Colorway

Vendors abbreviate. A colorway called Black/White may appear as BWH, BKWT or BW depending on the brand, and the same abbreviation can mean different things across two vendors. These codes are stable within a vendor and arbitrary across them, which is why colour is the attribute that most often fails to reconcile during receiving.

This is the decision that decides whether a catalog stays clean. When a vendor ships a colorway of a style you already carry, it belongs on the existing variant group as new children, not as a separate product record.

The arithmetic is unforgiving. A shop carrying forty styles, where each style picks up two new colorways a season across two seasons, faces one hundred and sixty of these decisions a year. Get them wrong and a two thousand product catalog gains eight percent duplicates annually, compounding every season.

Treat the colorway as the unit. Splitting Black/White into a Black variant and a White variant invents two things the vendor never sold and neither of which you can reorder. Whatever your catalog calls it, the value should map one to one with what appears on the vendor's document.

The practical consequence is that your colour attribute should hold colorway names, not colour words. A catalog whose colour values read Black, White, Blue will eventually be unable to express Black/White without either inventing a value or collapsing two products into one. A catalog whose values read Black, Black/White, Storm Blue can describe exactly what the vendor ships, which is the only description that reorders correctly.