Built Twice, Shipped
Better.

Godrej Foundation is an independent philanthropic trust that works on crafting a more prosperous India. With a 15 percent shareholding in the Godrej Industries Group, it's one of the oldest and most respected foundations in the country — dedicated to strengthening economic growth, advancing inclusion, and backing bold ideas through their Tomorrow Grants programme.

The brief was to build a website and a content management system that the foundation team could run themselves. Not a marketing site — a living platform for reporting impact, publishing grant updates, managing partner profiles, and telling the foundation's story in a way that matched the weight of the work.

v1 — The first build

The first iteration was designed by 3 Sided Coin — an award-winning design studio whose work includes a Webby Honoree for FiftyTwo magazine and the iPad App of the Year for Froggipedia. They've designed for Flipkart, Microsoft, and Urban Company. When 3 Sided Coin hands you a design system, you pay attention.

Their design for Godrej Foundation was clean, editorial, and built around the old Godrej identity. Warm tones, full-width imagery, and a layout that let the foundation's work speak for itself. A large banyan tree dominated the hero — grounded, enduring, a visual metaphor for the kind of institution Godrej Foundation is.

I built the entire frontend from their designs and wired it up to a custom CMS personalised for the foundation's workflow. Every page, every section, every content block — editable by the team without a developer in the loop.

The CMS wasn't an off-the-shelf tool with a Godrej skin on top. It was built from scratch to match how the foundation actually works — their content types, their publishing flow, their approval structure. When the comms team needs to add a new partner or publish a grant update, they log in and do it. No tickets, no staging environments, no waiting.

The rebrand

Then Godrej rebranded.

Not a colour tweak — a full corporate identity overhaul. New logo, new typography, new visual language, new guidelines. Everything the Godrej group touches had to change, and the foundation website was no exception. The design I'd spent months building was suddenly out of date.

Look at the two side by side. The old version is warm, editorial, text-forward — the banyan tree anchoring the page with its roots. The new version is lighter, more modern, with the hands reaching toward the sky as the hero motif. Different mood entirely. Same underlying mission, completely different visual language.

v2 — The rebuild

The second iteration wasn't a reskin. A rebrand at this scale changes the hierarchy of information, the rhythm of layouts, the way photography is used. The new Godrej identity has a different logo, different type hierarchy, different colour sensibilities. You can't just swap the palette and call it done.

We rebuilt the frontend from new designs — new component library, new layout system, new visual patterns. But here's where the architecture paid off: the CMS didn't have to change.

The CMS survived the rebrand untouched. Every piece of content the foundation team had created — every partner profile, every grant update, every impact report — carried straight over. They didn't have to re-enter a single thing. That's the advantage of separating content from presentation early: when the presentation layer has to change, the content doesn't care.

The stack

Both iterations run on SvelteKit with Tailwind CSS. SvelteKit handles the routing, server-side rendering, and static prerendering. Tailwind handles the design system — spacing, typography, colour tokens — making it possible to rebuild the visual layer quickly when the rebrand landed.

The CMS is a custom build, personalised for how the Godrej Foundation operates. It's not WordPress with custom fields, and it's not a headless CMS with a generic content model. It's a tool built specifically for this team — their content types, their publishing patterns, their organisational structure. That specificity is what made the rebrand migration so clean: the content model was designed around the foundation's work, not the visual design.

What I learned

• Separate content from presentation as early as possible. When you build a CMS around the content model instead of the visual design, you can survive a rebrand without migrating data.
• Working from a strong design — like 3 Sided Coin's v1 — sets the bar. It forces you to build well because the design demands it.
• Building something twice teaches you what actually mattered the first time. The second iteration was faster and cleaner because the hard decisions were already made.
• A rebrand isn't a disaster if the architecture is right. It's a frontend rebuild, not a platform rebuild. The difference is weeks vs. months.
• Non-technical teams will actually use a CMS if it matches their mental model. Generic tools get abandoned; personalised tools get adopted.