The vm2 system covers 2 systems for you.
When you want to have the childs working as variants of the parent, use the product custom field "Generic Child Variant", use layout position "ontop", add it to your parent, done.
When you want to use the parent as kind of pattern for your childs, unpublish the parent and give your child a category and then it appears at the frontend.
Important: the childs of vm2 are real childs, inheriting almost anyhting of the parent (except the categories). That means for a variant, you can just create a child,.. leave everything as it is,.. change the name and the price, done.
and these childs are completly normal products. You can change the description, customfields, and so on.
Important to know about a normla product is that it must have a category