WordPress Theme Craftsman Array Themes Joins WP Engine: The Negotiation Lessons of "Selling After Saying No, Again and Again"
Array Themes, a one-person WordPress theme studio, turned down multiple acquisition offers before finally selling to WordPress hosting giant WP Engine. A case where the seller's selectivity — who to refuse and who to say yes to — takes center stage.
This is a translation of the Japanese original. The Japanese version and cited primary sources are authoritative for all figures.
What Happened
Array Themes was a solo studio that designed and sold minimal, high-quality WordPress themes. The WordPress theme market is a thin-margin, high-volume world where marketplaces overflow with shoddy themes, but Array built a loyal customer base with a craftsman model: “maintain a small number of themes with care.” The founder kept turning down multiple acquisition offers, and only agreed to sell when WP Engine — one of the largest players in WordPress hosting — came along.
The Economic Value of Saying No
The first acquisition offer to arrive is rarely the best one. Array’s founder could keep refusing because the business was profitable and he had no need to sell — the same source of negotiating leverage as ScrapingBee’s “don’t-need-to-sell position”.
And the quality of the buyer mattered more than the price. Customers of a theme business are buying the promise that “it will keep being updated.” Hand it to a flip-minded buyer and the trust you built with customers is destroyed. WP Engine had the incentive to operate the themes long-term as added value for its own hosting — it was a buyer under whom the product would not die.
The Exit Path for “Craftsmen” Inside an Ecosystem
The WordPress economy has an established exit route in which individual theme and plugin developers are bought by hosting companies and large product companies. For a hosting company, themes and plugins are components of differentiation, and buying a craftsman’s work and reputation as a package is the fastest way to get them. The same structure we saw with Appfire in the Atlassian ecosystem and the roll-ups in the Shopify ecosystem exists in WordPress, the oldest ecosystem of them all.
Even for a small craftsman-style business, a reputation for quality is an asset worth buying to the big players in the ecosystem — quiet good news for developers who refuse to compete on volume.
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Sources
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