The Coop BJJ — Website Design & Development

I handled the full redesign and Webflow migration for The Coop BJJ, LA's first member-run Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu co-op. The old site was built on Squarespace, and it had one critical failure: it made the most interesting thing about the gym, a genuinely radical, non-hierarchical, member-taught model, almost impossible to understand at a glance.

The Coop isn't a normal BJJ gym. It's run by its members, priced only to cover expenses, and guided by a community of 30+ brown and black belt members rather than a single instructor. That's a real departure from the top-down “sensei” structure most gyms operate under, but none of that came through on the old site. Visitors landed on all-caps headlines, no real layout hierarchy, and a conversion flow that asked them to email or call just to try a free class. The site read like a placeholder, not a destination, for one of the most compelling fitness communities in LA.

Instead of starting with sitemap and sections, I treated the co-op's actual philosophy, member-driven, peer-to-peer, no belt politics, as the design brief itself. Every section leads with the “why” before the “what.” A dedicated how-it-works section with CMS-driven FAQs replaces the old buried text blocks, and a community roster makes the 30+ member base tangible and visible for the first time, something the old site never surfaced at all.

The biggest structural problem wasn't visual, it was functional: getting a free trial class on the old site meant finding a buried CTA, clicking out to an external HelloSign waiver, and separately emailing or calling to confirm. I consolidated that entire journey, waiver, booking, and membership info, into a single, clearly sequenced CMS-driven flow. Drop-in and trial conversion friction is gone at the source, not just styled over.

Motion plays a real role here: scroll-triggered section reveals, a community stats sequence, and a subtle hero entrance that sets tone without overwhelming the content. Structurally, the build is Client-First v2 conventions on top of a Relume component foundation, giving the site a consistent type scale and spacing system the old template never had. Finsweet Attributes power the schedule filtering, and local SEO schema (SportsActivityLocation + SportsOrganization JSON-LD) replaces the structured data the old site simply didn't have, targeting high-intent searches across Palms, Culver City, and West LA.

This wasn't a visual refresh sitting on top of the old platform. It's a complete Squarespace-to-Webflow migration, rebuilt from the content architecture up. The result: a site that finally treats The Coop's community model as the headline, not a footnote.