To be honest, we can hardly believe it, but it really has been 9 years since we published our very first blog post here on this website. On July 11th, 2009, from our tiny shared apartment in Auckland, we wrote about a brave little bird, about inspiration and the courage to build something and believe in our own dreams.

It’s A Journey

At that time we went on a journey with our own small Elmastudio business without knowing where this journey would take us. Today, in very small steps we understand more and more what we actually started and how important these first steps were. We were not prepared and we certainly didn’t have the best setup to start our own blog and later our theme shop. But we had a dream and a vision of how we wanted to live and work. We have always sticked to this vision, even in times that were not so easy. And these ideas from 2009 are still in line with our visions today, even though we and everything around us is constantly changing.

Honesty, Inspiration and Courage

I think whatever you start the important thing is that you are always 100 percent honest with yourself. Otherwise the whole effort may not be worth it and you will not be happy with your situation in the long run.

Fortunately, we are still super grateful and happy to have our little Elmastudio. And it is a little bit funny that we are in Nara, Japan at this moment. A place we wanted to visit for a very long time. This weekend we will talk about our Elmastudio story at the WordCamp Ogijima. We hope to inspire others to also follow their own path and to have enough confidence in themselves and in their own dreams. It’s definitely not easy and the web inspires and confuses us at the same time. You can quickly get the feeling that you are not good enough or that it’s already too late to follow your dream. The world is a busy place, but each one of us is special and has a special ability that he or she can share with others.

On our anniversary we would like to share this inspiration with you and we hope that this little message may reach you just at the right moment.

Birthday Discount and Further Goodies

To celebrate our Elmastudio anniversary with you, we are offering a 30% discount for all our products. So you can purchase all our WordPress themes and our Theme Bundle for a reduced price until July 18th at 11.59pm (CET). Simply use the coupon code bday2018 in the shopping cart here on our website.

We are also working on a few more goodies that we will release within the next week. There will be a new Pukeko theme update, with a design and improved Gutenberg editor support. A a great little freebie for WordPress beginners is also in the making.

Your Feedback
We would be very happy to hear from you what you like about Elmastudio or what you think we should improve. Maybe you have a special theme wish or suggestions on how we can further improve our themes. Write us your feedback in a comment or via email. This way we can better know in which areas we still have to get better on which aspects of Elmastudio we should highlight even more. We can’t wait to hear from you!