Separate Pages & Menus for Men vs Women's Clothing

Topic summary

A store owner using Shopify’s Dawn theme sought to create separate navigation menus for different customer categories (Men’s, Women’s, Boy’s, Girl’s). The initial challenge involved displaying category-specific menus on dedicated pages without applying those menus globally across the entire site.

Initial Approach:

  • Created separate theme templates for each category
  • Found that publishing a template applied its menu to all pages, not just the intended category page

Resolution:
The owner solved the problem by implementing dropdown sub-menus instead of separate pages. Each gender category now has its own sub-menu with links to specific collections, configured through Shopify’s Search & Discovery app.

Outcome:
The sub-menu approach provided a cleaner, more functional navigation structure. Screenshots show the implemented menu system with gender-based dropdowns leading to relevant product collections. The issue is resolved.

Summarized with AI on October 30. AI used: claude-sonnet-4-5-20250929.

Most discussions on this topic have resulted in suggestions to tailor the collections to separate men’s and women’s items. That’s easy enough done, but there’s still a problem with the main menu not separating the products.

Ideally, my main page would have a simple menu for: Men’s / Women’s / Boy’s / Girl’s

People would be directed to the page of their choice, where the menu atop that page would:

  • Identify which category they’re viewing (e.g. Men’s / Women’s / Boy’s / Girl’s), and

  • Have their own category-specific menus.

    • For example: The featured items menu button on the woman’s page menu would only show the woman’s featured items, while the same button on the men’s page would only show the men’s featured items, etc. I’ve already got the collections configured to do this, just need to get the correct menu atop the correct page.

I’m using the latest Dawn template.

I created a new theme template for a women’s products page, which has its own relevant main menu, but I’m not finding a way to mix and match the templates. When I publish that woman’s page template, by default it applies the women’s main menu to all the pages.

Stumped in Colorado

1 Like

Hello @ScottsSweaters ,

Can your please share the url of your store.

http://ScottsSweaters.org

After sleeping on it overnight, the solution seems rather simple. There must be a way to make sub-menus, and surely there is. Now, I don’t need special pages to separate items by gender, they’re just drop-down sub-menus under the gender of choice. Each sub-menu selection points to a specific collection. This is a much cleaner look than I had before and is much more functional.

The sub-menu setup is under the app Search & Discovery.