by Simon Rimkus is now owned by Michael Oeser of DER PRiNZ, a German based WordPress theme and digital media company.
ThemeShift has been in the WordPress commercial theme space since 2009. In an announcement post by Rimkus, he states the main reason for selling the business is a lack of time.
However, I have to make this step because with a new WordPress project that I started I’m not able to dedicate the time to ThemeShift the project actually deserves. As you might have noticed, things at ThemeShift weren’t really evolving lately.
Rimkus is focusing his efforts towards the WordPress framework wpCasa which will be part of WPSight. As for ThemeShift, Oeser says there will be no price increase and the number of themes available will rise as he migrates themes from DER PRiNZ to ThemeShift using the FrameShift framework.
The acquisition of ThemeShift is just one of many to happen in recent months. Here is a list of some other companies that have been acquired recently.
- Press75 acquired by Westwerk
- DevPress acquired by Deven Price
- Themelab acquired by Syed Balkhi
- CreativeMarket acquired by Autodesk
- Just The Lucid Themes acquired by UpThemes
- Standard Theme by 8bit acquired by WooThemes
Let us know in the comments which WordPress commercial theme company you think will be the next to be acquired and why.
I think his Branford Magazine was one of the first magazine themes I ever played with, but it was free at the time. There was also Arthemia and Mimbo… wow, talk about wayback machine time :)