An effective stock keeping unit (SKU) management system encodes catalog data into an embedding per catalog item. An embedding space is created by encoding catalog item data into an embedding per catalog item. The embedding is created by generating an index, where a number of rows represents a number of catalog items and a number of columns represents a number of fields associated with each catalog item. The index is then denormalized using customer groups and transformed by compressing the number of columns, to create the embedding space. In some configuration, a machine learning model is trained using catalog data. In the embedding space, item similarity is encoded by clustering catalog SKUs into groups in the embedding space, by placing similarly related items close to each other in the embedding space. Catalog items are then searched for in the embedding, with the closest clusters searched for a particular catalog item.