The Limits of "Just Add a Category"
Most systems organize products the same way: add a category, maybe a subcategory, done. That works for a simple catalogue. It falls apart the moment a catalogue needs to be sliced eight different ways at once: by collection, by designer, by material, by colour, and half a dozen other axes, all simultaneously, all governed centrally.
Category trees are a decades-old idea, and they get forced onto businesses whose products genuinely don't fit a single hierarchy. Most platforms never really solved this, because most businesses never needed to ask.
Where Standard Odoo Runs Out of Room
Standard Odoo product categorization is a single hierarchy. For a catalogue with real structural complexity, tens of thousands of SKUs that need to be findable along multiple independent dimensions at once, that's a genuine limitation, not a configuration choice someone simply hasn't made yet.
The fix is a proper multi-axis product information model. Every product gets tagged and searchable along each relevant axis independently, instead of forced into one flat tree that can only really represent one of those axes well.
What It Actually Buys the Business
Tens of thousands of SKUs stay genuinely organized and searchable, governed centrally from one system, instead of drowning in a single flat category list or splintering into parallel spreadsheets nobody fully trusts.
For luxury and design-led product manufacturers with catalogues this deep, this isn't a nice-to-have. It's the difference between a catalogue a team can actually navigate and one that quietly becomes unmanageable as it grows. If your product data needs to answer more questions than a category tree can hold, that's a structural problem worth solving properly, and the kind of build Majorbird does well.