Once your product catalogue starts growing beyond single-SKU products, introducing variants and new lines, managing it becomes increasingly challenging. Each new option multiplies the potential combinations, requiring more than just copy-pasting lacklustre manufacturer or supplier copy.
We’ve designed this article to show you how modern PIM data models help growing businesses to manage variants and configurable products without deluging your people in a storm of spreadsheets and manual drudgery.
Complex products in the real world
If you’re a retailer, a T-shirt in five colours and three sizes is manageable. If you’re B2B, a commercial lighting range with multiple lumen outputs, beam angles, finishes, and mounting options is definitely not. In fact, so many businesses still suffer from “SKU sprawl,” where every combination becomes its own record across eCommerce, marketplaces, and print. It becomes a herculean task for teams trying to keep them all in step.
It’s an approach which works at first, but sooner rather than later, it collapses under its own weight. Customers see pages and pages of near-identical products and …give up, going to a competitor’s site. Merchandisers are forced into delaying adding new options because they know what it will do to the workload.
A high-quality and suitably configured product information management (PIM) system addresses this by treating complexity as something to be modelled, not copied.
Variants: making inheritance do the heavy lifting
For straightforward variants, the core taxonomy pattern is a parent–child hierarchy. The parent represents the conceptual product; the children are the full set of variant SKUs. The parent level holds shared data such as the main description, brand, materials, and base imagery. Each child only stores the differentiating information, such as size, colour, finish, price, stock status, and other variant-specific assets.
What saves you a lot of time is attribute inheritance. Instead of copying the same material or warranty text into data fields for seventy variants, you can maintain it once on the parent and then let it flow down. If something changes (a compliance statement or revised specs come to mind in particular), your team only needs to update a single record for every variant to remain aligned in terms of product information.
Client use case: modelling compatibility-heavy products in PIM
Before
Elite Supplements, a fast-growing sports nutrition brand, was struggling to manage bundles, flavours, and pack-size variants directly in multiple Shopify storefronts. Each site held its own version of products, leading to duplicated effort, inconsistent nutritional attributes, and high risk when updating formulas or compliance copy. Merchandisers spent too long cloning and tweaking data, instead of launching new ranges and campaigns.
Action
Start with Data ran a structured PIM selection and implementation, designing a data model that treated base products, variants, and bundles in a consistent, reusable way.
After
Automated workflows now create variants from shared attribute sets, and push a single, governed source of truth out to every storefront. Back-of-pack data is captured once, checked, and reused everywhere.
Measurable gains
Elite can now introduce new products and promotional bundles much faster, with the certainty that flavours, sizes, and nutritional details are consistent and aligned across channels, thus supporting growth in a tightly regulated and highly competitive market.
Configurables: managing rules, not thousands of SKUs
At present, when it comes to configurable products, they tend to push you beyond grids of fixed variants. Fixed variant grids typically manage products with a limited, predefined, and often two-dimensional set of options (such as: Size and Colour for a T-shirt), where every combination must be manually pre-created and managed as an individual product entry.
Conversely, configurable SKUs are managed through a product configurator system, which offers much greater flexibility and efficiency: These systems use predefined rules and logic to dynamically generate valid product combinations on the fly, as the customer filters products towards making selections.
You can see that trying to prebuild every possible combination as a SKU is a pointless (not to say incredibly time-consuming) exercise. Instead, the PIM becomes a content engine for configuration. Each selectable option is an item with attributes and imagery. You capture which combinations are valid, and a configurator or eCommerce front end uses those rules to guide the user and create the final order.
These capacities are essential for complex products such as customised laptop specs, industrial equipment, or built-to-order machinery. Simple, pre-configured grids simply don’t hack it. The system ensures that only valid, manufacturable combinations are created, preventing order errors and ensuring consistency between sales and production.
Confused by PIM Vendors?
With 100s of PIM software vendors worldwide, choosing the right PIM solution can be a daunting & confusing task.
Use our guide to assess PIM solutions against the right capabilities to make an objective and informed choice.
Designing a PIM model that works in practice
You don’t have to be a tech-expert to steer the right structure, but you do need to provide clarity by asking the right questions.
Variant attributes
Start with these: Which characteristics genuinely distinguish one SKU from another? Three examples:
- For apparel it might be size and colour
- For lighting, lumen output, and finish
- For building materials, dimensions, and pack size.
Everything else should sit at parent level or higher in the hierarchy.
Channels
Your eCommerce site might show all variants on a single page, while a marketplace expects each child as a separate listing tied together by a variation theme. A good PIM model supports both options from one structure.
Governance
The key control mechanism. Decide when something is a variant versus a separate product or a configuration option. Additionally, impose user access rights, as in ‘Who is allowed to introduce new options or override inherited attributes?’
Final words
If your product range is rich in variants and configurables but your systems still treat everything as flat SKUs, you’re seriously missing out on efficiency and margin. At Start with Data, we partner with our clients, be they retailers, distributors, or manufacturers, to design PIM data models and hierarchies which make complex products manageable. Get in touch with us today and we can walk you through practical options for your business and discuss how to help you review how you structure variants and configurables. Your business performance will benefit as a result!