AppThemes is a fast growing company that employs talent from all around the world. Our diverse team consists of highly skilled WordPress developers, designers, and enthusiasts who come together to make awesome premium themes available in over two dozen different languages.
Meet the Team
Founder & Chief Strategist
dcowgillDavid has been a passionate WordPress developer, enthusiast, and evangelist ever since it was first released back in 2005. He has over 13 years experience in Internet Marketing & Web Development working for cloud computing companies such as Oracle, Siebel, Salesforce.com, SpringSource, and VMware.
He started AppThemes in May 2010 with a vision to make business applications easy to setup and use for virtually anyone. He has defined a new niche and coined the term “Application Themes” while leading his company to becoming the market leader in the WordPress Application Themes business.
David currently resides in the beautiful city of San Francisco, CA. He’s the brother of Steve Cowgill, the lead guitarist for a well known acoustic surf rock band called Bag of Toys who has been featured in a Microsoft Zune commercial, Bones, and several movies.
Along with Beau Lebens of Automattic and Zach Berke of Exygy, he is co-organizer of the popular San Francisco WordPress Meetup which meets monthly at the WordPress Automattic headquarters.
He was a speaker at the 2011 SF WordCamp on “Making Money and Having Fun Selling WordPress Themes“. His work has been published in numerous articles and books including WordPress 3 Site Blueprints and Google Blogger for Dummies (ironically) for his previous Blogger business, eBlog Templates (powered by WordPress).
Creative Director, Marketing and Operations
juusuiShannon is a designer and front-end developer who has been designing in some capacity or another “for as long as I can remember.” “Something about design fascinated me in a way that conventional art did not. I was naturally attracted to slick packaging and the simple, iconographic nature of logos.”
He believes that design is a beautiful blend of creativity and analytical thinking. “Good design always serves a purpose, besides simply being attractive.”
Prior to joining AppThemes, Shannon worked as a freelance contractor offering design and marketing services to small and medium businesses throughout the Bay Area.
He has had the opportunity to work with several technology start-ups including: Couchbase (formerly NorthScale/Membase), Hyperic, B-Stock Solutions, LoopFuse, and Sauce Labs.
Senior Theme Developer & WordPress Core Contributor
scribuCristi first started using WordPress in high school. He soon figured out how to write plugins and later began contributing patches to WordPress core. He was a guest commiter during the 3.1 development cycle and is still very active in the developer community.
His 25+ plugins (some of which you’ve likely used before) have over two million downloads and his website provides some great advanced WordPress tutorials.
When Cristi is not working with WordPress he likes to play with shiny new web technologies and weird programming languages. He also enjoys cycling and analog photography.
Theme Developer
chacha102Tyler Carter is an accomplished student who taught himself WordPress and web development over the past few years. He’s a Stack Overflow addict with over 650 solved programming questions credited to his name. He’s read numerous books, blogs, and articles on topics ranging from marketing to programming to photography.
In his free time he mentors a robotics team in San Diego, CA and sits on the steering committee for TEDxYouth @ San Diego – an event that brings 20 students from 12 different schools in the San Diego area together to be inspired about changing the world.
He does not like Pina Coladas, or getting caught in the rain.
Support & Localization Manager
Yumiko (aka Pepsi) is our lead support wrangler and forum moderator responsible for all things support and language pack related. If you’ve asked a question in the forum before, chances are she was the first to answer. Her speed, knowledge, and patience makes her a great addition to the AppThemes team.
She is a married mom with two girls from New Zealand with over 10 years experience in IT — specifically network engineering & technical support roles. She enjoys learning new technologies and is currently enhancing her skill set in the area of web development.
She was introduced to WordPress solely because of her desire to use ClassiPress, which was the only product of all those she researched that suited her needs perfectly.
Forum Support Guru
barukarRenato has been dabbling in website development for years. After creating his first site, he got hooked and hasn’t stopped since. He was first introduced to WordPress back in 2009 and built his first theme in 2010.
Not far after, he discovered AppThemes and was intrigued with their themes and decided to start a new classified ads website using ClassiPress. Since then he became a huge AppThemes evangelist and WordPress has completely changed his life.
Today he considers himself a self-taught ClassiPress and WordPress extraordinaire. Renato represents us from the amazing city of Sao Paulo, Brazil and is our resident Portuguese speaker.
Forum Support Guru
Jomark has been instrumental is helping grow and nurture the AppThemes support forum. When he’s not helping others in the forum, he is an internet entrepreneur and an independent filmmaker.
Jomark is intensively self-taught in the field of digital movie/film making and internet marketing and co-founded SineBuano, Cebu’s independent film-making group. His portfolio contains more than 50 websites which include several AppThemes-based sites.
Forum Support Guru
Dimitris has an incredibly varied skill set. His knowledge covers everything from web development, design, server administration, search engine optimization and, of course, WordPress.
Most importantly, Dimitris brings with him years of experience helping customers get through their toughest technical issues while providing support for hardware and software companies.
Dimitris enjoys writing valid HTML and CSS. He spends his free time practicing photography, playing sports, watching movies and reading.
Forum Technical Support Maven
Esther (aka bluecafe) is a web designer based in Berlin. She works on projects dealing with Drupal and WordPress but WordPress is her CMS of choice. Not only is Esther a designer, she likes to code as well.
Esther is our technical support lead in the forums so if you like to talk code, Esther’s your gal. When she’s not cracking those tough forum questions, she’s busy building WordPress themes for her clients.
Besides working with WordPress, her hobby is collecting movie memorabilia. Esther came across ClassiPress when she was looking for a theme to manage her movie memorabilia site. Ever since then, she’s been hooked on AppThemes.
