Building your catalog

A customer shopping on your website might see one T-shirt and choose from four sizes. In the stockroom, you can have twelve smalls and be sold out of mediums. A well-organized product catalog lets you answer two different questions about that shirt. How well is it selling? Which sizes should you buy next?

Give each SKU its own record

Each SKU, or stock keeping unit, identifies a distinct item you can buy, count, and ship. A shirt in four sizes has four SKUs and four product records because each size needs to be counted separately.

Make each record complete enough to stand on its own. All four sizes might have the same style name, fabric, and photo. Include those details on each record alongside its size and weight. Someone who opens the medium shirt’s record should be able to recognize it and work with it without having to look up another size.

Bring products together with attributes

The same details that let a product stand on its own also let you find the products it belongs with. Style, size, department, and season are attributes. Use the same style name across all four sizes, and a buyer can bring them together to see how the shirt is selling. Look at size as well, and the buyer can see that mediums account for half the sales.

Different questions call for different groups. An analyst answering “Do we have enough men’s shoes for next fall?” can use department, category, and season to find the relevant SKUs. For a review of the whole fall collection, season alone may be enough. Recording those details consistently gives the team the freedom to group products as the work calls for.

Build the record as you learn

When someone first sketches the shirt, a working name and a season may be all they know. Once samples arrive, they can confirm the fabric, weigh each size, and photograph the shirt. Record those details while the sample is in your hands.

Give every SKU a recognizable photo. Imagine a supplier reading a purchase order for twenty different shirts. A photo beside each line helps them recognize the style before they check the size and quantity. Weeks later, that same photo helps the person opening a carton check what arrived.

Let each transaction add useful detail

The product record describes the shirt. A purchase order adds the details of a particular purchase: how many mediums the buyer ordered, from whom, and at what cost. A purchase shipment tells the receiving team what’s on the way. When the team receives the shirts, inventory at that building reflects how many are now on hand. A sales order records who bought the shirt and how many they wanted.

Each of those records refers to the same SKU. When mediums start selling faster than expected, the buyer can see how many are left, check how many are already on the way, and decide whether to order more.

A good catalog is worth taking pride in. The photo helps a supplier recognize the shirt. The weight gives the shipping team a figure it can trust. And when the buyer asks about next fall, the analyst can bring the right products and their purchasing, inventory, and sales history into the same conversation.