Cocoon Music Event GmbH

I grew up in Frankfurt with techno all around me. Cocoon is older than I am, and it is one of the few independent labels that still means this much to so many people after 30 years.

In early 2025 cocoon.net still ran on Squarespace, and it showed. There was no real SEO, so the label ranked poorly on Google, even for its own name and topics. The subpages had no clear structure, the landing page was one endless scroll, and the site had not been looked after in a long time. At this size, Squarespace had become the brake on growth.

Moving away from it had been on the table for a while. What was missing was the time and the know-how. When I joined in January 2025, Edgar Dirksen, the managing director, handed me the project and gave me full freedom to run it. I made the calls and checked them with the team.

One site for a whole label

Every department had its own needs: recordings, events, the shop. On top of that, cocoon.net is also Sven Väth’s artist page, with his tour dates. So the site could not go offline for a single day during the switch. Bringing everyone’s requirements into one structure took longer than any line of code.

The quiet part: the backend

I set up all 179 products by hand, each with its SKU, product data and its own SEO title and description. The store runs in German and English, with prices in EUR and USD for international orders. I also brought in Google Analytics, Search Console and Merchant Center for the first time, and I still look after them today.

A stable theme, rewritten where it mattered

I started from a solid Shopify theme and then changed a lot of it in JavaScript and CSS, so it would look and work like Cocoon and not like a template. I only ship code I understand myself.

Every event gets its own page

For the first time, each event has its own page on cocoon.net, with pop-up cards for the artists on the line-up. Google lists every event on its own, and visitors understand the night before they buy a ticket. Tickets are sold through the partners, but the pages and the search traffic stay on Cocoon’s domain. This is the part I am most proud of.

Small things that add up

Cocoon now hosts its own link-in-bio page on cocoon.net instead of paying for an outside service. And the SEO groundwork, clean URLs, structured data and both languages marked up properly, also helps AI search tools describe Cocoon correctly.

The Recordings page. No frills, just the black Cocoon look and the records in a grid. For the first time, the label’s history is easy to follow.

• Organic search traffic grew strongly, and so did visits that come from AI tools
• Targeted email newsletters became a much bigger channel
• Sales went up across the whole shop
• The Recordings section is tidy, and Cocoon’s history finally reads well online
• One outside subscription less, thanks to the own link page

Detailed figures are confidential and available on request.

The hard part was not the code. It was bringing every department’s wishes into one site without anyone losing what mattered to them.

I taught myself most of this while building it. That only works if you really understand what you ship.

Next time I would automate the repetitive work, like product data, much earlier.

Cocoon has a special place for me. I still work there, and since then I have also helped out at Cocoon nights at Amnesia and 528 on Ibiza, and at Zoom and Sparta in Frankfurt. Zoom used to be the Cocoon Club.

I value this team a lot, for how close it is and for the trust it put in me.