Gym Marketing
Montavilla is the part of southeast Portland that still looks like the 1940s got interrupted and never quite resumed. SE Stark Street runs through it flat and wide, past a taqueria, a barber, a theater that has been three different things this decade.
Unicorn Jiu Jitsu is on that street, and the first thing you notice inside is that there's nowhere to sit.
That's on purpose. The building is about 3,300 square feet and a little over 2,000 of it is mat. No proper lounge, no juice bar.
Hillary VanOrnum will tell you the math plainly: a bigger lounge doesn't get you students, and a crowded mat gets people hurt.
The second thing you notice takes longer, because it's an absence. Hillary is a black belt of more than ten years, one of Oregon's first female black belts, and she owns the place. She does not teach the no-gi class.
A purple belt teaches it. She's better at no-gi than Hillary is (her words).
The Only Woman in the Room, Every Room
Hillary started training in 2005, outside Washington D.C., and she started it for somebody else. She bought her younger brother three months of classes.
Then she joined him.
The program folded a couple of years later and she spent two years doing judo full-time under Maurice Allan, a Scottish Olympian out of Springfield, Virginia. She still calls him Mo.
Then she moved home to Portland and stopped.
So she waited. She waited until her brother moved back, and then she walked into Team Quest in 2009, back when Team Quest was full of UFC guys, and got put through the wringer by all of them.
People sometimes tell her that must have made her tougher. She corrects it.
At her second tournament as a blue belt, she saw Lana Stefanac—the first female black belt she'd ever laid eyes on. She walked up to her afterward.
Why She Left a Gym That Was Good to Her
Years later she was teaching a women's-only class at somebody else's academy, and it was working.
One day a week became two, because she had more women on the mats than the academy had men in the room.
The owner backed her the whole way. Nobody was the villain here.
The problem was the calendar.
Unicorn opened in 2019.
Brian VanOrnum, her husband, tore his LCL right before the doors opened, which is a very jiu-jitsu way to start a business. They joined One Jiu Jitsu USA under Giva Santana the following January.
Naming the Gym Was the First Filter
The name came from three directions at once.
There was the logo on the first barn where Hillary rode horses as a kid, and there was her Shoyoroll sponsorship in her first year at black belt, where the reps started calling her the unicorn—she's had pink or purple hair for as long as anyone can remember.
And there was the plain arithmetic of being a female black belt in Oregon, which at the time made her roughly as common as the animal.
They worried the name would scare men off. It did not scare men off. It sorted them.
Most gyms pay an agency for positioning. Hillary got hers from a horse barn and a gi sponsor.
Handing the Class to Someone Who Outranks You at One Thing
Here's the part that most gyms don't do.
Giving the class to whoever's best at it is the easy half. The expensive half is what she tacks on at the end—she doesn't want her students coming out as copies of her.
Purple belts teach in front of black belts at Unicorn.
Guest instructors get booked specifically because they don't move like the owners do, and most of them are women. Members ask who's coming next.
She's blunter still about herself.
Most schools treat training your instructors as a pipeline problem: how do you get enough people qualified to run a class. Unicorn runs it closer to casting. They want a bench that disagrees with itself a little.
What a Room Full of Different Teachers Produces
The day he filmed, Alex walked into a regular noon class and clocked something before anyone explained it to him.
Hillary's own accounting of that same class: eighty-something percent women, and Brian was teaching it.
That's one class on one day and she'd be the first to say so.
Still. She came up with no women in the room at all, and now the noon class runs like that and nobody in the building mentions it.
She wasn't even watching. She was in the weight room doing paralegal work.
The other half of what makes that room work is a phrase they say out loud. A safe place for violence. Coaches walk the mat spacing rolls apart, and the floor plan exists to serve it.
There's also a membership condition that has nothing to do with technique.
Plenty of gyms put safe gym culture on the wall. This one puts it in the intake.
Why She Thinks This Is Bigger Than Her Gym
Hillary credits this next idea to her friend Emily Kwok, and she's careful to.
A women's program gets women onto the mat, which is the part most gyms are working on and worth working on.
Hillary is after the thing that comes after. Whoever stands at the front of the room decides what gets corrected and what slides, and she wants more of those people to be women.
She's not precious about how hard it was to get here, either.
What It Takes to Run It
None of this runs on Hillary being at the gym all day, because she isn't.
She's a full-time paralegal. Brian has the noon classes, the kids' classes, and the customer service, which is to say Brian has the gym.
He also didn't start training until she was already a purple belt, which she finds funny and slightly unfair.
Brian carries the admin too.
Unicorn has been on Gymdesk since the day it opened—about seven years, back when the product was still called Martial Arts on Rails—and he's the one in it.
He uses attendance as a tripwire, mostly around belt conversations.
Someone's been a member a year and has been to ten classes; that's a conversation you want to have in month two, not month twelve. He'll tell you he'd rather catch it earlier than he does.
Which is the honest version of running a gym.
You give the no-gi class to the purple belt who's better at it, you keep the lounge small, you take the calls at noon, and you go be a paralegal in the weight room.
Then somebody walks in, sees a room that has a place for her, and doesn't have to wait for her brother to move back.
Unicorn Jiu Jitsu is at 9220 SE Stark Street in Portland, Oregon. Watch the full episode on Gymdesk Originals.
