What happened to Foxhound Band Themes?

Foxhound Band Themes was started by the two of us, Shane Duquette and Jared Polowick, when a friend of ours came to us needing a website for his band. He didn't need a custom site, he just wanted a simple theme, except that none of the themes had the features that he needed.

We teamed up with a programmer and made a WordPress theme for musicians with all the features that they needed. It was a theme for metalheads made by metalheads. We launched it in 2010, and it was a huge hit.

Before and after photo of Shane Duquette building muscle with Bony to Beastly

The success of our WordPress themes freed up some time for us to get into another kind of heavy metal: lifting weights. As we were building bigger band themes, we were also building bigger muscles. In 2012, we launched The Bony to Beastly Bulking Program for Skinny Guys.

A Fork in the Road

Bony to Beastly was growing even faster than our biceps, and so was the WordPress theme market. We weren't the only band theme in town anymore. Our business was still profitable, but it had lost its sense of purpose. We weren't needed anymore.

Before and after progress photo of Marco Walker-Ng's ectomorph transformation.

However, there were all these skinny guys out there, and they were writing to us telling us that we were changing their lives. Furthermore, we had partnered up with a world-class strength coach, Marco Walker-Ng, BHSc, PTS, PN.

So we had a tough decision to make, and in the end, we felt that our original mission of helping musicians build websites was accomplished. Musicians now have a ton of rad options. (We'll recommend some down below.)

We decided to shut down Foxhound Band Themes, and go all in with our Bony to Beastly project. Since then, we've been helping skinny people build muscle, gain weight, and improve their health.

Before and after progress photos showing a skinny ectomorph gaining muscle and bulking up.

A genuine and deep down thank you for every single one of our customers. Foxhound Band Themes allowed us to meet the most incredible musicians, support our families, and work on something we were passionate about.

For that, we'd like to thank you if you bought a theme, recommended our themes, or worked with us in any way.

–Jared & Shane

A Fork in the Mouth

So, long story short, now we help people bulk up. Instead of building band themes, we help skinny people figure out how to eat more food.

We do this with our business partner, Marco Walker–Ng, BHSc, PTS, PN. He's our certified personal training specialist with a degree in health sciences, and over ten years of experience helping people bulk up. His clients have ranged from everyday skinny people all the way up to our Canadian Olympic rugby team.

Before and after progress photo showing a skinny woman gaining weight and building muscle by lifting weights.

As things stand, we're focused on a few different projects:

Foxhound Studio: Lifestyle and fitness from a design perspective.
Bony to Beastly: The bulking site for skinny guys, by skinny guys.
Bony to Bombshell: Where we help skinny women gain weight.
Outlive: Where we help people build athletic, healthy, and great-looking bodies without needing to moonlight as bodybuilders.
Outlift: a site focused on helping intermediate lifters build bigger, stronger, and more badass-looking bodies.

WordPress Favourites

What we use now instead of a regular theme

We've since started using a page builder with a bare-bones theme. Then we just add our own images and CSS to dress it up a bit.

Beaver Builder
- Page builders have allowed us to make edits to our pages, and make attractive layouts without needing a programmer. After much research, we decided on Beaver Builder and use it on Foxhound Studio, Bony to Beastly, Bony to Bombshell, and Outlive. We love it that much.
Astra Theme Pro—$59
- We've used the Beaver Themer as the theme with Beaver Builder—and it's good. However, Astra Theme Pro is incredibly lightweight and fast. The Beaver Builder theme has some visual advantages over Astra, but we've found it is worth the tradeoff for the speed increase (especially since we're fine with writing CSS.)

We know that not everyone will be able to edit the themes to look the way they want. In that case, we're still big fans of premium theme creator Organic Themes.

Favourite WordPress Plugins

Yoast SEO
- Yoast is the household SEO name for WordPress. It's free, gets the job done well, and it gets installed on every site we touch.
WordFence
- WordFence is a free firewall and malware scanner for your WordPress. It's simple to set up and worth the time it takes for the extra security.
Smush
- Smush optimizes the images you upload to WordPress by compressing them and stripping them of data that it doesn't need. It helps to speed up the loading on your website, which is a part of having good SEO.
Thrive Leads
- I find the Thrive products are often clunky, glitchy, and bloated (which is why we don't use their page builder) but they've still managed to put together some of the best functioning conversion oriented products. We like their thrive leads option for building opt-in forms to help people stay in touch with us.
WP Rocket
- This is the best caching plugin out there at the moment. It's really easy to use and makes your website load incredibly fast. I like the branding, too.