Buff Motion

Buff Motion is a London motion design studio whose website Shrink first built in 2023. Three years in, the site had drifted the way long-lived sites do: fonts and line heights out of sync page to page, hundreds of accumulated classes, a structure getting harder to maintain. Rather than patch it, we rebuilt it from the ground up on a fully component-based Webflow structure, with a campaign pages CMS, a UTM dashboard and a single flexible Lottie component their marketing team controls without a developer in the loop.

We built Buff Motion's site in 2023. It worked well for three years, but the usual drift had set in. Font sizes crept out of sync across pages, line heights stopped matching, the class list grew into the hundreds, and the structure got harder to work on as the site grew.

Drift has a real cost. Small inconsistencies compound, the site gets slower to update, and harder to keep on-brand. The deeper issue was operational: any meaningful update needed us in the loop, which is a slow and expensive way to run a marketing site.

The temptation with a site like this is to read the surface, the drifted type and exploding class list, and tidy it. None of that would have lasted. The real issue was that the 2023 build wasn't structured to absorb three years of edits without drift. There was no central system enforcing consistency, so every update was a small judgement call, and small judgement calls accumulate.

So we reframed it. Not "fix what's drifted" but "rebuild on a structure where drift can't happen the same way again". And treat it as an operating-model change, not a redesign: if the marketing team can ship campaign pages, swap Lotties and run their own attribution, we stop being a dependency on the day-to-day.

Every page is assembled from a shared component library, so type, spacing and visual treatment are enforced by structure rather than discipline.

A dedicated CMS for campaign pages means the team ships a new landing page without us writing a line of code: new URL, new SEO settings, new content, all in the Webflow editor.

The whole site uses one Lottie component that handles positioning, scale, playback and mobile behaviour through component properties. Drop it on any page, configure it in the Designer, done.

A UTM attribution dashboard gives the team visibility on which campaigns and channels are working. Underneath, the custom GSAP motion layer, Barba.js page transitions and Buff's signature easing curve are preserved and wired into the new structure. Reduced motion is respected throughout and Lotties lazy-load and hide on mobile where appropriate.

One source of truth: components, type and motion are structurally consistent rather than maintained by hand. Marketing-team autonomy: campaign pages, Lottie placements and content updates happen in Webflow without a developer. Visibility on what's working through the UTM dashboard. And a site that's drift-resistant by design, because new pages are assembled from the library rather than built from scratch.

Every long-lived site drifts. Font sizes creep, classes accumulate, and one day the structure isn't holding what you're asking of it. The right answer isn't always to patch. Sometimes it's to rebuild on a foundation that resists the same drift next time, and hand more of the day-to-day back to the people closest to the work. For Buff, that meant moving from a site we had to maintain to one their marketing team runs. We stop being the bottleneck. They ship faster. First built in 2023. Rebuilt in 2026.