What is range planning in apparel? A practical guide.

What range planning actually is

Range planning (line planning in US usage) is the process of defining what a season’s collection will contain before styles are designed. Not which specific styles - that’s design’s job - but the structure those styles must fit: how many options per category, at what price points, in which delivery drops, at what target margins, for which channels.

The output is the range plan: a working document that says, for example, “Spring 27 menswear carries 84 options - 22 tees across three price tiers, 14 shirts, 12 shorts, 9 outerwear pieces… - shipping in three drops, at a blended target margin of 62%.” Design then fills the skeleton with actual product.

Done well, range planning is the discipline that keeps a collection commercially coherent - the right breadth, the right price coverage, the right newness, deliverable on time at target margin. Done poorly or not at all, the collection becomes whatever accumulated: too many options, clustered prices, late drops, and a margin that only becomes visible after the season closes.

The commercial skeleton

A workable range plan holds six dimensions for every planned option slot:

As design proposes styles, each is adopted into a slot - and the plan totals update: options filled vs planned, projected margin vs target, drop loading vs capacity. The plan is a live scoreboard, not a kickoff deck.

Option counts

An option is one style-colour combination; the option count is the primary lever of range discipline. Every option added carries development hours, sample costs, fabric minimums, photography, and inventory risk. Every option removed concentrates the buy and simplifies everything downstream.

The recurring industry finding - visible in almost every brand’s own sell-through data - is that a minority of options produce a large majority of revenue, while the bottom quartile of options produces almost nothing except markdowns and complexity. Range planning is where that tail gets trimmed prospectively rather than mourned retrospectively.

Practical heuristics that hold up across mid-market brands:

• Plan option counts top-down from revenue, not bottom-up from ideas. Revenue target ÷ realistic average revenue per option = affordable option count. Design to that number.
• Cutting 15-20% of a first-draft range rarely costs revenue. The cut options were mostly cannibalising their neighbours.
• Judge options on projected contribution, not gut excitement. The plan should force a revenue and margin estimate per option before adoption.

Price architecture

Price architecture is the deliberate structure of price points across the range: what the entry price is per category, where the core of the offer sits, what the premium tier reaches, and how many options live at each tier.

Two failure patterns show up constantly in unplanned ranges:

• Clustering - ten tees between $38 and $45, competing with each other rather than covering the market. The customer sees redundancy; the brand sees cannibalisation.
• Gaps - nothing between the $60 core shirt and the $140 premium jacket, leaving an un-served price band that a competitor covers.

Architecture also disciplines costing: each tier implies a target FOB via the margin model, and that target constrains BOM decisions during development. A style developing toward a $52 FOB against a $45 target either gets re-engineered or re-tiered - deliberately, at adoption, not discovered at bulk. This is where the range plan and the costed BOM meet.

Delivery drops

Drops are sub-seasonal groupings that ship to retail at staggered dates - Drop 1 in early February, Drop 2 mid-March, Drop 3 late April, for a spring season. Drops exist because retail needs a flow of newness across the season and because compressing an entire range into one delivery concentrates production, freight and cash-flow risk.

In the range plan, every option is assigned to a drop, and the drop date drives everything backward: ex-factory date, bulk production window, fabric commit date, sample deadlines - the option’s entire critical path hangs from its drop assignment.

Drop planning disciplines worth having:

• Load-balance the drops - a 60/25/15 split across three drops concentrates risk in Drop 1; deliberate weighting should reflect retail flow needs, not development convenience
• Protect Drop 1 - it sets the season’s tone at retail and its deadlines are the least movable; late development pushes options to later drops, never the reverse
• Give carry-over styles the early slots - they need no development time and de-risk the first delivery

Carry-over vs newness

Every range balances three types of option: carry-over (an existing style continuing unchanged), updates (existing blocks in new colours or fabrics), and new development. The mix is a strategic dial:

• Carry-over - near-zero development cost, proven demand, existing BOM and grading. The margin and reliability backbone. Too much of it and the range reads stale.
• Updates - low development cost, moderate risk, keeps proven silhouettes fresh. Usually the largest bucket in a healthy mid-market range.
• New development - full cost and full risk, but the only source of genuine newness and category expansion. Concentrate it where the plan needs growth.

Typical healthy mixes for mid-market brands run roughly 20-30% carry-over, 40-50% updates, 25-35% new - varying widely by brand positioning. The plan should state the intended mix explicitly, because unmanaged ranges drift toward whichever type the design process finds easiest, which is rarely the commercially optimal mix.

Plan vs actuals

A range plan only steers if it’s tracked against reality as the season develops and then trades. The tracking happens in two phases:

During development: options adopted vs planned per category and tier; projected margin (from live BOM costs) vs target; drop loading vs plan. This is where the plan catches a range drifting - twelve tees adopted against a plan of eight, or projected margin sliding as fabric prices move.

During trading: sell-through, revenue and realised margin per option, rolled up to category and tier - compared against the plan’s assumptions. This is the feedback loop: which tiers over-performed, which categories carried dead options, what the actual revenue per option was. Next season’s plan should be built from these actuals, which is only practical when plan and actuals live in the same system rather than a deck and a warehouse report that never meet.

How range plans fail

1. The plan is a kickoff deck. Presented in month one, never updated, steering nothing by month three. A plan has to live where adoption and costing happen or it’s theatre.
2. Bottom-up option creep. No top-down count, so the range is the sum of everyone’s ideas - always larger, always with a long unprofitable tail.
3. Price points inherited, not designed. Last season’s prices roll forward without re-examining coverage, while costs and the market moved.
4. Margin discovered, not managed. No live projected-margin view during development; the season’s real margin appears at close, when nothing can be done about it.
5. Drops loaded by convenience. Options land in whichever drop their development schedule allows, rather than development being scheduled to the drop the range needs.
6. No post-season autopsy. Actuals never formally revisited against plan, so the same estimation errors repeat annually.

Every one of these is a process failure before it’s a tooling failure - but tooling determines whether the process is sustainable. A plan maintained by hand in spreadsheets, disconnected from adoption and costing, will drift into failure mode one within a season no matter how good the intentions.

Frequently asked questions