Founded in 1868, Tata Group is one of India's most renowned conglomerates. It has a diverse portfolio spanning 150+ sub-brands across a spectrum of sectors—from consumer products to consulting, travel to telecommunications, and hospitality to health.
In 2021, Tata Group doubled down on its digital strategy investing $2 billion to start Tata Digital, a digital arm focused on modernizing the company’s e-commerce, digital platforms, and online services. The goal was to accelerate growth by expanding reach and tapping into India’s fast-growing audience of over 1 billion mobile users.
At the time, Tata’s digital portfolio consisted of 20+ different mobile apps across electronics, groceries, travel, fashion, and others. This led to a fragmented experience for users—incessantly downloading and switching between apps. On the flip side, it came with a massive development cost for the company to build and maintain separate mobile apps with separate tech stacks.
To Tata Group’s leadership team, there was not a shred of a doubt: the brands were better together. The company tasked Tata Digital with its first company-wide initiative: unify all of Tata’s consumer brands under a one stop-shop—Tata Neu—for a seamless, connected e-commerce experience.
Internally dubbed the “SuperApp”, Tata Neu was no ordinary mobile app to build, and would require a “super” effort from Tata Digital to wrangle segregated tech stacks, business priorities, and teams. And they needed to do so against a hard deadline: a not-to-be-missed opportunity of exposure to 500 million viewers at the Indian Premier League (IPL). As the premier sponsor of the sporting event, Tata Group had planned to leverage its promotional placements to drive awareness and adoption for Tata Neu.
With one year to go, the work was cut out for Tata Digital. They needed to bring every app onto a single digital platform, without losing the flexibility to meet every brand’s unique business and technology requirements.
A critical layer of the digital platform, the right content solution was key to delivering a modern, multi-brand mobile experience. Initially, Tata Digital was inclined to stick to the company’s incumbent CMS vendor, Adobe Experience Manager (AEM).However, when put to the test, AEM Headless posed insurmountable roadblocks:
Ultimately, the problem boiled down to one core blocker: when content is tied to the presentation layer, you’re limited in the experiences you can create.After experiencing delays in launching Tata Neu due to AEM’s failures, Tata Digital realized the need for a more flexible approach to build the SuperApp the way they wanted. They turned to the headless CMS category.
We were very clear from the beginning—a CMS should not dictate the presentation layer. Content is the data, and the UI is a projection of the data. We don't want content to become the UI projection. When you couple UI with data, you muddle the pristine vocabulary of content and end up with a schema that departs significantly from the core purpose of structured content.
In their search to find the ideal content solution for the SuperApp, Tata Digital conducted a comprehensive evaluation of the top headless CMSes on Gartner’s list. It wasn’t just a matter of finding the right technology. They had to galvanize leadership and internal teams around the new vision: treating content as data. And composability was the means to get there.By storing content as atomic data units—detached from the UI—a composable content layer would allow content to be restructured and reused for any context. This was the unlock for Tata to scale multi-brand experiences.
There’s a common misconception that projecting data onto a UI requires significant transformation. In reality, everything displayed on the screen, from navigation to media and animation can be driven by data. With precise control over how data is handled and displayed, Sanity allows you to build dynamic UIs in real-time, even as the data evolves.
To ensure they met every brand requirement during evaluation, Tata Digital involved key cross-functional stakeholders from the start, including product, content, marketing, and engineering. After scoping the use case for every business unit, the team spent two months exploring top headless CMSes.
Most headless CMS vendors didn’t make it past the first technical requirement—including Contentful, ContentStack, Storyblok, Strapi, Prismic, Agility CMS, DatoCMS, and ButterCMS. Like AEM, they all came with the same limitation: schema creation through the user interface (UI). This meant the structure of their data would still be dictated by how it appeared on the authoring UI, making it untenable for the following reasons:
The team was on the verge of giving up on the search, and building their own CMS—until they came across Sanity.
We recognized that each brand in our multi-brand portfolio has unique content requirements and structures. A one-size-fits-all approach with a universal schema wouldn't suffice. Code-driven schema design was our top criteria for a CMS. We were looking for a programmatic way to build and modify schemas at scale. This would allow us to explore and evolve our content structures over time, without being limited to fixed design patterns.
Sanity met Tata's top two solution criteria. Where AEM and other headless CMS solutions fell short, Sanity’s composable content platform offered two technical differentiators:
Tata Digital has been able to create a schema structure complex enough to federate different brands, industry verticals, and complex use cases—and then seamlessly paint it on a single mobile app. Every time I've seen a new use case, I've been able to accommodate it. Thanks to Sanity, we were able to evolve our schema structure over time.
Within 4 months of purchasing Sanity, Tata Digital was able to launch Tata Neu—debuting in front of 500 million Indian Premier League fans in March 2022. With this massive exposure, Tata Neu amassed 11 million downloads within just 2 months of launch.
In reaching this milestone, Tata had seen content migration as a risk—they had massive amounts of data to get out of AEM and into Sanity. To their surprise, they were able to migrate everything—a whopping 20,000 documents—with a single script in under 17 hours. This is a testament to the real-time APIs and flexibility of Sanity's schemaless back-end database, Content Lake. Every content type, from text and images to references, was structured and ready for production. They also discarded unnecessary documents in the new world of Sanity—where infinite nesting of documents and objects allows you to consolidate schemas and organize data more efficiently, thus reducing complexity.
Today, streamlined data pipelines are the norm for Tata Digital.
Product categories on Tata Neu app The shift to Sanity gave birth to a new mindset: no idea is off limits due to technology constraints. Developers can say “yes” because they have the right building blocks and flexibility to solve even the most complex problems. This confidence is inspiring teams to think bigger, from exploring new growth strategies to reimagining user experiences.
Sanity’s flexible code-driven content modeling has allowed Tata Digital to absorb the complexity of multi-brand e-commerce. Having gone through the process of content modeling across verticals—grocery, fashion, electronics, jewelry, etc.—Tata Digital is confident they can build anything on Sanity. And the content team is now equipped with reusable design patterns across brands.
Tata has been able to build complex user experiences, which wouldn’t have been possible with other headless CMSes.
Behind Tata’s seamless travel booking experience, lies an interconnected web of moving parts: real-time flight and hotel listings, a search engine, personalized recommendations, promo offers, checkout flow, check-in flow, loyalty points, etc. Tata has been able to simplify the complexity thanks to Sanity’s schema as code and API-first data pipelines.
Tata offers over 20 products under the financial services umbrella—personal loans, digital gold, quick EMI, credit cards, and more. By writing schemas in code, Tata has been able to create a base schema, and layer on product-level requirements across the financial product portfolio.
I cannot imagine building complex experiences like travel or financial services in any prior CMS. No one is going to sit there and manually input schemas through the UI. It’s impractical and doesn’t scale. The schema has to be designed in code for you to build what you want, and make it simple to manage as your app evolves.
By connecting every brand on one platform, Tata Digital has unlocked new growth strategies like NeuPass, a cross-brand loyalty program.NeuPass customers earn 1 NeuCoin for every rupee spent on Tata Neu, and can use NeuCoins across any brand on the app. This winning retention strategy incentivizes return users to explore and shop Tata brands. Were it not for Sanity’s real-time, two-way data integration, building a rewards-based payment system wouldn’t have been feasible.
Before Sanity, content teams would regularly run into developer dependencies to ship content and troubleshoot issues. Mission-critical campaigns during festivals like Holi, Diwali, and Christmas meant late nights for both content teams and developers. Now, content teams are empowered to launch campaigns on demand. Tata’s development teams are completely hands-free and stress-free—no more phones buzzing at midnight because something isn’t working, yet again.
Not only are content teams autonomous, they’re able to go from idea to production in under 1 hour—successfully delivering time-sensitive content and campaigns with all the bells-and-whistles.
Fully customizable authoring UI, Sanity Studio empowers Tata’s team of 20-30 content authors to manage content seamlessly across brands, without having to go through multiple hoops. They ship fast with confidence thanks to powerful features like live previews and real-time collaborative editing. From content types to validations—everything editors need is configured up front, so no one has to worry about stepping in later.
To further simplify content management, Tata’s developers have been able to build powerful customizations and automations for their editors, including one-click template creation, approval workflows, and programmatic content personalization.
Enthusiastic about the future with Sanity, Tata plans to continue pushing the bar on upleveling the editorial experience. They have exciting customizations planned, including using AI for image curation and content creation.
With content teams in the driver’s seat and development teams freed up to build new products, there’s no looking back.
Success is about simplicity—for Tata, that’s the ability to manage content across brands in a unified seamless direct manner without having to jump through multiple hoops. And, to do it in a way so that a small team can manage big things.
Built to scale, not maintain
