Color family

When you have separate Shopify products that should appear as color variants of each other (often for SEO reasons), the color family metafield links them so each PDP shows the others as additional swatches.

Setup

1. Settings → Custom data → Products — add a metafield:
   • Namespace: custom
   • Key: color_family
   • Type: List of product references
2. Open each product in the family.
3. In the Color family field, reference the OTHER products in the family.

Tip: do this on all products in the family. Each product needs to reference the others — the system doesn't auto-mirror.

How it renders

• On a product without a color option of its own → an extra row appears with the family members as swatches.
• On a product with a color option → the family members render as additional swatches alongside the product's own color values.
• Clicking a sibling swatch navigates to that product's PDP.

Theme settings

Theme settings → Product → Enable color family swatches: checkbox. If turned off, the metafield is ignored even if populated.

When to use

• SEO-driven catalogs where each color has its own product (and own URL) for ranking on color-specific keywords
• Different product types that share a color story (e.g., "Olive" T-shirt + "Olive" hoodie linked together)