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.

The term is used two ways in practice: for the artifact itself (“put it on the line board”) and for the working session held around it (“we walked the line board on Tuesday”). Both senses refer to the same internal object — not to a wholesale line sheet, which is the outward-facing catalog a finished range is sold from.

Boards range from a physical wall of printed styles, through a spreadsheet or slide grid, to purpose-built software. The distinction that matters is not the medium but whether the board is connected to the numbers underneath it: an unconnected board is a snapshot, accurate only until the next change to option counts, costs, or open-to-buy.

Also called: range board, visual line plan, merchandising board
Used by: Design, merchandising, and merchandise planning; product development and sourcing join for feasibility.
Used during: Range building through line review, ending at sign-off — before the buy is committed.
Inputs: Style images or sketches, categories, colorway counts, price tiers, and the season’s option-count targets.
Output: A signed-off range that flows into the assortment plan and then the buy.

In use

“Fourteen of the eighteen tops on the line board were the same silhouette in a different color, so the review cut six and moved the options into outerwear.”