Catalogue, filters and collections

Before changing anything we pulled the whole catalogue and counted what was actually there. The public shop view only shows published products, so it reported 419. The real number, once we could see drafts and archived items too, was 848.

Two things stood out.

• Product types were filled in, but too broad to build on. Around 76% sat under a label that was perfectly true and simply too wide, such as a claw clip, a headband and a scrunchie all filed as “Hair Accessories”. That is fine for a person browsing. It is not enough to build a filter or an automatic collection from, because the shop cannot tell a claw clip from a scrunchie.
• Colour existed on only 39% of products, and those used 132 different spellings: Amethyst, Antique Blue, Blue Opal, Blues, Capri Blue and so on. A colour filter built on that would have hidden two thirds of the shop behind an unusable list.

A small number, 13 products, were in the wrong place outright: five brooches, two belts, a keyring and a long scarf all sitting under Hair Accessories, three headbands under Jewellery, and a hair band under Socks. Those are now corrected.

We replaced the 14 broad types with 23 more specific ones. One level, no gender split, no seasons.

The rule we applied: split where a shopper thinks of it as a different thing, merge where it is a variation of the same thing. So square, long and blanket scarves all became simply Scarves, and fingerless gloves and mittens became Gloves. But Make-up Bags and Toiletry Bags were pulled out of Bags, because those are the words people actually search for.

Hector stays inside the types rather than beside them. Hector men’s socks are filed as Socks. Putting gender into the type would double the list, halve every count, and make a men’s page impossible to build as one rule.

555 products were retyped in total, 350 live ones and 205 drafts, with a snapshot taken first so any of it could be put back.

Four new details now sit on every product: Colour, Pattern, Material and Style.

These are not free text boxes. Each one is a list you choose from, which is what stops “teal”, “Teal” and “Teal ” becoming three different filter options the way the old colours did.

Adding a new option

If a colour is missing, you add it once and it is then selectable on every product from then on. In Shopify that is Content → Metaobjects → Colour → Add entry. Type the name, save, done.

Each colour also carries its actual shade, which is why the filter shows colour circles on the shop rather than a list of words.

We then went through the catalogue and set those details on every product, reading the product names and descriptions to work out what each one actually is.

1,301 values are now set across the 584 live products, and the drafts were done at the same time so the autumn range arrived already filtered rather than needing a second pass.

Colour is near-total. The other three are lower on purpose: a plain navy sock has no pattern, and we would rather leave a detail blank than invent one. Four products carry nothing at all, because their names and descriptions genuinely give us nothing to go on.

The filters are live now and you can use them on the shop today.

Five filters, and they appear only where they make sense. Material shows on Hair Accessories and stays hidden on Bags, because no bag has a material set. That happens on its own, with nothing to configure per page.

Type is the one we would point at. 22 of the 56 collections hold four or more different kinds of product. Gifts under £10 has 582 products across 26 types. Until now there was no way to say “just show me the socks”.

The old 90-option colour filter has been removed, with your go-ahead, so there is now one Colour filter rather than two with the same name.

With the details in place we could finally ask which groups of products people search for, and whether we have enough of each to justify a page.

We checked every sensible grouping and found 217 with at least four products. Most should stay as filters. 65 earn a page of their own, and between them they cover around 211,680 UK searches a month.

See the full plan of all 65 →

The groundwork is done and the filters are live. What is left is building the collection pages themselves.

Every page is a rule rather than a hand-picked list, so once built they keep themselves up to date. New stock drops into the right collections on its own, which matters twice a year when a season lands.