WooCommerce brand feature fix

Have you recently updated WooCommerce only to find that your existing brands taxonomy has stopped working?

We recently upgraded a client site to the latest version of WooCommerce "9.6.0" which automatically comes with a new brand feature automatically enabled as mentioned in this pull request.

The issue we faced is that the site already had a brand feature which used a taxonomy and ACF with clashing slugs "brand/our-brand". 

With the brands feature turned on it resulted in the existing brand pages throwing a 404 so if you've updated to WooCommerce recently then it would be worth checking any pages you have with the slug "brand/xxx" to make sure your brand pages are not just silently failing.

WooCommerce handily tell you that the Brands feature can be turned off using the following CLI command.

wp option update wc_feature_woocommerce_brands_enabled 'no'

or hook,

add_action( 'init', function() {
   update_option( 'wc_feature_woocommerce_brands_enabled', 'no' );
} );

source:
https://developer.woocommerce.com/2025/01/17/enabling-brands-update-for-woocommerce-9-6/

Unfortunately turning it off resulted in our brand pages with the slug "brand/xxx" being redirected to the home page.

To solve the issue you need to leave the feature turned on but change the url in the permalinks section of Wordpress settings.

Hopefully this post saves somebody some time.