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.
On a line board, a price tier is most useful as an axis rather than as a field on a style card. Recorded on the card, the tier tells you where one style sits; used as the grouping axis, it turns the range into a visible distribution — which bands carry mass, which are thin, and which categories are missing from a band entirely.
Tiers are bands, not points, so distinctness inside a tier matters. Several options sharing a price, a silhouette, and a color position read as one price to the customer and compete with each other rather than with the market. Reading within a band before reading across bands is what surfaces that.
A tier’s weight is not its tile count. It is option count multiplied by colorway depth — and in footwear, multiplied again by the size run behind every style-colorway. The margin consequence of a given tier mix (blended markup, planned margin, markdown exposure) is arithmetic and belongs on the plan, not on the board.
Canvas — the visual line board inside RetailNorthstar — puts these on one connected board, live against the plan from board to buy.