“We want to change the world – the world of WordPress Themes.”
Our latest interview features Power Elite Author Dmitry a.k.a dedalx and their experiences as a husband & wife team specializing in WordPress Themes.
Dedalx is a small team of two people – myself working as a Developer and in Support, and my Wife as the Designer and Content Manager. We develop high-quality WordPress themes with new features and modern designs, and explore ways to add built-in unique theme features, options and elements. Fast, Clean and Easy to use WordPress themes with incredible support – this is key to our business.
At what moment did you decide to pursue your business?
5 years ago we released our first simple OpenCart shop theme (iTechShop, it still can be purchased) on Themeforest to check how this marketplace works and what we can earn here. We found that even simple themes can get some sales and good feedback from customers and decided to develop more complex shop themes for OpenCart and Magento platforms. We was very surprised that our new theme releases went very well and we made our way to become an Elite Author in 2013 (yeah, just in 1 year!).
This is when our serious business started and we decided to move to WordPress themes market.
iTechShop OpenCart Simple Universal Theme
What do you love about your work and why?
We love to make our customers happy and see what beautiful websites they make with help of our themes. This shows us that our work is important and appreciated by other people who use our products.
What’s the most challenging thing about your work?
We receive a lot of advice and requests from our customers to add or change things in our themes. The most challenging thing is to solve all our customer’s requests in one theme, we can’t have 1000 in 1 features to suit everyone.
Himmelen – Personal WordPress Blog Theme
Is where you live a good place to be a creative professional and why?
Based in a small city in Russia, we’re located near the sea and we can always go to the beach, breathe the fresh air and take a rest after hard work to clean our minds for new amazing products.
What or who inspires you and why?
Steve Jobs. We want to change the world – the world of WordPress themes.
What are some of the biggest lessons that have impacted your work?
It’s important to know that partnerships with other Authors may not always be a good idea. In our experiences, we had a very good partnership with one PrestaShop developer a few years ago, and they developed high-quality PrestaShop themes that sold very well and customers were satisfied. After some time, we received a DMCA from another company and turns out, this developer was an old employee of theirs, who stole part of company theme code and used it for their own developments.
Of course, we removed all PrestaShop themes and stopped our partnership but this already affected our reputation. After this lesson, we will always carefully choose our partners and usually make all our work ourselves.
TheBuilt – Construction, Architecture & Building Business WordPress theme
What tools and resources (online or offline) do you use?
iMac 27 is the best computer to make great work fast, develop new products – and change the world of course! One of our favorite applications we use is Sublime Text and Adobe Photoshop and to help offer incredible rapid support for our customers we use Zendesk platform and iPhone application to get in touch with our customers from anywhere. Outside from home, we use MacBook 12.
What is your advice to other authors regarding how to create a successful portfolio?
Be unique, don’t try to copy other authors items and ideas – build something new.
Hind – Multi-Concept Portfolio WordPress Theme
Apart from yourself, who is your favorite marketplace author, and why do you like them?
We really enjoy the clean and modern themes from Select -Themes!
Stockholm – A Genuinely Multi-Concept Theme
What are your hobbies and interests outside of work?
My wife likes cooking and I like making illustrations and drawing to help me rest after work – you can see all my artworks on my personal Instagram page.
What are your plans for the future?
We are working on some interesting niche themes for areas which are only becoming more popular. We hope these products will hit the market – stay tuned!
Bjorn – Personal WordPress Blog Theme
You can check out dedalx’s portfolio here. If you have any questions, want to continue the conversation, jump over to the forums and say hello!
