SECTOR
Three names for one colour,
and three half-empty filters.
Fashion does not have too few attributes but too many variants of the same value. Anthracite, charcoal and dark grey are one colour and three filter rows, each with a handful of products behind it. At that point a filter stops being a filter and becomes a list.
What never happens: size and colour are usually your variant axes. We stay off those, because your stock hangs on them.
THE FIELDS THAT COUNT HERE
We fill what stays empty next to the variants.
In a fashion shop size and colour are usually present, because the variants cannot exist without them. Everything that is not a variant axis stays empty. Which is exactly half of what a visitor searches on.
WHAT FILLS UP
colour
Out of your own title, and otherwise out of the description. On a real catalogue 21 to 43 per cent
material
The word has to stand somewhere in your own text; we do not invent one and we do not work out percentages
dimensions
Measurements out of the title, with the unit attached. 15 to 27 per cent
alt text
On every image, built out of your own product title. 0 to 99 per cent
fit, pattern, closure and audience
Those we do NOT extract. What does not stand literally in your own text, we do not derive
If colour is not a variant axis for you but an ordinary attribute, we do normalise it. We work that out on day one, because it differs per shop and sometimes per category.
THE PITFALL
Anthracite, charcoal and dark grey.
Every supplier invents its own colour name, and that name is part of the sale. Overwriting it is a waste. Leaving it standing without putting anything next to it makes the filter useless.
Only the supplier name
Three suppliers, three names, three filter rows with four products each. A visitor who wants grey sees three options and clicks none of them.
colour = anthracite | charcoal | dark grey
THREE ROWS, ONE COLOUR
The family alongside, the name stays
The normalised colour feeds the filter, the supplier name stays on the page. One grey row with twelve products behind it.
colour_family = grey · colour_name = anthracite
ONE ROW, ALL PRODUCTS
The same goes for size. We overwrite nothing that drives your variants, but we can lay a normalised value alongside for the filter to run on.
THE SOURCES
Where fashion gets its fields.
Your own title
By far the biggest: three quarters of everything we fill comes from here.
Your own description
Held to a higher bar, because a word in a sentence is more often about something else than about this product.
No photos, feeds or datasheets
We read no images, no supplier file and no pdf. If it stands only there, the field stays empty.
Because image is the main source here, the review list in fashion runs longer than in other sectors. That is not a side effect but the design: better a list of fifty than fifty guesses standing live.
EXPLORE ALL USE CASES
Same approach, different fields.
Technical parts
The fit sits in the title and therefore nowhere. Make, model, year and dimensions belong in a field.
READ ON
Workwear and ppe
The buyer filters on S3 and you have it in the description. Standards belong normalised.
READ ON
Another sector
Yours not listed? The method is the same; only the fields that count differ. Tell us what you sell.
PUT IT TO US
QUESTIONS FROM THIS SECTOR
What we always hear here.
We have ten thousand products and a hundred thousand variants.
The meter counts SKUs in your sitemap, not variants. A jumper in four colours and six sizes is one SKU.
Do you touch our size chart?
No. A size chart is a page or a block, not an attribute. We fill the size field and leave the chart alone.
Our brand copy comes from the brand itself.
Then you put that category or that brand on the exclusion list and we write no copy there. We do fill the attributes, because those are not in the brand’s way.
We swap the entire assortment every season.
Which is why keeping up is the point here and not the first pass. A new SKU goes along in the next day’s pass, so a season change simply rides along.