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.

The style-colorway reading is the dominant one and the one a line board is built on: one option is one tile, so option count is tile count and breadth becomes something you can see rather than something you total. The reading carries no size dimension — adding sizes turns an option into a set of SKUs — which is why a board always understates the units committed behind every card on it.

The ambiguity is the reason the word gets looked up. The style reading survives wherever colorway is not the multiplier that matters — a home or furniture line counted by model with finishes underneath it, an accessories carrier where one body is the unit — and it survives in ordinary speech, where “we cut four options” usually means four bodies. The gap between the two readings is the average colorway count per style, so a range running three colorways per body reports two numbers a factor of three apart. Any option target inherited from another team, another season, or another brand is therefore unusable until the unit behind it is stated.

Resolving it costs one sentence and is worth spending before a target is agreed, because everything downstream inherits the choice: the breadth-versus-depth trade, the season’s option-count target, the development load, and the buy. Say which unit is in play, keep it stated on the board itself, and treat a count that arrives without its unit as incomplete rather than as a number.