Catalog Machine 101

Catalog Machine helps you create, maintain, and share professional product catalogs with ease. Here's what you can do:

Product Database: Centrally manage product information and images for use across catalogs and your Showroom.
Catalog Designer: Drag-and-drop products, text, images, and layouts to build custom catalog pages.
PDF and Sharing: Share as a high-quality PDF or an online catalog site. Control access with privacy settings.
Advanced Features:
- Ordering: Configure your catalog to accept order requests, quotes, or payments, with inventory support.
- Showroom: Automatically generate a searchable and printable product catalog, with minimal setup and optional ordering capabilities.

Watch this short 3-minute video for an overview of the building steps.

Building Your First Catalog

Step 1: Adding Products:

Import products from your existing store (Shopify, etc.), upload a CSV file, or add them manually.
Or open AI Concierge and ask it to import — paste a list, upload CSV/PDF/photos, or share a URL.
Organize products using collections, categories, fields, and variants for easy selection later.

Step 2: New Catalog:

Choose a starting point: Select a pre-designed template, a grid or price list layout, or a blank page.

Step 3: Design Pages:

Drag-and-drop elements: Add text and product elements (which automatically update when product info changes), and open the Images tab in the right panel to drag your own images straight onto the page (or click to place). Upload new images right there, no need to leave the designer.
Use layouts: Apply pre-made layouts or save custom designs for future use.
Build with grids: Generate multiple product pages quickly with the Auto Grid feature and product cards.
Create price lists: Display product information in a tabular format with the Product List feature, selecting fields like images, descriptions, and prices.
Add a cover or other page types: Add a cover page from the Layouts tab in the designer's right panel (choose a Cover layout), or add a blank page and drag it to the top of the page list to make it page 1. The same Add page menu inserts tables of contents, sub-catalogs, and more.
Manage pages: Easily reorder, delete, copy, and paste pages and elements.

Step 4: Customize Your Look:

Adjust fonts, colors, page sizes, headers/footers to match your brand's style.

Renaming a catalog

Open the catalog, click Settings (the gear icon in the designer's right panel), and edit the Catalog Name field at the top of that panel. You can rename a catalog at any time after it is created.

There is no rename option on the catalog list and none on a right-click menu, which is the usual reason it is hard to find.

Headers and footers — including a logo

Open catalog Settings (gear icon) and expand the Header & Footer section. There are separate Header and Footer boxes, each with an Alternating variant for left/right pages, plus height, margin and background colour.

These are full rich-text boxes, not plain text fields. Each one has the standard formatting toolbar, and that includes an Insert image button — so a logo or banner that should repeat on every page goes straight into the header. You do not need to build a page Layout for it.

You can also type dynamic fields directly into the text — page number, current date, section name, or product fields such as category, collection and name — using the same expression syntax as the rest of the designer. The header uses the first product's fields on the page and the footer the last one, and a separate setting controls whether the header and footer appear on the first and last pages.

Changing the colors of a built-in layout

If a page uses a page layout (rather than a card grid), the background bars, decorative shapes and product text styling belong to the layout itself — so you can't recolor them by clicking on the page. A page in Page Layout mode only offers the layout picker.

Built-in and shared layouts are read-only, so you edit a copy instead. You no longer have to leave the catalog to make one:

With the built-in layout selected, look at the note above the layout picker: "Built-in layout - its colors and text can't be changed here."
Click Copy to my layouts on that note.
The copy is created in your account and your page switches to it straight away, in the same tab. There is nothing to re-select.
The note turns green and reads "[your layout] is yours - edit it to change its colors", with an Edit layout button that opens it in the Layout Designer.
Edit your copy: change the background shapes, text colors, and anything else. Your copy is filed under My Layouts.

Watch the text color. Several built-in layouts use white product text on a dark background. If you lighten the background, change the text to a dark color in the same copy or it will disappear.

Prefer not to touch the layout at all? Switch the page from Page Layout to Card Grid — then the colors come from your product card, which you can edit directly.

Best Practices

Speed & Consistency: Create and reuse your own product cards and page layouts.
Different image per page from one layout: A layout includes whatever you place in it, so an image added inside a layout repeats on every page that uses it. For per-page images (e.g. category covers), leave the layout's image as an empty placeholder and add the specific image on each page after applying the layout.
Automate Updates: Link text elements to product data for automatic updates. Grids and product lists will also update when product information changes.
Faster path: AI Concierge can build your first catalog from your products in a few sentences — try it if you'd rather skip manual design.

Build Your Product Catalog (V2)