Glossary
This is the term index for Line Board — every entry listed below, each a plain-English definition of a term that appears on a line board, cross-linked to the guide that covers it in depth.
Looking for a longer treatment than an entry? The board itself and the visual line plan are on what is a line board; the line plan and line planning on how to build a line plan; the visual assortment board on how to build a visual assortment board; the same plan under the range vocabulary in how to build a range plan; and the wholesale line sheet and its tool category in line sheet software: what it does and where it stops.
Line Board →
Line board (noun) — the internal, image-first artifact an apparel team assembles a season’s range on. Each style appears as a tile carrying its image, category, colorway count, and price tier, so the range can be judged as a whole rather than one style at a time.
Visual Line Plan →
A visual line plan is a line plan expressed as an image-first board rather than a numeric table — the styles, colorways, and price architecture of a season laid out visually so the range can be shaped by eye and by the numbers together.
Line Review (Range Review) →
Line review (noun) — the recurring cross-functional meeting at which a season’s range is walked as a whole and decided. Its defining feature is that it is a decision forum, not a status update: styles leave the room added, cut, or rebalanced.
Colorway Board →
A colorway board is a visual layout of a style’s color options across the season or a delivery — used to balance the color story, avoid over- or under-coloring a body, and plan color depth before it flows into the buy and size curve.
Storyboard (Mood Board) →
A storyboard (or mood board) is the design-led visual that sets a season’s direction — themes, palette, fabrics, and inspiration — and becomes the starting point that a line board turns into a concrete, planned range.
Assortment Board →
An assortment board is a visual layout of which styles, colors, and options will be offered across channels, stores, or clusters — the visual expression of an assortment plan, showing what goes where, and at what planned depth, before buy quantities are set.
Price Tier →
A price tier is a band of retail prices that a group of options is intended to occupy — the structural unit of line architecture, used to give a season a deliberate opening, core, and elevated shape rather than an accidental spread.
Good, Better, Best (GBB) →
Good, better, best is the common shorthand for a three-tier price architecture — an opening tier that gives the customer a way into the brand, a core tier that carries the volume and the point of view, and an elevated tier that sets the ceiling.
Color Story →
A color story is a season’s palette expressed across the whole range — which colors appear, on which bodies, at what depth, and how they hand over between deliveries. On a line board it is read as a distribution across the line, not as a chip row under a style card.
Option Count →
An option count is how many style-colorways a range holds — a single body offered in three colors contributes three, not one. It measures breadth: how wide the range reaches across categories and tiers, before any question of the depth committed behind each option.
SKU (Stock Keeping Unit) →
A SKU is the smallest individually stocked and counted unit of product — in apparel, one style in one colorway in one size. The size dimension is what separates a SKU from an option: a line board counts options, and a buy counts SKUs.
Carryover →
Carryover is any part of a range that returns from a previous season rather than being newly developed — a style, a colorway, or a color that repeats. It shortens the development calendar and de-risks the buy, and it registers as no newness at all to a customer who already bought it.
Drop →
A drop is a dated release of part of a season’s range — a defined set of styles and colorways that lands together on the floor or online — used in place of, or inside, traditional seasonal deliveries so a line reaches the customer in several smaller waves.
Capsule Collection →
Capsule collection (noun) — a small, tightly edited group of styles built around a single story, occasion, or collaboration, planned and released as a unit with its own drop date rather than absorbed into the seasonal range.
Fabric Platforming →
Fabric platforming (noun) — running multiple styles on one shared fabric quality, the platform, so that combined volume clears the mill’s minimums, fabric development happens once per cloth rather than once per style, and reorders draw on a single fabric position.
Option →
Option (noun) — the planning unit of breadth in a range. In most apparel usage an option is one style in one colorway, so a single body offered in three colors contributes three options; in some teams and some categories the word means the style itself, and the same range counts several times larger under one reading than under the other.
Hero Style →
Hero style (noun) — the style a range is deliberately built around and merchandised behind: the piece that carries the season’s point of view, takes the campaign and the photography, and anchors the category it sits in. It is designated before the season trades, which is what separates it from a bestseller.
Range Architecture (Line Architecture) →
Range architecture (noun) — the deliberate structure a season is built to: its price tiers, its category families, the ladders inside them, and the proportions and distances between them. It is the shape, statable before the styles exist; the assortment is what fills that shape once they do.
Line List →
Line list (noun) — the flat enumeration of every style in a line with its attributes: style number, name, category, colorways, price, cost, delivery window, and status, one row each. It is the tabular counterpart to the visual board, and in practice it is usually an export from it.
Prebook →
Prebook (noun) — a wholesale order committed by a retailer or dealer before the goods are produced, taken against samples or a line sheet at a market, trade show, or sales meeting. Standard in footwear, outdoor and sporting goods, and much of wholesale apparel, the prebook turns part of the season’s demand from a forecast into a booked quantity before production is cut.
Newness Rate →
Newness rate (noun) — the share of a season’s range that is newly developed rather than carried over from a previous season, stated in a declared counting unit: styles, options, or colorways. It is read on the board by flagging carryover on each card and counting the rows by the flag, and its complement is the carryover rate.
Line Plan →
Line plan (noun) — the numeric architecture of a season’s line: option counts by category, price tier and delivery, with the planned units, price points and margin each of those cells carries. It is agreed before the styles exist; the line board visualizes it, and the line sheet eventually sells what the board became.
Line Sheet →
Line sheet (noun) — the outbound selling document that presents a finished range to wholesale buyers and sales reps: images, style numbers, colorways, size runs, wholesale and retail prices, minimums and delivery windows, so accounts can place orders against it. The same word is also used for an internal working layout of the range, which is more precisely a line board.