Crowd Favorite to acquire Forty, a UX and design agency

Forty is a design and UX agency based in Arizona. James Archer, Forty’s CEO, is a founding member of the Gangplank incubator in Chandler, AZ.

Forty is a team of six that have focused on design and UX for the past 11 years. Throughout their years, they’ve brought on a lot of young talent and trained them in the design and UX space. Their clients include a number of fortune 500 companies, including Microsoft, Monster, Yahoo, and WalMart.

Crowd Favorite and Forty have agreed upon a letter of intent for Forty to join Crowd Favorite’s team.

Forty has been looking for a more formal account management and technology layer, similar to Crowd Favorite’s motivation before they joined VeloMedia last year.

Right now, Crowd Favorite doesn’t specialize in design, so the acquisition allows them to do more serious design work, and sell a more complete package to enterprise clients.

The acquisition should be complete within about two months. Crowd Favorite also announced an acquisition of Pixel Jar in January at WordCamp Phoenix, and it’s closing very soon.

The whole Forty team will join Crowd Favorite, and the deal is what’s called a stock purchase, meaning they are buying the brand, business, staff, and everything else at Forty.

Crowd Favorite CEO Karim Marucchi said the following about the acquisition:

The fact that both of us go after the same market, and have trusted expertise in development and design, makes this a valuable transaction for both us and our respective clients.

Workflow, account management and other aspects of the business will likely be managed through Crowd Favorite. Forty will maintain their Tempe office, and they’re still working on the branding details, but there’s a good chance they’ll maintain both brands.

This is Crowd Favorite’s third acquisition in the last twelve months, and their team recently passed fifty members.

This acquisition is yet another step of WordPress based development shops maturing as WordPress gains broader scale acceptance in the enterprise space. Also, it appears there’s a bit of a trend of development-centric WordPress agencies investing in bolstering their in-house design chops.