How we build the catalog

The steps between the brand store and this site, including the ones that threw things away.

Collecting

We read the brand store front page and every one of its ninety-six sub pages, which produced a list of just over a thousand product identifiers. That list went to the retailer product interface, which returns current price, stock state, images and the manufacturer bullet points. Each product page was then read separately for its rating and review count.

Cutting

Anything with no live price was dropped, because a catalog entry without a number is a dead end. Anything permanently out of stock was dropped. That took just over a thousand identifiers down to the number you see on the front page.

Sorting

Nine sections, assigned by which store sub pages a listing appeared on, falling back to reading the product title when the store gave nothing useful. A listing usually sits on five or six promotional pages, so the mapping runs in priority order: what is printed on the sock beats the occasion it was promoted for, and the slogan section catches whatever is left.

Writing

Each product page gets a short teaser, an opening paragraph and four notes, written from that product specification. Measurements, blends and sayings come from the spec sheet and are not invented. Where the manufacturer is blunt about a sock being thin, that stays in rather than being smoothed over.

What we deliberately left out

Review text. The retailer no longer serves it to anything that is not a browser, so the only review data on this site is the star average and the count. We would rather show two honest numbers than a quote we cannot verify.

Rebuilding

The whole site is regenerated from the data each time it changes. Nothing is edited in place, which means a stale page cannot survive a rebuild.