History of Crowd Favorite
Crowd Favorite’s commitment to open source predates the company. In 2002, founder Alex King became the fifth contributor to the WordPress Project. That early work set the direction for everything after it.
The agency opened in 2007 as the first firm focused entirely on scaling WordPress and open source for performance, and as the original VIP partner. Enterprise adoption followed. In 2010, Crowd Favorite joined the team that made WordPress Disney’s CMS of record under a five-year enterprise-wide program, and the platform proved it could carry a global media operation.
In 2014, Crowd Favorite pioneered the decoupled CMS, two years before the industry began using the approach for headless applications. That pattern has held ever since. Crowd Favorite builds what enterprise teams will need before the market has a name for it.
A Long History of Open Source Innovation
By 2016, Crowd Favorite was delivering deep personalization to enterprise clients, capability that until then had lived inside AEM and Sitecore. In 2018, the team architected a Composable CMS approach, combining best-in-class open source tools into modular digital experience platforms. In 2020 came the first data-driven digital products built for enterprise, pairing personalization with complex Laravel applications.
Today that work reaches past client engagements and into the ecosystem itself. Crowd Favorite is a founding member of The Scale Consortium, a group of enterprise open source agencies raising the standard for how large organizations evaluate, buy, and build on open source. Crowd Favorite is also a founding participant in the FAIR Package Manager, a Linux Foundation project building a federated repository for WordPress plugins and themes and a direct answer to how the ecosystem stays stable at enterprise scale.
NVIDIA, Disney, Lexus, and Providence Healthcare trust Crowd Favorite as their digital partner. The next chapter of open source belongs to the organizations willing to build it. That is where Crowd Favorite has always worked.
The Story Behind Our Name
The Crowd Favorite name originated from our founder Alex King who, while watching a golf tournament, heard the announcer talking about a player and how, although that player was at the top of his sport, still took the time to look fans in the eyes, shake their hands, and sign their autographs until the last person got one. Alex wanted the same for his company and its clients. As an expert developer and Open Source Software enthusiast, he set out to create an agency for established and scaling brands where clients could get elite technology services with a friendly, authentic, and approachable experience.
Today, we continue to use that ethos as our North Star – whether that means working with our clients and partners, giving back to the Open Source Community, giving back to underserved and underrepresented communities, or supporting our team in their professional growth- we look to be the Crowd Favorite.
Formed in 2014 by Three Best-of-Breed Digital Firms
VeloMedia
CLIENT-CENTERED ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT
Founded in 2007, VeloMedia specialized in running mission-critical digital projects for enterprise and Fortune 500 companies. The company was known for its ability to provide stability, process, infrastructure, and account management appropriate for high-profile projects where failure wasn’t an option.
Forty
USER EXPERIENCE DESIGN
Opened in 2003, Forty existed to create remarkable digital experiences that solved problems for users through human-centered design. In the years that followed, the firm became known for its ability to expertly craft brands and experiences that resonated with customers.
Crowd Favorite
THE ORIGINAL WORDPRESS AGENCY
Also established in 2007, Crowd Favorite was the very first digital agency focused primarily on the WordPress platform. Through years of experience working on enterprise-grade digital problems, Crowd Favorite set the bar for world-class web engineering, systems integration, and heavily customized content management.