Is a range plan the same as a line plan?

Yes — one artifact under two vocabularies. The arithmetic is identical: units divided by depth gives options, options placed across price bands and phases, every cell tested against supplier minimums and the margin target. The surrounding words move together, so range architecture maps to line architecture, range review to line review, and phasing to drops. Neither word is owned by a market. A brand whose design team uses one vocabulary and whose sales team uses the other can hear both names for one document inside a single season, which is where the risk sits: two names invite two files, and two files have to be reconciled by somebody.

What is the difference between a range plan and range architecture?

Range architecture is a component of the range plan, not a synonym for it. The architecture is the set of rules: how many price bands the range runs, how far apart they sit, which category families have to be present in which band, and what job each band does. The range plan is those rules plus the numbers — the option count in every cell, the depth behind each option, the phase it lands in, and the margin the mix has to return. Architecture can be written down before anything is counted; the plan cannot.

How many options should a range plan have?

The count is derived rather than chosen. Divide the cell’s unit budget by the shallowest depth an option there can work at, which gives a ceiling, then check that ceiling against supplier minimums, the number of new styles development can sample and fit, and the space the range has to fill. Set the count inside the ceiling, because a cell planned at its ceiling has no room for an option that books short. A count borrowed from another season or another team is unusable until its unit is stated, since a count in styles and a count in style-colourways differ by a factor of the average number of colourways per style.

How do you decide breadth versus depth in a range plan?

Breadth and depth divide the same unit budget, so one is always bought with the other. Depth belongs where demand is already evidenced — carryover, core bodies, the shades or sizes the last hindsight showed selling out — because those units have somewhere to go. Breadth belongs where the season is testing, and it is affordable only down to the depth an option can still be manufactured and merchandised at. Plan too wide and every option in the cell sits near its minimum, so the run breaks early and the remaining stock reads as slow demand; plan too narrow and a price point goes unoffered, which leaves no trace in the sell-through at all because nobody could buy it.

How does a range plan feed the buy?

In sequence. The range plan sets how many options each cell holds, at what price, in which phase. The range board decides which products fill those slots and is reconciled back against the counts. The range is locked, and the assortment decides where each locked option goes — channel, cluster, door — and how deep. The buy then turns planned units into ordered quantities against the open-to-buy, and in wholesale the prebook tests the range with accounts before production. Four things have to survive every handoff: the option count in its stated unit, the price point, the phase, and the carryover flag.

// Range planning

How to build a range plan

By Line Board Editorial TeamPublished September 20, 2026Editorial policy

A range plan is the structure a season’s range is built to: how many options each category and price band holds, how much depth sits behind each one, when they land, and what margin the mix has to return. It is agreed before the styles exist, and the range board then shows which products fill the slots it has counted. Where a team says range, the planning document is the range plan; where it says line, the same document is the line plan. One artifact, one set of arithmetic — what changes with the word is the vocabulary around it, not the job it does.

This guide is about the decisions the range plan records. For the build arithmetic itself — unit budgets, the tier and delivery split, the minimum and margin checks, and a worked example whose rows sum — see how to build a line plan, which carries the step-by-step method, the worked example and the bounds vertical by vertical under the line vocabulary. For the structural rules on their own, see range architecture.

The short version

A range plan is the line plan under the range vocabulary. Build it in five decisions: fix the range architecture — bands, distances, families, and the job each band does — before anything is allocated; decide breadth against depth in every cell, knowing both divide one unit budget; bound the option count by depth, supplier minimums, development capacity and space before you set it; split each cell into the carryover the hindsight earned and the newness design develops; then phase the range, lock the counts at range review, and hand them to the buy in a stated unit.

Definition — Range plan: The numeric structure of a season’s range — how many options, in which price bands, in which phases, with the depth and margin each cell owes — agreed before the range is committed to a buy. The same artifact a team working in the line vocabulary calls a line plan.; Options in a cell = planned units for the cell ÷ planned depth per option, by category × price band × phase; Used by: Merchandising and planning, with design and finance; Related: Range architecture, line plan, option count, breadth and depth, phasing, range review

// Key takeaways

A range plan and a line plan are the same artifact under two vocabularies; the arithmetic does not change with the word.
Range architecture is a component of the range plan: the rules. The plan is the rules plus the counts, the depth, the phasing and the margin.
Breadth and depth divide one unit budget, so every option added is depth taken from the options already in that cell.
An option count is bounded before it is chosen — by workable depth, supplier minimums, development capacity and the space the range has to fill.
Carryover is placed first, style by style, from the hindsight; the newness rate is what you read afterwards, not a number set in advance.
What the buy inherits is the option count in its stated unit, the price point, the phase and the carryover flag — it cannot repair a range that was planned wider than its units.
The artifact holds across verticals; what moves is what counts as one option and what the range is phased against — prebook windows, market dates, planogram resets.

// One artifact, two vocabularies

Range plan or line plan: the same document, different words

The two terms describe one document. A brand whose design team works in one vocabulary and whose sales team works in the other can hear both names for it inside a single season, and neither word signals that the other exists. The words move together as a set — where the artifact is a range plan, the meeting is a range review and the structure is range architecture; where it is a line plan, the meeting is a line review and the structure is line architecture.

The same objects under both vocabularies
The thing	Range vocabulary	Line vocabulary
The season’s products, collectively	Range	Line
The planning document	Range plan	Line plan
The price and family structure	Range architecture	Line architecture
The visual working surface	Range board	Line board
The sign-off meeting	Range review	Line review
One product in one colour	Option (colourway)	Option (colorway)
When the products land	Phasing	Drops, floor sets
The price the customer pays	RRP	Retail, ticket price

Treating them as two artifacts has a practical cost. Two documents get built, they are counted in different units, and the reconciliation between them becomes a job nobody owns — so the range review signs one number and the buy inherits another. One plan, named whichever way the room names it, removes the reconciliation entirely.

One caution on the word itself. “Range” also does duty as a scope word — “the outerwear range”, “the kids range” — where it means a slice of the season rather than the planning document. Read which sense is meant from whether a count is attached to it. And for the three artifacts that are genuinely different from one another, see line board vs line sheet vs line plan: the plan is the numbers, the board is the picture, the line sheet is what an account orders from.

// The build

The five decisions a range plan records

Each decision constrains the next. Allocating options before the architecture exists produces a range whose shape is an accident of how many ideas arrived, rather than a shape anyone chose.

1. Fix the range architecture first

Write down the price bands, the distance between them, the category families that have to be present in each band, and the job each band does. Do this before a single option is allocated, because the architecture is the only part of the range plan that can be stated without a style attached to it.

Architecture is a set of rules rather than a set of products — range architecture carries the full definition. What matters for the plan is the consequence: every rule written here is a rule the counts have to obey later, so a family the architecture requires in a band is a slot before it is a style, and a band the architecture never gave a job to will be argued about in every review until the structure changes. Good, better, best is shorthand for the ladder, not a requirement to run exactly three bands — the count is a choice, and the only real test is that each band does a job the rest of the range is not already doing. Two bands priced close together with the same silhouettes and the same colour position read as one band to the customer and compete with each other. See line architecture: good, better, best and price tiers for reading the ladder on a board, and good, better, best for the term itself.

2. Decide breadth against depth, cell by cell

The unit budget is fixed by the financial plan, so breadth and depth divide the same number. Decide where the season wants more choice and where it wants more stock behind fewer choices, and record both sides of the division rather than only the option count.

Breadth is how many options the range holds; depth is how many units sit behind each one. The financial plan fixes the units, so the two are one division. Every option added to a cell is depth taken from the options already in it. Record both numbers, because a range plan that lists only option counts has hidden the half of the decision that determines whether the range can be bought at all.

The two failure directions look different in the data. A range planned too wide puts every option in the cell near its minimum: the size run or shade ladder breaks early, and from that point the remaining stock records as slow demand when what actually happened is that the sizes people wanted were gone. A range planned too narrow leaves a price point or a family unoffered — and an absence leaves no trace in the sell-through at all, because nobody could buy what was never on the floor. The first mistake is visible and painful; the second is invisible and repeats.

3. Bound the option count before you set it

Work out the ceiling each cell already has — the unit budget divided by the shallowest workable depth, then tested against supplier minimums, development capacity and the space the range has to fill. Set the count inside that ceiling, and treat the ceiling as a limit rather than a target.

Four things bound the count before judgment gets involved. Workable depth — the shallowest depth an option can still be manufactured and merchandised at — divides the unit budget to give the arithmetic ceiling. Supplier minimums put a floor under that depth: mill minimums quoted per fabric and colour, factory minimums per style or style-colourway, tooling minimums where a component is moulded. Fabric platforming lets several options clear a minimum none of them would clear alone, which is the main lever for buying back breadth without buying depth.

Development capacity is the third bound — every new option consumes a tech pack, samples, fittings and a slot on the critical path, and a range plan that exceeds what the calendar can develop arrives late rather than arriving wide. Space is the fourth: a wholesale account’s fixture and a store’s floor both hold a finite number of choices, so a range that overruns them gets edited by somebody else. State the counting unit in the plan’s header before any of this — style, option, colourway and SKU are four different units, and the option count planner builds the same number from categories, bands and colourways as a cross-check.

4. Split every cell into carryover and newness

Place the carryover the hindsight has earned first, style by style, then treat what is left in the cell as the newness brief design works to. Flag each slot so the split can be read by band and by phase afterwards rather than being set as a target beforehand.

Carryover arrives with known sell-through, no development cost and a shorter lead time, so it is placed first and the remainder becomes design’s brief. The decision is per style, from the last hindsight: did this body earn its slot, does it still hold its margin, and is the trend behind it still alive. Balancing carryover and newness covers that test, and hindsighting the line covers the read that feeds it. Two mechanisms are worth building into the plan. Recolouring a body that died does not rescue it — if the body was the problem, a new colourway inherits the problem and consumes a slot. And the newness rate is a number you read off the finished plan, not a target you set before the styles are decided; set as a target, it forces newness into cells where the hindsight was asking for depth.

5. Phase the range and hand it to the buy

Distribute the options across the season’s phases so each one merchandises on its own, then lock the counts at range review and pass them forward in a stated unit. The buy inherits the count, the price point, the phase and the carryover flag, and it cannot repair a range that was planned wider than its units.

Phasing distributes the options across the season’s delivery windows so each one merchandises on its own — enough bands present, enough newness to bring a customer back, and the anchor core carried through all of them. Planning drops on the line board covers the rhythm in detail. Then the counts lock at range review, and the lock is a state change with a date, a version and a named owner — not the fact that a meeting finished. After it, the plan changes by swap rather than by addition: a reserve concept can replace a locked option in the same band and phase if it clears the same checks, and anything genuinely added has to name what comes out.

// Downstream

How the range plan feeds the buy

The range plan is upstream of everything that costs money, which is why its errors are expensive and its corrections are cheap. The sequence is fixed:

Range plan. How many options, in which bands, in which phases, at what depth and margin. Owned by merchandising and planning, agreed before the products exist.
Range board. Which products fill the counted slots, laid out so balance, price flow and colour coverage can be judged by eye — and reconciled back against the counts. How to build one.
Assortment. Where each locked option goes — channel, cluster, door — and how deep it goes there. See line board vs assortment board and line plan vs assortment plan.
The buy. Planned units become ordered quantities against the open-to-buy, at confirmed costs. In wholesale the prebook sits here too, testing the range with accounts before production commits.

Four things have to survive every handoff intact: the option count in its stated unit, the price point, the phase, and the carryover flag. Lose the unit and a plan agreed in styles meets a board built in style-colourways, and the two disagree by a factor of the average number of colourways per style. Lose the phase and options land where development was ready rather than where the selling window was.

One failure is quieter than any of those, and more expensive. A card cut at range review that does not change the count leaves the buy inheriting a number the room no longer believes — and the assortment cannot repair it, because it can only spread the same units differently. Margin works the same way: the target has to hold in blend across bands, which is arithmetic that belongs on the plan rather than on the board. See costing the line to a margin target.

// By vertical

What the range vocabulary names differently

The five decisions hold in every vertical, and so do the bounds on an option’s depth — minimums, tooling, development capacity, container quantities. Those are the same arithmetic under either word set, and how to build a line plan works through them vertical by vertical. What actually changes with the vocabulary is what counts as one option, and what the range is phased against.

Apparel. An option is a style-colourway carrying a size run. Phasing rather than drops is the usual word for the delivery split, and it is planned against the selling window rather than against a floor-set date. The plan holds an RRP per band, and RRP is quoted to the customer inclusive of VAT — so the margin blend runs on the net figure, not on the number the ticket shows. A range priced from a ticket price and costed against a net one will read as holding its margin when it is not.
Footwear. An option is a style-colourway committing a full size run of pairs, plus a width run where widths are offered. The prebook window sets the phasing: a range sold on prebook has to be complete and priced a season ahead of the one it sells into, so phases are named by order window rather than by floor set, and an option that fails to book is cut before it is ever phased. See the footwear and accessories guide and prebook.
Accessories and bags. An option is a style-colourway with no size dimension, so the option count and the SKU count converge and the range plan reads much closer to the buy than an apparel one does. Collection families phase as sets: a family split across two phases sells its first half without the pieces it attaches to, so the attach the family was planned for never happens.
Home and furniture. An option is a model in a finish, a cover or a configuration, and special-order options widen the range without committing stock. Market dates rather than phases pace it, and the RRP the plan holds is a landed-cost RRP — freight moves between the plan and the buy, so a model can cross a band boundary without anybody repricing it.
Outdoor. An option is a colourway for soft goods and a model year for hard goods, so one range plan carries two definitions at once and cannot be summed without stating which. Dealer prebooks placed through rep groups fix the wholesale phase dates, and MAP puts a floor under the advertised price — which limits markdown as an exit, so an over-wide range leaves through closeout channels or carries into the next model year. See the home, outdoor and sporting goods guide.
Health and beauty. An option is a shade within a franchise. Launch calendars and retailer planogram resets set the phasing, not a floor set — a shade that misses a reset waits for the next one, so the phase is fixed by the retailer’s calendar rather than by the brand’s. Period-after-opening then caps how much depth a phase can carry, because depth that outlives its PAO is written off rather than marked down. See the beauty and personal care guide.

// Where it lives

Keeping the range plan and the range board on one record

A range plan can live in a spreadsheet; every calculation behind it is spreadsheet arithmetic. The failure is two files — the board is edited at range review and the counts are not, and from that afternoon the plan records what the range used to be. The plan only works as a constraint while the board cannot drift from it. The reconciliation itself is covered in how to build a line plan, and the line plan workbook carries the option, depth, minimum and margin checks above as working formulas. For the tool category itself, see visual line planning software.

// Related resources

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// FAQ

Frequently asked questions

What is a range plan?: A range plan is the structure a season’s range is built to: how many options each category and price band holds, how much depth sits behind each one, when they land, and what margin the mix has to return. It is agreed before the styles exist, and the range board then shows which products fill the slots it has counted. Where a team says range, this document is the range plan; where it says line, the same document is the line plan.
Is a range plan the same as a line plan?: Yes — one artifact under two vocabularies. The arithmetic is identical: units divided by depth gives options, options placed across price bands and phases, every cell tested against supplier minimums and the margin target. The surrounding words move together, so range architecture maps to line architecture, range review to line review, and phasing to drops. Neither word is owned by a market. A brand whose design team uses one vocabulary and whose sales team uses the other can hear both names for one document inside a single season, which is where the risk sits: two names invite two files, and two files have to be reconciled by somebody.
What is the difference between a range plan and range architecture?: Range architecture is a component of the range plan, not a synonym for it. The architecture is the set of rules: how many price bands the range runs, how far apart they sit, which category families have to be present in which band, and what job each band does. The range plan is those rules plus the numbers — the option count in every cell, the depth behind each option, the phase it lands in, and the margin the mix has to return. Architecture can be written down before anything is counted; the plan cannot.
How many options should a range plan have?: The count is derived rather than chosen. Divide the cell’s unit budget by the shallowest depth an option there can work at, which gives a ceiling, then check that ceiling against supplier minimums, the number of new styles development can sample and fit, and the space the range has to fill. Set the count inside the ceiling, because a cell planned at its ceiling has no room for an option that books short. A count borrowed from another season or another team is unusable until its unit is stated, since a count in styles and a count in style-colourways differ by a factor of the average number of colourways per style.
How do you decide breadth versus depth in a range plan?: Breadth and depth divide the same unit budget, so one is always bought with the other. Depth belongs where demand is already evidenced — carryover, core bodies, the shades or sizes the last hindsight showed selling out — because those units have somewhere to go. Breadth belongs where the season is testing, and it is affordable only down to the depth an option can still be manufactured and merchandised at. Plan too wide and every option in the cell sits near its minimum, so the run breaks early and the remaining stock reads as slow demand; plan too narrow and a price point goes unoffered, which leaves no trace in the sell-through at all because nobody could buy it.
How does a range plan feed the buy?: In sequence. The range plan sets how many options each cell holds, at what price, in which phase. The range board decides which products fill those slots and is reconciled back against the counts. The range is locked, and the assortment decides where each locked option goes — channel, cluster, door — and how deep. The buy then turns planned units into ordered quantities against the open-to-buy, and in wholesale the prebook tests the range with accounts before production. Four things have to survive every handoff: the option count in its stated unit, the price point, the phase, and the carryover flag.

// See it in RetailNorthstar

See how a line board works when it is connected to the plan. Canvas — the visual line board inside RetailNorthstar — links the board to open-to-buy, the assortment, sizing, purchase orders, and production, so the board stays live instead of going stale.

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