When I first responded to Alina Cerminara, Founder and Publisher of FOLKLIFE, she’d posted on Instagram that she was looking for a website designer. I skipped past my fleeting “I’m not a website designer” (having built many well-performing websites but thinking of myself in a broader way) and asked what her project was.

FOLKLIFE is a print magazine rooted in slow living, creativity, and community—two beautifully produced volumes a year, with a loyal readership, and a brand with warmth and depth. Her goal was to align the digital presence with the print product’s quality and to build a new website.

The more we talked, the more it became clear that what FOLKLIFE needed wasn’t a website refresh. It needed a new product. A digital version of FOLKLIFE that wasn’t the magazine, but carried the same ethos to a different and broader audience—one we would research, define, and build from the ground up.

I pitched something more comprehensive than what Alina had been thinking, and totally different from what others had proposed. She said yes and was taking a big step out of her comfort zone, delving into strategy.

A Grant, Budget, and the Scope

FOLKLIFE had already secured grant funding before we began. The proposals Alina had been receiving allocated more than 90% of the budget to website design and customizations needed to build on WordPress, but Alina wanted to earmark funds for creative content—writers, photographers, videographers. Storytelling by independent creatives is the core of the FOLKLIFE brand. Our proposal looked at the budget differently.

We recommended allocating about half the budget to the build and strategy, and the rest to content, because strategy hadn’t been included in her thinking. She’d be looking at website design studios proposing ideas based on the website’s look and final outcome. Without a brand strategy behind the product, it would mimic the magazine but lack a clear distinction or a way to appeal to a broader set of new audiences who would be reading online. We wanted to leave the project with something that the brand could use for years to come to guide their decisions, marketing, and content planning.

We pitched expanding the scope beyond a website build into a full digital strategy engagement. Audience research and development. Revenue planning. Subscriber and vendor management systems. Training and coaching so the team could run the platform independently after launch. Alina was earlier in her revenue journey than some of the brands I typically work with, which shaped how we approached everything—with more coaching and support built into the process and more time for decisions that needed time to get right.

Staying on Shopify

The first significant decision wasn’t about design. It was about the platform.

Because the project focused on publishing editorial content, others had suggested moving away from Shopify and into WordPress. It’s a common recommendation, and not an unreasonable one. But I’m not one to suggest change for the sake of it, and part of the project’s goal was sales coaching. So, building on a platform built to help the brand grow its revenue was incredibly valuable.

FOLKLIFE’s original setup was a Wix website with general brand information and stunning photography, but to make a purchase or browse products, it linked to a secondary Shopify site. The Shopify site had minimal customization, serving as the online store for purchasing subscriptions, print copies, and merch, with very little information or architecture.

I knew Shopify’s capabilities well, and I knew that FOLKLIFE’s goals—publishing online editorial in a customized format (which wasn’t an “online magazine”), making print volume ordering seamless, growing the subscriber base, and opening up new revenue channels—were all achievable within Shopify. Long term, one platform that the team could manage without a developer on retainer would better serve the brand than splitting across two systems.

One of the most meaningful parts of this project was the audience work. FOLKLIFE’s print readers were well understood. The digital reader was a different question—someone who might come to FOLKLIFE through a search, a social post, or a CommunityFOLK listing, rather than through a bookshop or a subscription gift.

We spent real time on this. Who were they? What were they looking for? What would make them stay, subscribe, come back? Cory Ripley of Exhibit A: Design Group led the online brand strategy and audience research, developing detailed audience personas and a visual direction that felt consistent with the print magazine while being built specifically for digital. That clarity of audience shaped every decision that followed. From the content architecture to the product descriptions to the positioning of advertising on the site.

It was this work, more than anything else, that extended the timeline. We were not building a website. We were creating a new product, and getting the foundation right took time.

The Build

Alina and I worked closely and tirelessly to build almost everything on her wish list. What was meant to be a two-month project turned into a six-month project. Building a content-heavy, editorially driven Shopify store isn’t straightforward, and we weren’t willing to cut corners. We did meet the grant deadlines that mattered. And what we delivered was a considerably more robust and custom site than the original scope described, on budget.

The build included a complete revamp of products, shipping processes, and customer experience. We set new shipping parameters, managed how subscriptions are processed to streamline the experience for Alina and her customers, and navigated the setup of tariffs and duties correctly so FOLKLIFE could continue shipping to its US customers during the cross-border changes underway at the time.

We built everything so Alina wouldn’t need a developer (or us) for day-to-day updates. Training videos, written walkthroughs, detailed strategy and revenue planning documents, and hours of video coaching so she could add editorial content, update advertising products, manage pages and site details, and keep the platform growing on her own terms.

CommunityFOLK

Digital advertising was already on Alina’s radar, but the question was how to do it in a way that felt native to the FOLKLIFE brand. We researched and worked through a few approaches, with a consistent focus on the reader experience—both visual and editorial—and on making any advertising feel like a natural part of the FOLKLIFE world rather than an interruption.

CommunityFOLK emerged from that process. A platform within the new Shopify store where aligned brands could grow a community and publish editorial content that delivered on what FOLKLIFE readers already expected. It was built as a custom article section within the site, and I sold the first spots to give Alina and her team a working model to build from.

The copywriting across the site was part of our scope. Everything outside the editorial content, plus a few articles and advertising features. Alina holds a master’s in publishing, and the team includes editors, which means the copy went through a proper editorial process.

I’ve been writing my whole life, including a monthly magazine food column, client copy, and hundreds of thousands of words of copywriting across projects and jobs. But working with a real editor again and being pushed to fit the writing precisely to the audience, the brand voice, and the project was such a great refresher on so many points. It’s easy to develop habits over years of independent work. Having someone with Alina’s editorial background review the copy was a good reminder that being open to that process makes the work better. It’s one of the things I valued most about this collaboration.

What the Project Delivered

A fully custom Shopify store at folklife.ca, built to support editorial publishing, print volume sales, subscriber growth, and the CommunityFOLK advertising platform. An online brand strategy and audience research developed in partnership with Exhibit A: Design Studio. Subscriber and vendor management systems. Email setup and automation. SEO foundations across the site. (FOLKLIFE is still working on labelling images in an extensive library) A complete operational overhaul, including shipping process, inventory management, subscriptions, and cross-border commerce. Training materials, video walkthroughs, and strategy documents to enable the team to run the platform independently. And three months of post-launch support.

The value of this project far exceeded its cost. We built something designed to grow for years, to open new revenue channels, and to give Alina—a founder who has devoted years to building something she believes in—the platform and the plan to build the work and life she wants from it.

Since the launch, sales, traffic, average order value, and organic reach have all grown as FOLKLIFE maintains regular communication with its growing email audience, and new audiences find the brand.

In Alina’s Words

“I won’t say this website project has been an easy road. It was actually very very hard, and what was meant to be two months took six. But we made it, and it’s been worth every amount of energy that was put into it.

Chantal Ireland is the person behind the brand/business strategy, design, and build, working endlessly on every little piece, using the Shopify platform to make a content-heavy site—not an easy feat. Kudos to Chantal.” —Alina Cerminara, Publisher, FOLKLIFE

Alina and Chantal both published stories about their experiences on the new FOLKLIFE website. You can read Alina’s and Chantal’s.