achievement
əˈtʃiːvm(ə)nt/
noun
A thing done successfully with effort, skill, or courage.

This truly is a momentous occasion, a celebration and testimony to belief and faith in trying to reach the stars.

Simply put, we are humbled, grateful, elated, thankful, in awe, amazed, and everything in between. Sometimes in life you have an idea and on occasion you decide to follow through on your idea. You nurture the idea, delicately, watch it grow into something tangible and before you know it, 6 years fly by. And what an amazing 6 years it has been.

The world was emerging out of a global financial crisis not seen for decades. Many people, of all walks of life, turned to entrepreneurship as a means to define their destiny. In fact, global entrepreneurship back in 2011/2012 started to peak. A Forbes article at the time summed up this process succinctly.

This entrepreneurial drive lead to a serendipitous meeting between a designer from the United States and a developer from Pakistan in March 2012, Luke Beck and Muhammad Haris, which lead to a partnership that would not only break records it would change how many worked with the extensibility a WordPress theme can offer. Two initial themes, Imperio and Crucio, were designed, developed and released onto the Themeforest marketplace. The excitement to start the competitive race within marketplace had begun but did not yield much in terms of success so they went back to the drawing board. Intense research and discussion followed, with the decision to develop a theme with greater versatility and usability which would suit the workflow for the majority of WordPress and freelance users out there. Design and development commenced a complete new type of WordPress theme.

Many sleepless nights and very long days were endured as the design and development process took hold, refining and reworking each and every idea to reach our goal of creating an easy to use, multi-purpose and highly flexible WordPress theme. All of this was about laying the groundwork for what would become Avada.

On August 16th (a Thursday), 2012, the illustrious Avada WordPress theme was released into the wild. Those first four days on the marketplace realized 150 sales and elevated us into the 4th top seller position for that week. The following week ending August 26th 2012, Avada hit the #1 selling theme spot for the very first time on the marketplace with 335 sales. Within a single month, we (ThemeFusion) attained Elite Author status with sales totaling more than $75,000.

It was evident early on that we were on to something important, that was by no means lost on us. We needed to grow from a partnership into a fully fledged company to facilitate growing and evolving Avada. Key decisions were to ensure that anyone that uses Avada would develop trust in the theme and the direction we were taking with the quality of what and how we delivered being crucial. By the end of our first year we had established & maintained Avada as the #1 selling theme on Themeforest, achieved Elite Author status, thereafter achieved Power Elite author status with $1,000,000 in gross sales, started growing our team and released Avada 2.0 and 3.0.

Our second birthday brought with it team growth to six staff and our now long standing tradition of releasing regular scheduled updates for Avada had been established as central to the evolution of Avada to meet both customer demand and a ever changing industry. Evolution and growth to our framework and team became critical. Anyone that runs a business will know just how challenging growth can be, getting it just right is only half of the battle won.

By our third birthday we had released our proprietary drag and drop page builder, Fusion Builder, providing the end user much more freedom in design and content management. During year three, our next milestone was significant in our history, surpassing the Envato 100,000 sales threshold all the while maintaining the #1 spot on Themeforest. It showed us that what we were doing was working, and more than that, it was testament to just how much our growing customer base believed in what we as a team had created. The ultimate design tool to match and improve your workflow. We would not be resting on our laurels, thats for sure. We recognized that refactoring our codebase was a critical requirement that would give our team and Avada the tools and extensibility to build upon our future goals.

Plans for refactoring were started and scheduled and released with Avada 4.0 and 5.0. The challenges we faced were considerable. We had to make sure that backward compatibility was provided and a seamless transition to the new framework was a guarantee. We did exactly that. No challenge is too much for our team. Even when Muhammad Haris, a founding member of ThemeFusion, made the decision to leave the company to venture out in new industries. Whilst this was a difficult transition, it was also a turning point for us that brought about a much needed restructuring of our team to facilitate Avada’s future and the systems in place to manage world class customer service.

Our next Envato milestone was a doozy, not only for us and our customers, but for the entire marketplace as a whole. In December 2015 we surpassed $10 million in sales, the first time any theme author had achieved this. Our team had doubled from 6 staff members and so had our workload, all part of the growth process. This growth was and always will be personal to us. Our team and our customers are part of a family, our family, and this is golden thread that is woven into everything that we do and how we do it.

Roll on our fourth birthday! Avada 5.0 was released based on our refactoring plan and an entirely new Fusion Builder was developed in-house and from the ground up, re-purposed for performance, usability and extensibility. By now professional Avada demos, innovative feature and functionality, workflow tools, design freedom, advanced options management, performance management, maintenance tools, all form part of every update and decision made affecting our Avada plans and user-base. Strategic new plans to expand the Fusion Builder and our ecosystem are developed to map the next five/ten years for Avada growth. By April 2017 Avada surpasses 300,000 in total sales.

Birthday number five and we are dancing on the ceiling with excitement. By this time our team had gown to 20, all based across the globe and all equally passionate about what we do here at ThemeFusion. We pride ourselves in the fact that we have an extremely low staff turnover. This not only helps us to be consistent in our approach and customer care, it validates just how much each person really cares about what they are a part of, working tirelessly on releasing dozens of new features and constant maintenance spread out over many theme updates.

This brings us to our sixth birthday celebration. The depth of what we have achieved in 6 short years is simply stunning. We wanted to touch the stars and that is exactly what we have done. The dedication and commitment that is core to our belief has just seen us surpass Envato’s top elite milestone of $25 million in item sales on the marketplace. Each milestone and achievement is accompanied with sacrifice and relentless commitment, nothing worthwhile comes easy. It also requires trust and faith in us by our customers old and new in where we have been and where we are taking Avada. As a team we welcome any challenges that are presented to us, it is what helps us stay sharp and ahead of the curve.

Image credit: Envato