The content editor's guide to content operations [E-commerce edition]

Written by John Siciliano

Why can some teams launch global campaigns in minutes (👋 Tecovas) while yours is still waiting on a homepage swap?

Hint: It's not their CMS. It's their approach to content operations.

The best teams don't scale by adding headcount or hacking together workflows.

They build systems around their team and operations.

Not a custom CMS, but a stack built on structured content, flexible workflows, and automation-ready architecture.

Fully configurable. Minimal maintenance. Built to scale.

Why now? Delay has real costs.

Commerce teams are creating more content for more channels with smaller teams and higher expectations. But most systems were built for publishing, not operations.

AI can't work without structured, queryable content. New surfaces mean more duplication without reuse. Each workaround adds complexity, and replatforming becomes inevitable.

Sanity gives you the infrastructure to move faster and adapt to whatever comes next. Structured content, programmable workflows, and automation-ready architecture built for scale.

This guide shows the workflows, tools, and strategies behind high-velocity, scaling e-commerce teams.

The brands you'll see:

• Tecovas – Western boots and apparel, known for craftsmanship and rapid product drops.
• SKIMS – Kim Kardashian’s shapewear and loungewear brand with a massive global presence.
• Lady Gaga – The artist’s official storefront, featuring exclusive merch and creative campaigns.
• Sanetti – A premium cycling brand built by Sanity to demo complex e-commerce workflows (without NDAs or blurred screenshots).

But first, what’s everyone dealing with right now?

The current state of e‑commerce content ops

E-commerce teams are under pressure to move faster with less.

Customers expect personalized, localized, story-driven experiences across every channel. But most content systems still assume you're shipping static pages, not orchestrating real-time campaigns. Teams know they need AI and automation to survive, but most tools bolt these on as afterthoughts instead of building them into the foundation.

What's shifting in the industry:

• AI adoption is accelerating but unevenly applied. Leading brands use AI to translate entire collections in hours instead of weeks, while others still copy-paste between spreadsheets. The gap between early adopters and laggards is widening fast.
• Manual campaign orchestration is killing velocity. Sales, product drops, and regional promotions require updates across 5+ markets within hours. Teams that can't automate these workflows miss revenue windows and burn out their staff.
• Headless freed the frontend, but editorial stayed stuck. Development teams ship faster, but content teams still fight with rigid interfaces that weren't built for commerce workflows. The result: features ship on time, but content doesn't.
• PDPs are becoming mini brand sites. Top performers pack product pages with embedded video, long-form storytelling, and market-specific modules. Teams without flexible content modeling can't compete on experience.
• Lean teams are the new normal. Successful brands now support 3x more channels, languages, and campaigns without adding headcount. Those still scaling linearly with manual processes are getting priced out of growth.

The most forward-looking teams are rethinking how content gets planned, modeled, and delivered, not just how it gets displayed.

Why e‑commerce teams hit a wall

The commerce platform doesn't matter as much as it used to. They can all sell a product online, whether it's Shopify, Magento, SFCC, BigCommerce, or Commerce Tools. The real challenge is everything that happens around the product: localized campaigns, seasonal storytelling, personalized promotions, and managing all of it across markets without scaling your team.

Here's where content operations start to break down:

• Multi-market content is a mess. Launching in five regions means managing five versions of the same content. Every region duplicates efforts.
• Campaigns live in spreadsheets and Slack threads. There's no single source of truth, so updating a banner means chasing down URLs, translations, and image variants across tools.
• Personalization is talked about more than it's implemented. Targeting VIP customers or tailoring content by UTM parameters is theoretically possible, but operationally out of reach for most teams.
• Content teams rely too heavily on devs. Even minor updates, like tweaking PDP copy or scheduling a homepage swap, often require an engineer's time.
• Tech is holding them back. Even with headless stacks and composable platforms, most teams still rely on rigid models, duplicated content, and manual processes that don't scale.

The shift doesn't happen because someone wants a shinier CMS. It happens when the cost of doing things the old way gets too high. What starts as fixing one pain point becomes an opportunity to rethink how content moves through your organization—not just how it's stored or displayed but also how it's modeled, governed, reused, and orchestrated. I.e., how companies can leverage a Content Operating System.

What is a "Content Operating System"?

You're already running a content system (even if you didn't mean to).

It's the spreadsheets, CMS, Slack threads, and last-minute dev requests that hold everything together. Launching a sale means chasing down banners, image variants, and approvals and duplicating those efforts across markets.

A Content Operating System replaces that with actual infrastructure: structured content, flexible workflows, and tools that match how your team operates, not just how content looks but also how it moves.

This guide shows our customers' approaches in five stages of content operations:

• Plan and govern – Define complex product structures, evolve without waiting for rewrites, and set smart rules that guide editors without blocking them.
• Create and manage – Use editing tools that fit your teams' exact workflows, from full-featured content workbenches to single-purpose apps.
• Distribute and automate – Efficiently launch campaigns across languages, regions, and surfaces.
• Analyze and optimize – Connect content variants to conversion data, run experiments, and personalize without ballooning scope.
• Extend and integrate – Connect to your stack (PIM, ERP, DAM, storefront) with real-time sync and zero infrastructure headaches.

The Content Operating System is built to be shaped. It includes editors, workflows, and data models. Every part is customizable to match how your team works.

This guide shows how teams at brands like Tecovas, SKIMS, and Lady Gaga moved from managing content to orchestrating it. It's not about switching CMSes. It's about building systems that scale with your business.

1. Planning and governing: Architecting your "foundation"

In this section, we'll explore:

• Why flexibility matters more than perfection
• How Tecovas structures products, colorways, and variants
• How to enable editors to create multi-market campaigns at scale
• Setting precise governance policies

The perfect foundation trap

Starting from a blank slate feels like the best opportunity to get it right this time. No more duplicated efforts per market. Let's finally fix our wonky colorways and structure of variants.

Of course, you want to learn from and fix the shortcomings of your current system. However, even if you design the perfect model today, it will slowly calcify as your business evolves (e.g., new product types, seasonal campaigns, unexpected market requirements, etc.).

Most companies are forced into an impossible choice:

• Invest months in an exhaustive content model that tries to anticipate every future need.
• Or build something quick and simple that you'll painfully outgrow within months.

What if your foundation wasn't fixed in concrete but could adapt organically as your needs change? Let's learn how your competition keeps shipping while your team is stuck maintaining increasingly complex workarounds and spending too much time on manual processes.

Start simple, evolve as you learn

With Sanity, you can start by shipping something that works. See how it performs. Then refine and optimize once you understand what's needed.

These capabilities make this possible:

• Flexible data structure: Add, remove, or modify fields without breaking existing content. Your engineering team can handle structure changes without disrupting your workflow.
• Content migration tools: When structure changes happen, your content comes along. No manual re-entry required.
• Graceful sunsetting: Mark old fields as outdated while transitioning to new ones smoothly.
• AI assistance: Let AI help suggest and implement content model improvements.

This is why your content foundation can evolve. As you learn what works and what doesn't, you can adapt your content system without starting over.

While the definition of "perfect" will change, let's explore how Tecovas structures the trickiest parts of e-commerce.

How Tecovas solved the products, colorways, and variants challenge

E-commerce data is highly relational. How do you structure your data to enable maximum reuse and flexibility for those edge cases?

Tecovas needed a product structure that separated core product information from color-specific details while keeping variant complexity manageable. This would enable them to define global product information once and optionally add specific information to colorways, such as care guides.

Tecovas' product structure separates base products from colorways. Shared content like name, description, and sizing lives on the product. Colorways are separate but connected, so editors can override things like imagery or marketing copy when needed.