Advice for my ideal product nav structure?

Thanks in advance for input on this post!

I'm about to start a test population using Easy Populate but need to figure out how to achieve the proper menu structure first. I want to have 2 ways to browse to a single product. The 1st will be the TYPE of item and 2nd will start with the BRAND (manufacturer) name. (I do know that a drop down for manufacture is automatically generated but I want sub-menus as well.)

For example, let's say I'm selling hats and scarfs from 2 different manufactures(say "Apparel World" and "Clothes Warehouse"). And menu tree would look like this:

HATS
--winter (winter hats displayed from both brands)
--beach
SCARFS
--winter
--fashionable
BRANDS
--Apparel World

• --Hats
  ----- --winter (winter hats displayed from Apparel World only)
  ----- --beach
• --Scarfs
  ----- --winter
  ----- --fashionable
  --Clothes Warehouse
• --Hats
  ----- --winter
  ----- --beach
• --Scarfs
  ----- --winter
  ----- --fashionable

My uncertainty on how to proceed is whether or not I should LINK or COPY product to/into the other sub-catagories. LINKing seems to be the cleanest way (having only 1 instance of the product). And when using Easy Populate, the documentation I've found seems to indicate that I can have 2 entries on my tab-delimited text file, each with a different category structure. But I can't deduce if that COPIES the product entry or just LINKS the second entry to the first.

Any ideas on how I should go about setting this up?

Zencart V1.3.9

I find it easier to do something like this in Easy populate and using the Spreadsheet, however it does not link them I don't believe. i believe it just makes a copy of the item.

You definitely want the products linked, not duplicated. You first need to decide what will be the "master category" for a product. My opinion would be to use the manufacturer subcats for the masters, but there may be good arguments for another way.
I have never used easy populate so can't advise on getting category links with that (if it's possible). Once you have the products in their master categories, you can use the Multiple Categories Link Manager to copy/link an entire manufacturer category's worth of products into a type category (but you can't copy category/subcategories themselves; those have to be created individually).