This article will take you through how to best manage your products that carry through season over season. Following these recommended steps can quickly and efficiently create new tech packs for your Core and Carryover assortments while giving you visibility into the evolution and history of your products.
Step 1: Confirm Your Taxonomy and Custom Fields 👍
If you are ready to carryover a product record into a new season, you have most likely already confirmed that your Taxonomy information in the Admin Panel is set up to assign your products to their appropriate development cycles.
- If you haven’t done this now is a great time to make sure this information is set up to accurately track your assortments as you continue to build products in Backbone.
Navigating into the Admin Panel, first you will want to confirm your Seasons and Years are set up to meet your business needs. Not everyone follows a standard two- or four-season development calendar so you'll need to update this to match your own calendar whether that be Seasonal, Quarterly or even Monthly. You can update your current listed seasons using the pencil icon or the plus icon in the bottom right corner to add a new option.
Next, Custom Fields. We have two sections of Custom Fields.
The custom fields we want to track a Product level, with attributes that do not change a color level.
The custom fields we want to track for our Product Color Variants, which may or may not change at a color level. You will mostly likely use both when managing Core and Carryover Products.
At a product level you will want to make sure you have a field set up to track whether the product as a whole is a Carryover, Core or New Product. All of our customers sites come pre-configured with this field, however if you would like to make changes to the nomenclature you can go wild by the selecting the pencil icon to the right of the field.
For example: We can add “Core” as an option to my dropdown list.
Next add the fields you would like to be able to track at a color level
i.e. New, Carryover or Core and Intro Season
We will follow the same process here, however this time we will select "Product Color Variant" so that this data is tracked at the color level.
Once we have our Taxonomy and custom field data confirmed we can move to our next step of duplicating and updating our product record.
Step 2: Duplicate Your Product Record ✌️
Move into your product library and find the product you would like to carry over into the next season. If we hover over the product record, we can either simply select the three-dot icon and then “Copy” or select the check box and use the bulk action tool bar at the top of your product library.
This will prompt me to confirm the duplication, notifying me that everything besides my Cost Sheet Scenarios, Size Spec Sample Data and PDF Tech Packs will carry through to the new record.
Note: Duplicating the record does not link the records, so you are able to make updates to either record without affecting the other.
The duplicate record will be created with “Copy” appended to the end of the style name and style number. Once that's done, it is time to review the record and make the necessary changes and updates to reflect those of the new season.
Step 3: Review and Update Your Product Record ✏️
By clicking on the product record, you will be able to open up your newly created product record. You will notice that all information on your summary has remained unchanged, so our first task is to update the summary information.
Once your fields are updated it's time to update color. There is a good chance that at least one of your colors will be carried over into your next season. In our video's example a Pumpkin 🎃 color way will be carried through. For you, you'll need to update any necessary data for you carry over colorway. Feel free to leave Intro Season and Approved Status alone if it's not changing.
Next, replace previous colorways with new seasons colorways. Select the color chip you want to change, then a seasonal palette, then select a new color. When you're done update the attributes for the new colorway.
Repeat this process for the next colorway, and if you need to add an additional one, you can do so by selecting the “Add Variant” dropdown to the right of your swatches.
Next up let’s check out our images. Duplicating your record will carry through all the images that existed on the previous product record, which will save you lots of time in not having to re-upload images. Typically, your carryover product will not experience design changes so you should be able to maintain the existing images. If you need to clean up anything here, you can delete images using the check box in the top right-hand corner or if you would like to replace certain images you can do so by clicking the source files name.
For our example, we will need to remove old colorway images, so go ahead and delete the images you no longer need and upload new images then assign them to their appropriate colorway section.
After that, we need to update our BOM to reflect our colorway changes- by replacing your colorways on the summary page, your variant selections will be maintained in your BOM columns. If you added new color ways, a new BOM column will be generated.
For those that were replaced, switch out the data as it applies to each color way. For new colorways, add the variant information and use the copy across method using the three-dot menu.
Finally, we need to check our size spec and clear out any irrelevant information. If you have not finalized the spec from your previous season, you can quickly clear the size spec by using the three-dot menu and selecting the “Clear Size Spec”. Once the spec is finalized you can use the “Import from Product” Option to bring in your final approved spec from the original product.
If this is a product that has been carried over many years and seasons and your spec is approved - You can keep it as is or just make minor adjustments as needed without affecting the previous seasons products.
When you're done with that, check your feedback and revision section. You won't want all your previous sample information on your new record so you can remove it by selecting the checkbox in the top left-hand corner and using the trash can icon in the top right-hand corner of your screen.
Once your product record is accurate to match the new season’s information you can continue to create additional carryover records and new records rounding out your assortment.
Next Step will be to duplicate your seasonal assortment views to pull in your new carryover products.
Step 4: Track + Report on Your Core + Carryover Products 🗣️
Now that you have created your carryover styles for your new season you can now start to track this information with Item Views. If you have already set up an assortment view or Development Tracker for your previous season in Backbone, it becomes even more simple to update the report to reflect the new seasons assortment.
First, choose the report you want to duplicate by using the three-dot menu in the right-hand corner.
Once you duplicate the report you can then select the edit option.
Change the criteria to match your new seasons' attributes. For example, if we just created our carryover products for S/S 2024, set that as the criteria.
Once you hit “Generate View” the item view set up will remain identical to the previous season, but you will notice that only S/S 2024 products are appearing in the report.
Depending on the information we would like to see here, we can also switch between our Product Mode which lists Product Custom Fields or switch into our Color Variant Mode which allows us to track and update the data at a color level.
Because you are managing separate records by season you can now accurately report on what existed in both your previous season/year and now your new one. All while you're able to monitor what changes or updates were made to that product record.