The line planning calendar

• ✓The calendar is worked backwards from the date that cannot move — the floor date, the ship window or the reset — not forwards from the strategy.
• ✓It has fourteen milestones, from season strategy and financial envelope to ship; the line lock sits near the middle, and more of the calendar lies after it than before it.
• ✓In the illustrative example the strategy is signed 60 weeks before the floor, the line locks 34 weeks before it and purchase orders are placed 22 weeks before it. Every duration is an assumption, not a benchmark.
• ✓Two or three seasons are in flight at once, so a calendar is only realistic once it is laid over the others and over the holidays.
• ✓The critical path runs through fabric and trim lead times, supplier minimums confirmed before the lock, and costs confirmed before the final review.
• ✓The end date changes by vertical — a delivery drop, a model-year launch, a retail partner’s reset, a dealer market, the gifting peak, a sport’s season — and so does the longest lead.
• ✓The three recurring failures are a lock that moves while the ship date does not, reviews held before costing, and line sheets released before the line is locked.

Why a line plan needs a calendar

A line plan says what the season contains. It does not say when any of it has to be decided, and most of what goes wrong in a season goes wrong on a date rather than in a number. The option count was right, but it was signed after the fabric for it had to be booked. The margin was right, but it was checked on target costs because the quotes arrived the week after the final review. The line sheet was right, but it went to accounts before the line was locked, so every later change became a correction.

The calendar is what prevents those. It gives every milestone a latest date, works out what has to exist before that date, and tells the teams downstream when their own work can start. A sourcing team that knows the line locks on a given Monday can line up sample capacity for that week; a sales team that knows when the line sheet releases can book appointments around it; a planning team that knows when the prebook closes can schedule the buy.

Two kinds of date. A calendar contains dates the business controls and dates it does not. The floor date is usually fixed by the delivery calendar the business has promised its stores or its accounts. The market week is fixed by the trade calendar or by key accounts, and a brand rarely moves it. A retail partner’s reset date is fixed by the retailer. Everything between those external anchors — the windows for hindsight, concept, development, costing and review — is the business’s own, and those internal windows are the only part of the calendar that can flex when something slips.

Who owns it. In most teams the calendar is held by merchandising or by planning, sometimes by a product operations or merchandise operations role in larger businesses. What matters is that one person publishes it, owns its versions and moves a date only with a recorded reason. A calendar that every function keeps its own copy of has as many versions as there are functions, and the lock date is whichever one the person in the room remembers.

What it is not. The line planning calendar is not the whole time-and-action calendar a sourcing team keeps for each order, with its lab dips, fit approvals, pre-production samples and inspections. It is the level above: the milestones that change what the line is, and the handful of supply-chain dates that bound them. A sourcing calendar sits underneath it, and the two have to agree on the purchase order date, the production start and the ex-factory date.

The fourteen milestones, in order

Every line planning calendar, whatever its vertical, runs through roughly the same fourteen milestones. Some businesses merge two — a small brand may hold its first line review and sign its architecture in one meeting — and some add more, such as a mid-development review or a second market. The order is the part that does not change, because each milestone consumes what the one before it produced.

The first eight milestones are planning: they change what the line is. The ninth, the lock, is the hinge. The last five are commitment and execution: they sell, buy, make and move the line the first nine decided. A milestone in the first group that slips can be absorbed by the windows around it; a milestone in the second group that slips usually cannot, because by then the dates are held by factories, freight and accounts.

How to schedule the calendar backwards from the floor date

A calendar built forwards from the strategy answers the question “when could the line arrive?”. A calendar built backwards from the end date answers the question the business actually has: “what is the latest each milestone can happen, and are we already late?” The method is eight steps, each subtracting one stretch of the season.

A dated calendar for a Fall 2028 first delivery

Every lead time below is illustrative — a planning assumption chosen so the dates can be checked, not an industry benchmark and not drawn from any brand. Your own lead times will differ by category, factory, country of origin and shipping mode; the method is what carries over.

Take a hypothetical wholesale-led apparel brand planning the first delivery of its Fall 2028 season, sourced from overseas factories and shipped by ocean. The floor date for the first delivery is Monday 7 August 2028. Every milestone in the example falls on a Monday, so each lead time is a whole number of weeks.

The supply half, worked back from the floor. Two weeks from the distribution centre to the floor puts the goods in the distribution centre on Monday 24 July 2028. Six weeks of ocean transit, port and customs put the ex-factory date on Monday 12 June 2028. Six weeks of production put the production start on Monday 1 May 2028. Eight weeks for stock-supported bulk fabric and trim to reach the factory put the purchase order date on Monday 6 March 2028 — 22 weeks before the floor.

The sell-in, worked back from the buy. Two weeks to consolidate bookings into the buy put the prebook close on Monday 21 February 2028. A four-week prebook window opens with market week on Monday 24 January 2028. The line sheet goes to accounts two weeks before market, on Monday 10 January 2028. Salesman samples take six weeks, so they have to be ordered by Monday 13 December 2027; the line sheet needs four weeks after the lock, which would also allow a lock on 13 December. Both constraints give the same date here, so the line locks on Monday 13 December 2027, 34 weeks before the floor.

The planning half, worked back from the lock. One week to close open items puts the final line review on Monday 6 December 2027. Confirmed costs and minimums are due a week earlier, on Monday 29 November 2027, after a four-week costing window that opens with proto approval on Monday 1 November 2027. Two proto rounds of four weeks each put the first line review on Monday 6 September 2027. Three weeks before that, the architecture and option counts are drafted, on Monday 16 August 2027; four weeks before that, the concept and trend direction is signed, on Monday 19 July 2027; two weeks before that, the hindsight is read, on Monday 5 July 2027; and three weeks before that, the season strategy and financial envelope are signed, on Monday 14 June 2027.

Check the sum. The leads between milestones are 3 + 2 + 4 + 3 + 8 + 4 + 1 + 1 + 4 + 2 + 4 + 2 + 8 + 6 + 6 + 2 weeks, which is 60. Sixty weeks before Monday 7 August 2028 is Monday 14 June 2027, the strategy date in the table. Read down the “weeks to floor” column and every step is the lead on the row above it: 60 − 3 = 57, 57 − 2 = 55, and so on down to 2 − 2 = 0.

What the example shows. Three things stand out. First, more of the calendar lies after the lock than before it: 26 weeks from strategy to lock, 34 from lock to floor. The planning half is where the line is decided, but it is the shorter half. Second, the lock is set from the market, not from development: it is the salesman-sample lead time and the line-sheet window, counted back from 24 January, that put it on 13 December. Development has to finish in time for that date; the date does not wait for development.

Third, the calendar runs straight through two holiday periods. The four weeks between the lock on 13 December 2027 and the line sheet on 10 January 2028 include the year-end break, so the working time to photograph, price and lay out the line sheet is shorter than four weeks. And market week opens on 24 January 2028, a period when many Asian factories are preparing to close for the Lunar New Year, so salesman samples have to be finished and shipped before those closures rather than in the last days of the sample window. Step 8 exists for exactly this.

Where it would change. Air freight instead of ocean shortens the supply half and costs more per unit; a domestic or near-shore factory shortens transit and may lengthen production; a direct-to-consumer brand drops the line sheet, the market and the prebook, and can lock later and buy sooner. Each of those is a different calendar built with the same eight steps — the example is the method, not the answer.

Where the four locks sit on the calendar

Locking the line describes a range that needs four locks — concept, range, commercial and buy — each fixing one class of attribute and leaving the others open. On the calendar, each lock is a milestone that already exists, which is the easiest way to make the four locks real rather than a vocabulary.

Read the dates as intervals. The concept lock on 6 September 2027 and the range lock on 13 December 2027 are 14 weeks apart: that is the time development has to fill the frame. The range lock and the commercial lock on 10 January 2028 are four weeks apart: that is the time to turn a locked line into confirmed prices. The commercial lock and the buy lock on 6 March 2028 are eight weeks apart: that is the time the line spends being sold before it is bought.

A business that runs a single sign-off has, in effect, put all four on one date — and on the calendar it is visible what that costs. Put the single sign-off at the range lock and prices are fixed four weeks before they need to be, before wholesale pricing and the margin reread at wholesale are done; put it at the buy and development works for six months against a line that can still be re-scoped.

Two or three seasons in flight at once

A season’s calendar is longer than the gap between seasons, so seasons overlap. In the illustrative calendar each season runs 60 weeks from strategy to floor, and a two-season business starts a new one every 26 weeks. Sixty divided by 26 is about 2.3, so at any date two or three seasons are in planning or production, and another is on the floor. A business with four seasons or monthly drops has more.

The table reads the same calendar for four consecutive seasons, each starting 26 weeks after the last, at five dates on the Fall 2028 clock. Week numbers are counted from each season’s own strategy date; Fall 2027’s floor is week 60 of its own calendar, and it is read here as on the floor for an illustrative 26 weeks before it closes.

The collision weeks. Look at the first row. In the week the Fall 2028 strategy is signed, Spring 2028 is locking its line and Fall 2027 is leaving the factory. The same merchandising and planning team is in all three conversations, and the strategy for one season is being written in the same week the previous season’s final open items are being closed. The third row repeats the pattern a season later: Fall 2028 locks the week Spring 2029 signs its strategy. On this calendar, every lock lands on the same week as the next season’s strategy, because the two are exactly 26 weeks apart in their own calendars.

That is a scheduling choice, not a law, and it is the kind of collision step 8 is for. Moving the strategy milestone a week or two earlier — so it is signed before the previous season’s lock week rather than in it — costs nothing on the critical path, because the front windows have room, and it gives the strategy the team’s attention.

The hindsight gap. The overlap also explains why the hindsight is always partial. Fall 2027 reaches the floor on Monday 9 August 2027, five weeks after the Fall 2028 hindsight milestone on 5 July 2027 — so when Fall 2028’s hindsight is read, the comparable season has not yet sold a unit, and the read has to rest on the last full season and on Spring 2027. Fall 2027’s first four-week read lands on Monday 6 September 2027, the week of Fall 2028’s first line review. And if Fall 2027 sells for an illustrative 26 weeks, it closes around Monday 7 February 2028, eight weeks after Fall 2028 has locked on 13 December 2027.

The calendar answer is to schedule the reads rather than wish for them: put the comparable season’s first read on the first line review’s agenda, where carryover calls are still cheap, and put a second read before the final review for the carryover options whose call depends on how they sell. The rest of the full-season hindsight goes to the season after. This is the same logic as balancing carryover and newness, applied to dates.

The critical path: what has to happen before what

Most milestones on the calendar can slip a little without moving the floor date, because the windows around them have some room. A few cannot. The critical path is the chain of dependencies whose lead times are longer than the window the calendar gives them, and on a line planning calendar it runs through three things: fabric and trim lead times, supplier minimums, and costing.

Fabric and trim lead times

The calendar gives fabric and trim eight weeks, from the purchase order on 6 March 2028 to the production start on 1 May 2028. A stock-supported fabric that the mill can deliver in eight weeks fits that window and can ride on the purchase order. Anything longer has to be committed before the buy is final.

Count back from 1 May 2028. A custom-dyed trim with an illustrative 10-week lead has to be ordered by 21 February 2028 — the day the prebook closes, before bookings have been consolidated into a buy. A developed fabric with an illustrative 12-week lead has to be committed by 7 February 2028, two weeks into the prebook window, on partial bookings. A custom-developed fabric with an illustrative 20-week lead has to be booked by 13 December 2027 — the day the line locks. For that fabric, the choice of material is final at the lock, and the quantity is committed months before anyone has booked it.

There are three ways to live with that, and a calendar should say which one each long-lead material uses. Commit the fabric at risk on the planned quantity and accept the exposure; reserve greige or mill capacity early and commit the color or finish later; or platform the fabric across several options so that a booking for one fabric is spread across many, which lowers the risk that any one option’s booking is wrong. See fabric platforming.

What the calendar should not do is give every material the same lead and discover the long ones at the buy. Ask sourcing for the lead time of every fabric and trim that has to be developed, at the concept milestone, and put each one that exceeds the PO-to-production window on the calendar as its own dated milestone.

Minimums confirmed before the lock

Supplier minimums — per option at the factory, per fabric and color at the mill — put a floor under depth and so a ceiling on the option count. A line locked before minimums are confirmed can lock options that cannot be made at the planned quantity at quoted cost, and the problem surfaces at the buy, when the only fixes are a surcharge, a consolidation onto a shared fabric or a cut after the line sheet has gone out.

On the calendar, minimums are confirmed with costing, by 29 November 2027 in the example, so the final review a week later can check every option against its minimum and fix the failures while the line can still change by swap. The arithmetic of a minimum against an option count is in what is line planning.

Costing before the final review

The final review asks whether the line can be bought at the planned margin, and it can only answer that on confirmed costs. If costs arrive after the review, the review signs counts on target costs, and every cost that comes in above target turns into a post-lock change: re-tier, re-engineer, cut or accept the lower margin.

So the calendar puts confirmed costs a week ahead of the final review, with the date written down and owned by sourcing. Where some costs cannot be confirmed in time — a factory still quoting, a new construction still being engineered — the calendar should say so, and the final review should carry those options as explicitly open rather than as costed.

One calendar per delivery: drops and channels

The example is the calendar for one delivery. A season with several deliveries has several end dates, and the supply half of the calendar is worked back separately from each one, while the planning half is usually shared. How many deliveries a season should have, and what each carries, is set out in planning drops on the line board.

Take a second Fall 2028 delivery on the floor four weeks after the first, on Monday 4 September 2028. Worked back alone with the same illustrative leads, its purchase orders could wait until Monday 3 April 2028, four weeks after the first delivery’s, and its lock could wait until Monday 10 January 2028.

Wholesale-led: one market, one lock. If both deliveries are shown at the same market week, the second delivery cannot lock in January — it has to be on the line sheet that goes out on 10 January, and its salesman samples have to be at market on 24 January. So it locks with the first delivery on 13 December 2027, 38 weeks before its own floor date rather than 34. What the second delivery gains is not a later lock but a later buy: four more weeks of booking data before its purchase orders are placed on 3 April.

Direct-to-consumer-led: a lock per drop. Without a market, each drop can lock on its own calendar, as late as its supply half allows. The second drop in the example could lock on 10 January 2028 and use four more weeks of development — or of reading how the comparable drop sold. This is one of the real advantages of a direct-to-consumer calendar: later drops in the season can respond to earlier ones.

Both at once. A brand that sells the same line wholesale and direct runs the wholesale calendar for the line and can hold direct-only options or colors to a later lock, as long as they are flagged as their own cells. The risk is the reverse: a direct-only addition made after the wholesale lock that quietly uses fabric or factory capacity the wholesale buy was counting on.

How the calendar differs by vertical

The fourteen milestones hold in every vertical. What changes is the date the calendar is worked back from, and the lead time that sets the critical path. Each vertical below is described in its own terms; the durations are left out on purpose, because they vary too much by business to be useful as numbers.

• Apparel — by delivery drop. The calendar is worked back from each delivery’s floor date, and the planning half is shared across the season’s deliveries. Developed fabrics and custom trims run longer than the window between the purchase order and production, so fabric commitments are made ahead of the final buy; carryover bodies in carryover fabrics are the ones that can ride on the purchase order. Each delivery’s line has to merchandise on its own, so the lock signs the line delivery by delivery even when it signs them on one date.
• Footwear — model year and long development. Core models carry over for several model years with colorway refreshes, and those run on a calendar much like apparel’s. A new last, mold or outsole does not: tooling has to exist before a sample can be made. On the example’s dates, if new outsole tooling took an illustrative 16 weeks before a sample could be made, it would have to be released by Monday 17 May 2027 for protos to start after the first line review on 6 September 2027 — four weeks before the season strategy is even signed on 14 June. So new bottoms are decided on an earlier track, often a model year ahead, and the season’s calendar decides colorways on bottoms already committed. Every colorway also commits a full size run of pairs, plus width fits where they are offered, so the minimum check before lock is a check on runs, not units. See the footwear and accessories guide.
• Beauty — shade launches and reset dates. The end date is usually the retail partner’s gondola or planogram reset, and the retailer runs its own calendar ahead of it: its own line review, then item set-up, then delivery to its distribution centre, all well before the reset. The brand’s lock is therefore set by the retailer’s submission dates rather than by its own development, and a shade that misses a reset waits for the next one. Formula development, stability and compatibility testing, and packaging components such as custom components or decorated packaging often set the critical path; testers and their replacement on period-after-opening dates need their own quantities on the calendar. Shade launches inside an existing franchise run on a shorter track than a new franchise. See the beauty and personal care guide.
• Home and furniture — long lead and the dealer market. SKUs with long lead times, container minimums and ocean freight fix the buy months ahead of the floor set, so the calendar’s supply half is long and the lock is early. The line is introduced at a market or trade show and committed through dealer prebooks, so the market date anchors the lock in the same way it does for wholesale apparel, and the calendar unit is usually the model year rather than the season. Landed cost moves with freight between the lock and the container arrival, so the margin check on the calendar is a landed-cost check. See the home, outdoor and sporting goods guide.
• Toys — the trade-show cycle and the gifting peak. The line is weighted to the holiday gifting peak, and retail buyers review and commit to it at trade shows and in their own line reviews long before the peak, so the lock is set by when the line has to be shown rather than by when it has to ship. Tooling for new items and safety testing before shipment set the critical path and cap how late a concept can enter. Licensed items live inside their license windows, so their slots have dates that expire with the license and have to be placed on the calendar against it. See the toys, juvenile and jewelry guide.
• Outdoor and sporting goods — prebook by sport. Seasonality runs by sport — winter sports, cycling, running, team sports each have their own season start — so a multi-sport brand runs several calendars, each worked back from its sport’s season and each with its own prebook window for specialty dealers. The prebook is both the sell-in and the production signal, so the lock is set by the prebook window, and technical fabrics and components with long leads set the critical path. Equipment lines carry over across model years, so newness is often a model-year changeover planned on its own track. See the home, outdoor and sporting goods guide.

The question is the same everywhere: what is the date that cannot move, and which lead time is longer than the window the calendar gives it? The per-vertical definitions of one option, which change what the lock signs, are on how to build a line plan.

Where line planning calendars fail

Three failures recur, and each is a mechanism rather than a lapse — it happens to careful teams, because each decision that causes it is reasonable on the day it is made. All three are visible on the calendar weeks before they are visible in the season.

The lock date moves, but the ship date does not

Development runs late, a review is rescheduled, a key concept needs another fitting, and the lock moves two weeks. The floor date does not move, because it has been promised to stores and accounts, and the production and shipping windows behind it are held by factories and freight. So the slip lands entirely on the windows after the lock, which are the ones least able to absorb it.

On the example’s dates: the lock slips from 13 December to 27 December 2027. Market week still opens on 24 January 2028, so salesman samples now have four weeks, not six — ordered on the planned six-week lead they would arrive on 7 February, two weeks into a four-week prebook window. The line sheet is still due on 10 January, two weeks after the slipped lock instead of four, and those two weeks are the year-end holiday. And the custom-developed fabric with a 20-week lead still has to be booked on 13 December to make production on 1 May, so it is booked on a line that is not yet locked.

Each of the outcomes has a cost: samples are expedited, the line sheet goes out late or incomplete, or it goes out before the line is locked, and the fabric is committed at risk. The counter is to treat the lock as the calendar’s fixed point in the planning half. When development runs late, the question at the rescheduled review is not “when can we lock?” but “what do we lock on the original date, and what do we hold open?” — locking the options that are ready and carrying the rest as named open items with their own late date, as locking the line describes for post-lock changes.

Reviews scheduled before costing

Review dates are set early in the season, often by the availability of the people who have to attend, and costing is scheduled afterwards by working forwards from development. The result is a final review that falls before confirmed costs arrive. The review then signs counts on target costs, and the cost check happens after the lock.

An illustrative case: a Better option planned at $75 retail and a $30 target cost, a 60% initial markup, comes back quoted at $33 the week after the final review. Its markup falls to ($75 − $33) ÷ $75 = 56%. At the review, that option could have been re-tiered, re-engineered or swapped for a reserve concept in the same cell. After the lock, each of those is a post-lock change with downstream work already started, and the most likely outcome is that the lower margin is simply accepted.

The counter is to schedule backwards: the final review date is fixed from the lock, and the costing date is fixed from the final review, with a gap between them. If sourcing cannot confirm costs by that date, the calendar is wrong, not the review — move the costing window earlier, or plan the final review with the uncosted options explicitly open.

Line sheets released before the line is locked

Market dates do not move, so when the lock slips the line sheet is often released anyway, from a line that is still changing. Suppose the lock slips to Monday 17 January 2028 while the line sheet goes out on its planned date of 10 January. For the week in between, every change to the line is a correction to a document accounts are already reading, one week before market. Corrections that arrive after an account has planned its buy around the first version are the ones that damage the relationship.

The counter is to release a line sheet only from a locked version, and when the lock and the line sheet cannot both make their dates, to release a partial line sheet of the locked options and add the rest as a dated supplement. A smaller line sheet that is right is better than a complete one that changes. The internal and external documents are told apart in internal vs wholesale line sheet.

Five more show up often enough to name:

• A calendar built forwards. A calendar that starts at the strategy and adds each window produces the date the line could arrive. It is almost always later than the date it has to, and the difference is discovered at the buy.
• One calendar for every category. Outerwear with developed fabrics and new constructions needs a longer development window and earlier fabric commitments than a carryover knit. A single calendar is either too long for one or too short for the other. Run the supply half and the development window by category where they genuinely differ.
• Review dates without input dates. A review is only as current as its prework. Each review on the calendar needs an input deadline — board current, counts loaded, costs in — usually a week before it, and an owner for that deadline.
• Holidays and closures left off. Year-end breaks, summer closures and factory shutdowns sit across the calendar every season. A calendar that ignores them has fewer working weeks than it shows.
• A calendar with no versions. When a date moves and the old one is overwritten, nobody can see how far the season has slipped, and next season starts from a calendar that never actually happened. Keep the planned and actual date for every milestone.

Keeping a calendar people plan their weeks from

A calendar is only useful if every function plans its own work from the same version. Seven columns turn a list of dates into a calendar that can be run: the milestone, its planned and actual date, its distance to the floor, its input deadline, its owner, what it releases and the calendar version it belongs to.

• Publish it before the season starts. The calendar for a season should exist before its strategy milestone, so the strategy itself has a date. In practice that means building the next season’s calendar during the current one, at the point the current calendar’s actual dates are known.
• Read it weekly, with one question. Which milestones in the next four weeks are at risk, and what does each one release? A weekly read of a calendar is short; a calendar that is read only at reviews is out of date at every one of them.
• Make slips visible. When a milestone moves, record the new date beside the old one and say which later milestones the move pushes. A two-week slip in the planning half that is absorbed by a later window should still be recorded, because the next slip has less room.
• Tie the reviews to the record. Each review on the calendar ends with a decision log, and the line review agenda and sign-off template carries one. The calendar says when the review happens; the log says what it decided.
• Hindsight the calendar, too. At the end of a season, compare planned and actual dates for every milestone. The windows that always slip are the ones to lengthen next season, and the ones that always finish early are where time can be found.

In a small team. A small brand often runs the whole calendar through two or three people, and the risk is not complexity but the absence of anyone whose job is to say a date has passed. The same discipline applies at a smaller scale: an end date, a lock date worked back from it, a costing date before the final review, and a written record of every move. A calendar on one page that is read every week is enough.

On files or on a platform. A line planning calendar can be run on a shared spreadsheet; every date on this page is spreadsheet arithmetic. The difficulty is the same one that affects the line plan and the board: the calendar, the plan and the board are three records, and a lock that moves on one and not the others is how they start to disagree. The line plan workbook holds the counts the calendar’s milestones sign, and visual line planning software sets out what separates a board tied to the plan from a picture of it.

Ten questions to ask before the calendar goes out

A calendar is ready to publish when every one of these has an answer that the person who owns the milestone is willing to sign. A question nobody can answer is a date the season will discover on its own.

1. Is the end date stated precisely — floor, ship window or reset — and is the last milestone named with it?
2. Is every lead time stated in weeks, labelled as the team’s own assumption, and based on what the business actually achieves?
3. Is the market week taken from the trade calendar or the key accounts, rather than derived?
4. Is the lock date set by the tighter of the line-sheet window and the salesman-sample lead time?
5. Are confirmed costs and supplier minimums due before the final review, with a gap between them?
6. Is every fabric and trim whose lead exceeds the PO-to-production window on the calendar as its own dated milestone?
7. Does each review have an input deadline and an owner for it?
8. Has the calendar been laid over the other seasons in flight, and are any locks or final reviews in the same week as another season’s?
9. Have office and factory holiday closures been checked against every milestone on the critical path?
10. Who owns the calendar, which version is this, and where are the planned and actual dates kept?

The line board checklist covers the other half of readiness — whether the board itself is ready for the review the calendar has scheduled.

• What is line planning? The process the calendar schedules →
• How to run a line review, step by step →
• Locking the line: what sign-off commits →
• How to build a line plan, step by step →
• Planning drops on the line board →
• Hindsighting the line →
• Costing the line to a margin target →
• Internal vs wholesale line sheet →
• Line review agenda and sign-off template →
• Line plan (glossary) →
• Line review (glossary) →
• Prebook (glossary) →
• Line plan vs assortment plan (retail-plan.com) →

Frequently asked questions

What is a line planning calendar?

A line planning calendar is the sequence of dated milestones that takes a season’s line from strategy to a locked line and a released line sheet, and on through the buy, production and shipping, worked backwards from the date the product has to be in store or ship. It turns the line planning process into dates: when the strategy is signed, when each line review happens, when the line locks, when the line sheet goes to accounts and when purchase orders are placed.

What are the milestones in a line planning calendar, in order?

Fourteen, in order: season strategy and financial envelope, hindsight, concept and trend direction, line architecture and option counts, first line review, development and proto, costing, final line review, line lock, line sheet release, sales market and prebook, buy and PO placement, production, and ship. Brands that do not sell wholesale skip the line sheet and the market, and brands with several deliveries run the later milestones once per delivery.

How far ahead of the floor date does line planning start?

It depends on the vertical, the sourcing model and the channel, so work it out from your own lead times. In the illustrative wholesale apparel calendar on this page, the season strategy is signed 60 weeks before the floor date, the line locks 34 weeks before it and purchase orders are placed 22 weeks before it. Those durations are planning assumptions chosen for the example, not industry benchmarks.

Why is a line planning calendar worked backwards?

Because the end date is the one that cannot move: the floor date, the ship window promised to accounts or the retail partner’s reset. Working forward from the strategy produces the date the line could arrive, which is usually later than the date it has to. Working backwards from the end date produces the latest date each milestone can happen, and shows at once whether the season is already late.

How many seasons are in flight at once?

Usually two or three, plus one on the floor. In the illustrative calendar each season runs 60 weeks from strategy to floor and seasons start 26 weeks apart, so 60 ÷ 26 is about 2.3. In the week the Fall 2028 strategy is signed, Spring 2028 is locking its line and Fall 2027 is leaving the factory, and the same people work on all three.

What has to be finished before the line locks?

Three things: confirmed costs, so the final line review reruns the margin on real quotes rather than targets; supplier minimums confirmed per option, so no option is locked below the quantity a factory or mill will make; and the long-lead fabrics and trims identified, because some of them have to be booked on or before the lock date. In the illustrative calendar a 20-week custom-developed fabric has to be booked on 13 December 2027, the day the line locks.

What happens when the line lock slips but the ship date does not?

The slip lands on the windows after the lock, because production and shipping are already fixed by the floor date. In the illustrative calendar, a two-week slip from 13 December to 27 December 2027 leaves four weeks, not six, for salesman samples before market week opens on 24 January 2028, and two weeks, not four, to build a line sheet that is still due on 10 January. Sampling is expedited, the line sheet goes out late, or it goes out before the line is locked.

How does the line planning calendar differ by vertical?

The milestones hold, but the end date and the longest lead change. Apparel works back from each delivery’s floor date; footwear runs new lasts, molds and outsole tooling on an earlier track inside a model-year calendar; beauty works back from the retail partner’s reset date and shade launches; home and furniture lock before the dealer market because production and ocean freight on long-lead SKUs fix the buy months ahead; toys are shown to buyers long before the gifting peak; and outdoor and sporting goods lock for the prebook window of each sport’s season.