The South Africans who revolutionised global e-commerce

WooCommerce is one of the most-used e-commerce platforms in the world. Although it’s now owned and developed by Automattic, the company behind WordPress, it was originally developed by a South African startup called WooThemes.

WooThemes was founded in 2007 by web designers and entrepreneurs Adii Pienaar, Magnus Jepson, and Mark Forrester.

Pienaar and Forrester are from South Africa, while Jepson is Norwegian. As the trio tell it, they met over email nearly twenty years ago to discuss developing and selling WordPress themes together.

Out of that, WooThemes was born — a marketplace for professionally developed WordPress themes.

In 2010, WooThemes started investigating the idea of introducing e-commerce functionality into its collection of themes.

The company hired Mike Jolley and James Koster, UK-based developers at Jigowatt, to work on a fork of Jigoshop. However, the name WooCommerce dates back to at least as early as November 2010.

WooThemes also brought WordPress core developer Mark Jaquith on board to perform a complete security audit of the WooCommerce plugin.

WooCommerce officially launched on 27 September 2011, and by the following year, WooThemes had switched to using its own plugin to power its WordPress theme marketplace.

Its popularity exploded, and in 2015, Automattic acquired WooThemes for a reported $30 million.

Forrester and Jepson stayed at Automattic, where they still work as advisors, while investing and founding other ventures.

Pienaar went on to found several more companies, including PublicBeta, Conversio, and Cogsy, before joining Automattic last year to join the WordPress.com leadership.

CM Group acquired Conversio in 2019, while Cogsy was acquired by Mayple in 2023.

The CM Group deal was reportedly worth over $6.7 million and Pienaar stayed on for about a year at the newly-formed CM Commerce before launching Cogsy.

However, Pienaar has also been radically transparent about the issues that can crop up after acquisitions like these.

In May last year, Pienaar revealed on his blog that roughly 35% of his financial portfolio vanished because the equity he received when he sold Conversio was worth much less than the value at which it was issued in August 2019.

While extremely disappointing, Pienaar said he had fortunately treated the money as if it was not yet his and never included it in any financial planning.

He acknowledged that the loss still hit hard.

“Looking at a fixed valuation on my portfolio spreadsheet and doing these mental acrobatics was a kind of financial memento mori. It was a half-baked attempt to acknowledge that any paper value can die,” he wrote.

“But when the news came, which was much worse than I ever expected, my suspicions and preparation were little solace.”

Fortunately, Pienaar said he was happy with the path he is on after exiting Cogsy in 2023 and joining Automattic.

During 2024, he served as head of WooNew, where he focused on initiatives to help first-time entrepreneurs thrive.

At the end of the year, he became general manager in Automattic’s Other Bets, or .Bets division.

Bets is a team that builds products that aren’t yet core to Automattic’s business, but keep the company innovating and pushing it to explore new territory.

“Bets brings together the immense potential of Day One, Tumblr, Newspack, Gravatar, Pocket Casts, Advertising and Greenhouse under one roof with a singular mandate,” Pienaar explains.

“To take bold risks in pursuit of 10x outcomes, unlocking new revenue and impact for Automattic.”