@Benjamin - Personally, I don't agree that the selection ithemes offers looks particularly good or distinctive although, as I've said, I did buy Essence. To my eyes, most of their other themes look old-fashioned and almost blandly generic as parking pages, whereas StudioPress and WooThemes have a certain wow factor.

From my perspective as a customer, I would say that ithemes are also behind the times in terms of their ongoing customer service and community building. Before Brian really pushed the innovative marketing idea of giving theme customers great ongoing service, a forum and timely free updates that kept his themes compatible with the latest releases of WordPress and to introduce new features, it was normal for commercial themers to view a sale as the end of the matter and ithemes followed that old model.

I think there was one compatibility update of Essence (2.7?) but no new features were ever added and there was no encouragement to become involved in any sort of ithemes community. This was a missed opportunity because a few developer hours spent on, say, adding Gravatar support would have kept the themes relevant and pleased existing owners no end, encouraging them to recommend ithemes to their friends - that is precisely what made Brian so successful, word of mouth, but, as I say, the old-school commercial themers has a less sophisticated approach to marketing.