Champions Journal: Content, Commerce & Membership Platform
About the project
GOALS
- Evolve the existing storefront into a full platform supporting content, subscriptions, and e-commerce
- Showcase editorial content while promoting and selling magazine issues
- Enable tiered access based on subscription levels
- Support competitions, campaigns, and brand collaborations
- Create a scalable system for ongoing content and growth
CHALLENGE
The existing platform was limited to e-commerce, with a large and growing content archive that needed to be restructured and expanded.
Over 1,200 CMS items (now well over 2,000) had to be migrated and organised into a system that could support content discovery, filtering, and long-term scalability.
At the same time, the platform needed to balance multiple functions: editorial, commerce, subscriptions, and campaigns, while remaining clear and intuitive for users.
Solution
A modular, filterable and searchable CMS-driven platform designed to unify content, commerce, and membership.
The system supports structured content, tiered access, and flexible integrations, enabling the platform to evolve alongside the magazine while maintaining clarity and usability.
The design draws inspiration from the physical magazine, bringing its editorial style into a digital format while ensuring performance and accessibility.
Let's Jam
From Storefront to Platform
The platform evolved from a simple storefront into a full digital product—supporting content, commerce, and membership within a single system.
With thousands of articles and growing editorial output, content needed to be structured in a way that remained clear and navigable. A CMS-driven approach enables filtering and discovery by team, category, and issue, allowing users to explore content intuitively while supporting ongoing growth.
The result is a unified experience that balances multiple user journeys—from reading and discovery to purchasing and subscription access.
Bringing Print into Digital
A key part of the design was translating the feel of the physical magazine into a digital experience.
Bold typography, expressive layouts, and editorial-inspired components were used to create a distinctive visual language.
Features such as the gallery layout mimic the experience of flipping through a magazine—using horizontal scroll to recreate the rhythm of print in a digital format.
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Systems, Integrations & Build
The platform integrates multiple systems to support its functionality: from e-commerce and subscriptions to email campaigns and user management.
Integrations include Foxycart for commerce, Mailchimp for campaigns, and Zapier for automation tools for managing user groups and workflows.
The system was designed to be maintainable with limited resources, ensuring content, campaigns, and competitions can be managed internally without developer reliance.
Doing this project truly turned me into a "Swiss army knife man".
Outcome
The result is a fully integrated platform that supports content, commerce, and membership within a single experience.
The site enables Champions Journal to showcase its editorial output, grow its audience, and support commercial activities: from subscriptions and magazine sales to brand collaborations.
The platform has played a role in securing a further 5-year extension for the magazine, while supporting new partnerships and campaigns.
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