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A product family groups related products (typically variants of the same style) so features like diversity expressions can reason about them as one item. Use this guide to create a manual family from the dashboard, or to configure automatic families from a product attribute.

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Prerequisites

  • You have access to the Product Families section of the Layers dashboard.
  • The products you want to group are already synced into your catalog.
  • If you plan to create automatic families, the attribute you’ll use is already configured. See Attributes or Metafields.

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Create a manual family

Use a manual family when your grouping logic doesn’t match a single attribute, or when you want to hand-curate a set of products that belong together.
  1. Go to Product Families and click + Create Family.
  2. Give the family a clear name, such as Heritage Tee — All Colors, in the Untitled Product Family heading.
  3. In the Products card, click Add Product and search for each product that belongs to the family. A family should contain at least two products.
  4. Click Create Family.
The new family appears in the Product Families list with a Manual source label.
A product can belong to at most one family at a time. If you add a product that was previously in an automatic family, it is moved to the manual family — manual assignments always win.

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Configure automatic families from an attribute

Use automatic families when an attribute already identifies the grouping — for example, a style_code metafield that is shared across color variants of the same style.
  1. Go to Settings → Product Families.
  2. Click + Add Attribute.
  3. Pick an attribute from the dropdown. Supported attributes include product fields (like vendor), nested keys (like custom.style_code), metafields, and calculated attributes.
  4. Click Save.
Layers builds a family for every distinct value of that attribute during your next catalog sync. Each automatic family is named Auto: <attribute>:<value> and appears in the Product Families list with an Attribute source label.

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What counts as a valid source attribute

  • Single-valued string, number, or boolean attributes.
  • Calculated attributes whose logic returns a single value.
  • Metafields that resolve to a single value.
Array-valued attributes (like tags) and metric attributes are not supported. A product cannot cleanly belong to multiple families through one attribute.

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Edit or delete a family

  • Manual families can be renamed, have members added or removed, and can be deleted individually or in bulk from the Product Families list.
  • Automatic families are read-only in the dashboard. To change their membership, update the source attribute on the underlying products. Automatic families with no remaining members are cleaned up automatically.

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Bulk delete

  1. In the Product Families list, select the rows you want to remove.
  2. Choose Delete from the bulk actions menu and confirm.
Only manual families in the selection are removed. Automatic families are skipped.

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Troubleshooting

A product didn’t end up in the family I expected. Check which source attribute your automatic family is using, and verify the product’s value for that attribute. Empty or array-valued attribute values are skipped on purpose. My manual family assignment disappeared. Manual assignments are not overwritten by sync. If a product is missing, confirm that it wasn’t removed from the manual family’s member list, and that the product is still synced into your catalog. Diversity isn’t doing anything. Diversity only reshuffles products that are assigned to a family. Confirm that the products in the top of your collection are actually members of families, either manually or through an automatic source.

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Next steps