The story
Creative Market first began in 2011 as a venture between Aaron Epstein, Chris Williams, and Darius A. Monsef IV. Epstein, Williams, and Monsef were the co-founders of COLOURlovers, a Y Combinator-backed social network service that provides color inspiration for both personal and professional creative projects. The co-founders recognized that COLOURlovers was in need of a marketplace to help its community members exchange the digital goods they were creating, and hence created Creative Market.
In April 2014, the team launched a Photoshop extension that allowed designers to preview and purchase Creative Market's digital assets directly within Photoshop itself. This made it easier for designers to find and integrate third-party digital assets within the workflow of their existing graphic design environments.
In February 2014, Creative Market was acquired by Autodesk. The amount of the acquisition was not publicly announced. The entirety of the Creative Market team stayed with the company through the acquisition.
In 2016, Nicky Laatz became Creative Market's first shop owner to reach $1 million in earnings.
In May 2020, it was acquired by the online design community Dribbble. Shortly after, the team released Creative Market's Membership, a subscription offering that includes sitewide discounts and exclusive free assets.
Creative Market has continued to expand its catalogue consistently since launch, rolling out new categories like photos and 3D assets as well as emerging subcategories like Procreate brushes and Canva templates. In 2022, the site partnered with Shutterstock to expand its photo supply.
From Wikipedia’s article on Creative Market, shared under CC BY-SA 4.0.6