The Farmers' Guide to the Farmer's Tan
33 minutes agoRead more
Dollar Shave Club · Original Content
We had millions of readers. We did not own the house they read in.
Dollar Shave Club built one of the sharpest content brands on the internet in MEL Magazine. But the audience, the archive, and the search traffic were sitting on infrastructure we did not fully control. I led the product work to move all of it onto our own foundation, and to make the content actually earn its keep.
3.2M
Members
2M+
MEL monthly readers
3
Migration phases
11 mo
May 2018 → Mar 2019
The content engine
MEL was the reason people liked a razor company.
MEL Magazine was Dollar Shave Club's ad-free men's magazine: smart, funny, genuinely reported writing about being a guy, with none of the lad-mag cliche. It pulled millions of readers a month who had no intention of buying razors, and it made the brand feel like a place with a point of view. Content was not marketing garnish at DSC. It was a growth channel. Which is exactly why it needed real infrastructure underneath it, not a rented platform.
Lifestyle
What Does It Actually Mean to Be a Redneck?
The Library
The Farmers' Guide to the Farmer's Tan
Grooming & Hygiene
Hey, Stinky-Teeth
Health & Exercise
Why Does My Sweat Smell Like Last Night?
The approach.
One migration, three phases, eleven months. Build the foundation, fill it and make it findable, then turn readers into members.
The structure comes verbatim from the original approach plan. Step through the phases above; each is expanded below.
01
Phase one · May-July 2018
Own the foundation first.
Before a single article moved, we built the platform to move it onto: the content infrastructure and technology that would hold MEL and everything around it. The point was control. When your audience and your archive live on someone else's stack, you do not own your own growth. Phase one was about making sure Dollar Shave Club did.
02
Phase two · June-Aug 2018
A library that search could find.
With the foundation in place, we developed the Library: the full body of original content, structured so it could be organized, resurfaced, and reused instead of scrolling off into the archive. And we pointed it at search. A funny feature about the summer is a one-day spike; the same piece built for SEO is an evergreen door people walk through for years. Phase two turned a stream of publishing into an asset that compounded.
Surf Hair, Do Care
2 days ago
Change the Look Without Changing Yourself
5 days ago
03
Phase three · Aug 2018-Mar 2019
Turn a reader into a member.
The last phase is where content stops being a top-of-funnel curiosity and starts doing work. We built member experiences on top of the Library and the new infrastructure: connecting the person reading a MEL story to the club they could join, so the audience the content earned had somewhere to go. Read something good, become a member, the loop DSC always wanted content to close.
Where the migration was headed: content and subscription in one loop.
The work
What it looked like.
These are the migration designs: the magazine homepage rebuilt on the new infrastructure, in its Today, Magazine, and Blog Roll layouts. Same voice, same real headlines, now on a foundation we owned. Switch between the layouts below.
Built from the live Original Content component library. Real headlines kept intact; they are the personality.
Matthew Wardenaar
Director of Product Management, DSC
My part.
I was Director of Product Management at Dollar Shave Club, over mobile, retail, internal tools, and original content. I led the product for this migration: the plan, the phasing, and the shape of the platform and the member experiences on top of it. It was run by the same team that had built out MEL Magazine, so the group that knew the content best was the group that rebuilt its home. This was the original-content chapter of a broader mandate to run several DSC surfaces at once without letting any of them stall.
Companion reading: the full Dollar Shave Club case study and the MEL Magazine build.
Anyone can publish. The trick is owning what you publish, making it findable, and pointing it at the thing you actually sell. That was the migration.