Docs navigation
Home / Docs / Categories & brands

Categories & brands

Organize your catalog for browsing — hierarchical categories, brands, slugs, rich descriptions, manual sort order, and custom fields on both.

Categories and brands are the layer customers navigate. Categories group products by what they are; brands group them by who made them. Both carry the content and metadata a storefront needs to render a real landing page rather than a bare product grid.

Categories are org-global

A category tree belongs to your organization, not to a channel. The same taxonomy serves every storefront you connect.

This matters when you’re mapping to an external platform: the categories you build in Foundry are your own structure, and each channel maps onto it. You don’t maintain one tree per storefront.

Hierarchy

Categories nest to any depth via a parent link:

Brakes
├── Rotors
│   ├── Slotted
│   └── Drilled
└── Pads

Deleting a parent doesn’t cascade — children survive and are detached to the top level rather than being destroyed with it. That’s deliberate: an accidental delete on a top node shouldn’t take a whole branch of your catalog with it.

Keep it shallow. Three levels is usually plenty. Deep trees look tidy in an admin and read as a maze on a storefront, and every extra level is another page that has to earn its own traffic.

Sort order

Categories carry a manual position within their siblings. Lower sorts earlier; ties break by name.

This exists because alphabetical is rarely what you want. “Best Sellers” belongs above “Accessories” regardless of the alphabet. Set position where merchandising matters and leave it alone where it doesn’t.

Slugs

Both categories and brands have a slug — the URL-friendly handle a storefront uses. Auto-generated from the name when blank, unique per organization.

Two things worth knowing:

  • Renaming doesn’t change an existing slug. Once set, it stays put, so you don’t silently break live URLs by fixing a typo in a display name.
  • Changing a slug changes the URL. If the old one is indexed or linked, set up a redirect on your storefront. Foundry doesn’t manage your frontend’s routing.

Rich descriptions

Categories and brands each have two rich-text description fields. Two, not one, because a category landing page usually wants copy in two places — an intro above the product grid and longer SEO-oriented content below it. One field forces you to choose.

Both accept HTML and are sanitized on write, so pasted content from a word processor won’t inject anything unwanted.

Custom fields

Categories and brands support custom fields via definitions scoped with appliesTo including CATEGORY or BRAND.

Useful for things a storefront needs but that aren’t universal: a hero image URL, a care-instructions block, a warranty statement that applies to everything a brand makes.

Note that a definition must explicitly declare CATEGORY or BRAND in its scope. Fields created before this existed default to product/variant scope, so an older field won’t appear on categories until you widen it.

SEO metadata

Categories, brands, and products all carry metaTitle and metaDescription. Both fall back sensibly when blank — title to the name, description to a description excerpt — and the fallback is resolved at read time rather than being written into the record, so fixing a name fixes the derived title everywhere.

Per-channel overrides let one storefront present different metadata than another. See SEO metadata.

Assigning products

A product belongs to at most one category. If you need a product in several places, that’s usually a sign the taxonomy wants restructuring — or that the grouping you want is a brand, a class, or a custom field being used as a filter.

Modeling notes

Category or class? Categories are for browsing; classes define what fields a kind of product requires. “Brake Rotors” is often both, serving different purposes.

Category or custom field? If customers navigate to it, category. If they filter by it, custom field. Color is a filter, not a category.

How many? Every category is a page that needs content to rank. Forty well-populated categories beat four hundred with three products each.