Data model
Understand the parts of your Emfas catalog — products, variants, SKUs, assets, metaobjects, and categories — and how they fit together.
Your catalog isn't just a flat list of products. It's made up of a few different kinds of items that each play a different role and connect to each other in different ways. Once you understand these building blocks, everything else in Emfas makes more sense.
This page walks through each one, how they connect, and the one thing they all have in common: attributes.
The building blocks
Here are the kinds of items you'll work with in Emfas:
| Item | What it is |
|---|---|
| Product | The main item you sell, like "Running Shoes". |
| Variant | A version of a product, like the blue colourway. |
| SKU | A single sellable unit, like blue in size 42. |
| Asset | A media file — an image, video, or document. |
| Category | A group used to organise your products. |
| Metaobject | A reusable piece of information, like a "Brand". |
| Bundle | A group of products or variants sold together. |
They fall into two groups. Products, variants, and SKUs describe the things you sell. Assets, categories, metaobjects, and bundles are the data that surrounds and enriches them.
Products, variants, and SKUs
These three describe what you sell, organised in three levels. Each level is more specific than the one above it.
Products
A product is the main item in your catalog — something you sell, like "Running Shoes" or "Leather Jacket". It holds the information that's true for the item as a whole: its name, a description, the brand, and so on.
Variants
A product can have multiple variants. A variant is a version of the same product — most often a colour or a style. "Running Shoes" might have a Blue variant and a Black variant. Information that differs between versions, like a colour-specific image or description, lives at the variant level.
SKUs
Each variant can have multiple SKUs. A SKU (stock-keeping unit) is a single sellable unit — usually a variant in a specific size. The Blue variant of "Running Shoes" might have a SKU for size 41, another for 42, and so on. SKU information is the most specific: things like a barcode, a weight, or a warehouse location that's unique to that one unit.
How the levels relate
The levels flow downward: a product has variants, and a variant has SKUs. Not every catalog uses all three — a simple product might have no variants at all, and not every variant needs separate SKUs. But when SKUs exist, they always belong to a variant, and variants always belong to a product. Deleting a product removes its variants and their SKUs along with it.
This is why where you put information matters. A description that applies to the whole product belongs on the product. A colour swatch belongs on the variant. A barcode belongs on the SKU. Putting data at the right level keeps your catalog clean and avoids repeating yourself.
Assets
Assets are your media files — images, videos, and documents. An asset stands on its own and can be connected to more than one thing at a time.
The same product photo might be linked to a product, to one of its variants, and even to a metaobject. Because the asset is a single shared file, you manage it in one place rather than re-uploading it everywhere it appears.
Assets can carry their own information too — for example, alt text for accessibility, or a caption. (More on how that works in Attributes below.)
Metaobjects
Metaobjects are reusable pieces of information that don't fit neatly onto a single product. Think of things like a Brand, a Material, a Size guide, or a Care instruction. These are things you want to define once and reuse across many products.
Metaobjects come in two parts, and the difference is the key thing to understand:
- A metaobject definition is the template. It describes what a "Brand" is made of — say, a name, a logo, a country of origin, and a website.
- A metaobject is a single entry built from that template. "Nike" and "Adidas" are two metaobjects based on the "Brand" definition, each filled in with its own values.
A helpful analogy
A metaobject definition is like a blank form, and each metaobject is a filled-in copy of that form. You design the form once, then create as many entries from it as you need — and every entry has the same fields.
Once you've created them, you link metaobjects to your products. Instead of typing the brand name onto every product, you connect each product to the right "Brand" entry. Update the brand's logo in one place and every product linked to it stays up to date. If your connected platform has its own version of this kind of reusable data, Emfas keeps it in sync for you.
Categories and category trees
Categories organise your products into groups, like Apparel → Outerwear → Jackets. They live inside a category tree, which holds the whole structure.
- A category tree is one complete way of organising products, such as "Product categories" or "Marketplace categories".
- A category is a single group within a tree. Categories nest inside each other — a category can sit under a broader one and contain narrower ones — which is what gives the tree its shape.
You can have more than one tree. A brand might keep its own internal structure in one tree and a marketplace's required structure in another, and place a product into both.
A product is placed into one or more categories rather than owning them — the categories themselves are managed in the tree, independently of any single product.
Bundles
A bundle is a group of products or variants sold together as a single offering — a "Starter kit" or a "Gift set". A bundle links to the items it contains rather than duplicating them, so the underlying products stay the source of truth for their own data while the bundle adds its own details, like a name and a description for the set.
Everything has attributes
Here's what ties all of these together: every one of them can have attributes.
Attributes are the individual pieces of information that make up your catalog — title, description, colour, price, alt text, barcode, and so on. A product has attributes, a variant has attributes, an asset has attributes (like alt text), a metaobject has attributes (the fields of its definition), and a category can too.
The important rule is that each attribute belongs to a specific kind of item. A "Barcode" attribute might live on SKUs, a "Care instructions" attribute on products, and an "Alt text" attribute on assets. So an attribute only appears where it belongs, which keeps each item's data focused and relevant.
Attributes come in two flavours:
- External attributes are mirrored from a connected platform like Shopify or Centra, and sync in both directions.
- Emfas attributes are created and managed in Emfas — useful for marketplace-specific data or internal fields that don't exist in your platform.
For everything about attribute types, settings, and how AI uses them, see the dedicated Attributes page. To choose which attributes appear on which kinds of products, see Families.
Putting it together
A real catalog weaves all of these together. A single product can:
- sit at the top of a product → variant → SKU structure,
- have assets (images) linked to it and to its variants,
- be placed into one or more categories across different category trees,
- link to metaobjects like its Brand and Material,
- appear inside a bundle,
- and carry attributes at every level, some synced from your platform and some added in Emfas.
Knowing which item holds which information — and how they connect — is the foundation for everything else: enriching content with AI, keeping data in sync, and giving your customers complete, consistent product information.
Next steps
- Attributes — the types, settings, and AI generation behind every field.
- Families — choose which attributes appear on which kinds of products.
- Connecting your data — how your catalog gets into Emfas in the first place.