Hopefully you had a great start into the new year celebrating together with your family and friends. For the new year we wish you tons of health, happiness and success in everything you want to achieve. May all your dreams and wishes come true.

2013 was an exciting year for Elmastudio, with lots of highlights and motivating feedback from our blog readers and theme users and we had lots of fun and loved doing our work over the year.

Our trip to Japan and our visit to the WordCamp Tokyo in September/October was definitely our personal highlight of the year. And although we already dreamed of visiting Japan for a very long time, we never thought that this trip would be so inspiring. It felt great to just sit in a café for hours, watch the hustle bustle around us and let our minds wander. That we would also be able to absorb so much creativity and inspiration while visiting many of Japans giant book stores, exploring art galleries and the trendy neighborhoods of Tokyo and Osaka was an extra unexpected bonus. It was such a wonderful relaxing and motivating trip!

We also would have never dreamed that our visit to the WordCamp Tokyo would lead to a cooperation with WordPress.com and Automattic. We are so happy and proud that Kiore Moana got released as our first Premium theme on WordPress.com in December. Coming a long way since releasing our first free theme Ari here on Elmastudio about three years ago, this really means a lot to us!

At the moment we are also eagerly working on our Elmastudio redesign with the Moka theme as a basis theme. We hope to finish and release the redesign in the next few days, so that we can start into the new year with a fresh design.

Of course we will also release at least six new Premium Elmastudio themes in 2014 (the next new theme will be a photography theme) and we plan to write at least one new blog post per week this year.

To an exciting, healthy and positive year 2014!
Yours Ellen & Manuel