Feature inheritance or Release Duplication Merged

I work in a hardware device environment, which has variants (releases) depending on the customer. Variations could have software, hardware or external physical components differences due to customization. What I would like to be able to do is import or create features for the base product and have each release (variant) inherit copies of the base feature set. I can edit each release feature set based on what is different. If that is not possible, them being able to duplicate and rename a release would accomplish the same goal.