About Line Board
Line Board is a free resource on visual line planning — what a line board is, how apparel teams build and review one, and how the tools compare. It is published by RetailNorthstar, the apparel merchandising planning company behind Canvas.
A term with no good reference
“Line board” is one of those terms that everyone in apparel merchandising uses and almost nobody has written down carefully. Search for it and most of what comes back is about the wholesale line sheet — the outward-facing catalog a finished range is sold from — which is a genuinely different artifact with a different audience and a different job.
This site covers the internal object: the board a design and merchandising team actually builds the season on. That distinction is the reason it exists, and it is why internal line board vs wholesale line sheet is one of the first things we published.
The Line Board Editorial Team
Pages here carry the byline Line Board Editorial Team. That is a group attribution, not a pen name for a single person: content is drafted and reviewed inside RetailNorthstar by the people who build planning software for apparel and who work through these workflows with merchandising, planning, and product development teams.
We use a group byline rather than inventing individual expert profiles. If a page later carries a named author, that will be a real person with real apparel experience, named because they wrote it — not a persona added to make the page look more authoritative.
What this site covers — and where it stops
Line Board covers the visual half of line planning: building the board, running the line review, price architecture, color stories, and the handoff from mood board to assortment. It deliberately stops at the board’s edge.
The numeric side of the same job — option counts against open-to-buy, size curves, IMU, markdown maths — lives on retail-plan.com, a sibling resource. The wider category argument about connected apparel workflows lives on theapparelos.com. All three are published by RetailNorthstar. Splitting them keeps each one a genuine reference on its own subject instead of three sites re-fighting the same ground.
The commercial product this site maps to is Canvas, the visual line board inside RetailNorthstar. Pages link to it where it is genuinely the next step. Nothing on this site requires a demo to read, and the tools and guides are usable whether or not you ever talk to us.
Tell us where we are wrong
Terminology in this field varies by company, by country, and by category — what one team calls a line review another calls a range review or a line adoption. If something here does not match how your team actually works, or is simply wrong, we want to know. Write to editorial@line-board.com. Our correction practice is described in the editorial policy.