David Perel is the co-founder of Obox Themes where he is the designer and head of product. He’s going to be talking about the current state of the WordPress theme industry, so we found out from him how he got into the industry himself and where it has taken him so far.

My brother and I started Obox at 19/20 years old. We never studied but instead decided to work at our fathers software company, Peresoft, in his website division. During that period we were both developers but once I had learned that Marc was way better at it than me I decided to take on design.

A year after joining Peresoft we decided to break off and start Obox Design. Initially it was a web design shop for cheap websites. We would advertise by sticking pamphlets in post boxes and on car windows.

Eventually we decided to start a blog, We Are not Freelancers, where we wrote about design and dev. It had a unique hand drawn design and received a tonne of traffic because of it. Using that blog as a platform, we launched From the Couch – a daily web TV show about tech.

From the Couch grew to have an audience of 40,000 viewers per month and from there… we launched Obox Themes.

Obox is the only theme company in the world which are official theme partners for Tumblr, Posterous (now closed), WordPress.com and Themeforest. Since launching in 2009 we have grown to over 100,000 customers and – between all the platforms – have released close to 100 themes.