What is a line plan?

• ✓A line plan is a document, not a process and not a picture: one header, one row per planned option slot, and totals rows that reconcile to money and limits set outside the plan.
• ✓The grain is the slot. State the counting unit in the header — style-colorway in apparel, pair-run in footwear, shade in beauty, model-in-finish in home, design-in-metal in jewelry — or the count cannot be checked against the board or the buy.
• ✓Twelve columns do the work: identity, class, tier and retail, target cost and markup, units, receipt dollars at cost and retail, delivery, carryover or new, platform, channel, status and owner.
• ✓Seven totals must reconcile: cost to the open-to-buy, retail to the receipts plan, count to the ceiling, blended markup to target, newness to target, units per platform to minimums, units per delivery to the calendar.
• ✓The plan is cut in five versions — strategy draft, architecture lock, post-review, post-lock, hindsight — and each adds columns without rewriting the ones before it.
• ✓Four readers read four different things: the planner reads reconciliation and slack, the designer reads the open slots and their platforms, the buyer reads deliveries and channels, finance reads cost against envelope and what is still unconfirmed.
• ✓The recurring defects are counts without units, a plan that cannot be summed, cells with no owner, a unit mismatch with the board, and target costs that never become quotes.

What a line plan is, and what it is not

A line plan is the agreement, in numbers, about what a season’s line will be allowed to be. It is written before design draws anything, which is the whole point: it turns the money the financial plan gave the category into a frame of empty, counted, costed slots, so that development fills a frame rather than drawing a pile of ideas that the buy then has to cut. Every slot in it is a promise in both directions. To design it says: this is a place in the line that will exist, at this price, in this delivery, on this fabric, at this depth — fill it. To finance it says: this is a claim on the open-to-buy of exactly units times cost, and all the claims sum to no more than the envelope.

It is not the line board. The board is the same counted slots turned into image-first cards, where design and merchandising decide which bodies and colors fill them and whether the result reads as a range; a plan cannot show that eleven Better options are nine variations of one idea, and a board cannot show that a cell is below the depth a factory will make at quoted cost. It is not the line sheet, which is written after the lock for accounts and carries wholesale prices, minimums and delivery windows. It is not the assortment plan, which takes the locked options and decides which channels, clusters and doors each goes to and how deep. And it is not the line planning process, which is the sequence of strategy, architecture, development, reviews, lock and handoff that the plan is the numeric record of.

Usage varies on one point worth stating. Some teams’ line plans also carry the style list — the plan becomes the design-and-merchandising agreement on what the collection contains, not only the envelope around it. That wider sense is the one used in line plan vs assortment plan. This page uses the narrower sense throughout, because it is the sense that keeps the plan and the board separable: the plan says how many; the board says which. In practice the two senses meet at the post-review version, when slots acquire style numbers, and the anatomy below covers that version too.

One more thing it is not: a spreadsheet of option counts with nothing to multiply them by. A column of counts by category is the strategy draft of a line plan, not a line plan. The document earns its name when every count has units, every unit has a cost and a retail, and the sums of those reconcile to something the plan did not set for itself.

The header block: what the plan states once

Above the rows, a line plan states the things every row inherits. Most of the arguments a plan gets into later are arguments that the header should have settled. Six things belong in it, and a plan missing any of them is a plan two people can read differently.

The counting unit is the field most often missing, and the one that does the most damage when it is. A plan that says a category holds twenty-four options means twenty-four styles to one reader and twenty-four style-colorways to another, and the two differ by the average number of colorways per style — a category that averages two or three colorways per style is counting two or three times over. The board will be counted in style-colorways because that is what a card is; if the plan was counted in styles, the board will look two or three times over its count at the first review, and the room will spend the meeting discovering that nobody is wrong. The counting units and the conversion arithmetic between them are on what counts as one option.

The envelope belongs in the header for a different reason. A plan that carries its own targets only in a totals row can be made to pass by editing the target; a plan whose header states the open-to-buy at cost, the receipts plan at retail, the margin target and the option ceiling as inputs — with where they came from — has to pass against numbers it did not set. The price architecture is there so that every row inherits its tier’s planned retail and target cost from one place: when the Better retail moves from $90 to $95, nine rows move with it and the markup column recomputes, rather than nine cells being edited by hand and one being missed. See line architecture: good, better, best for how the ladder itself is set.

The grain: one row is one planned option slot

A line plan is built at one of two grains, and the choice decides what the document can and cannot do. At the coarser grain, one row is one cell — a category, a price tier and a delivery — carrying an option count, a planned depth per option and the units that count times depth produces. That is the grain of the strategy draft and of the summary tables that go to leadership. At the finer grain, one row is one planned option slot: a single place in the line, with its own units, retail, cost, delivery, flag, platform and channel. That is the grain of the working plan, and it is the one this page describes, because the cell grain can always be produced from it by summing and the reverse is not true.

The slot grain matters because slots are not identical inside a cell. In the illustrative plan further down, the Good tier in the first drop holds five slots: a carryover anchor at 700 units, a second carryover at 500, two new poplin bodies at 500 and a new linen body at 400. At cell grain that is five options at an average depth of 520; at slot grain it is a hero that is the deepest thing in the category and a test that is the shallowest, and the two should not be bought, costed or reviewed the same way. A board card can be matched to a slot; it cannot be matched to an average.

What one slot stands for changes by vertical, and the header has to say which. The unit is whatever the buy will be placed in and the board will be counted in, which is not always a style-colorway.

Two consequences follow from the grain. First, a slot exists before the option that fills it, so it needs an identity of its own — a slot ID that the board card, the costing sheet and eventually the style number all key back to. A plan that waits for style numbers to identify its rows cannot be locked at architecture, because there is nothing yet to lock. Second, units live on the slot, not on the cell: when a card is cut at line review, the slot’s units go back to the cell for redistribution or to the reserve, and the plan shows that; when a card is added without a slot, the cell’s units are divided one more way and every slot in the cell gets shallower, and the plan shows that too. A plan at cell grain shows neither; it shows a count that went from five to six.

The columns a real line plan carries

Twelve columns, read in five groups below, do the work. Some are inherited from the header through the tier, some are set per slot, and three are computed. Each column exists because some reader downstream has a question only it can answer; a column nobody reads is a column that will be wrong by the second version.

Identity and placement

The slot ID is the key everything else hangs off, and it should be dull: a tier letter and a sequence number is enough. It should never be the style number, because the style number arrives late and changes, and never the row number in a spreadsheet, because rows get sorted. The category or class column is the node of the merchandise hierarchy the slot rolls up to; it is how the plan reconciles to a financial plan written by category and month rather than by slot and drop. In a category plan it is the same on every row and still worth carrying, because the season roll-up will stack this plan under the others.

Price and margin

Price tier and planned retail are inherited from the price architecture in the header; a slot planned off its tier’s retail is either a mistake or a deliberate price point within the tier, and the plan should say which. Target cost is the landed cost the slot must come in at for its markup to hold, and initial markup is a computed column — (retail − cost) ÷ retail — never typed. Until quotes confirm, the cost column is a target and the status column should say so; after the commercial lock, it is a quote, and the markup that is signed is the one that ships. How target cost is derived from a margin goal, and where the cost base moves after the plan is set, is on costing the line to a margin target.

Depth and money

Planned units is the single most important number on the row, because every reconciliation is a sum of it multiplied by something. It is set per slot from the tier’s planned depth, adjusted for the slot’s role: the anchor carryover deeper, the test shallower, the hero deepest in its tier. Receipt dollars at cost — units times target cost — is the slot’s claim on the open-to-buy. Receipt dollars at retail — units times planned retail — is the slot’s contribution to the receipts plan and the base the blended markup is weighted on. Both are computed; both should appear on the row, because a reader checking one slot should not need a calculator.

Timing and newness

The delivery column places the slot in a drop, floor set, launch window or prebook window. It is what lets the plan be read by delivery as well as by tier, and a delivery read is where most seasons find their first problem: a line that sums for the season and lands four-fifths of its newness in the second drop. The carryover or new flag is set at architecture — the carryover slots the hindsight has earned are placed first, by name, and the remainder of each cell is new — and it drives two rates that have to be read together: newness by slot and newness by unit. They differ whenever carryover is bought deeper than newness, which is the common case. The per-slot decision is on balancing carryover and newness; the delivery rhythm on planning drops on the line board.

Supply, distribution and state

The fabric platform or material group column is the one most plans leave out and most plans need, because option counts that pass factory minimums per style routinely fail mill minimums per fabric: six fabrics at 350 units each when the mill wants the equivalent of 500 garments per fabric. Summing units by platform is only possible if every slot names one. Channel flags — all, direct only, wholesale only, a named account exclusive — exist so the plan can be summed by channel and delivery; without them a season can pass every total and still hand wholesale a delivery with nothing for an account to book. Status is the column that tells each reader what can still move. A small, fixed vocabulary is enough: planned, proposed, reconciled, locked, cost open, swapped, cut. Owner and notes are the columns that make the plan survive a review: a cell with a named owner and a one-line reason gets confirmed in a sentence; a cell with neither gets re-argued from the start.

The totals rows a line plan must reconcile to

A line plan’s totals are not a footer. They are the reason the document exists: the point at which a set of slot-level intentions is tested against money and limits that were set before the plan and outside it. Seven reconciliations, and a plan is not finished until all seven are either passing or flagged with an owner and a date.

The two money totals come first because they are the ones finance will read. Receipts at cost against the open-to-buy is the hard constraint: an overspend here is corrected at the buy, after development, sampling and costing money have been spent on slots that will then be cut. Receipts at retail against the financial plan’s receipt line is the softer one — a plan that lands under it has, in effect, planned not to make the sales plan it inherited, which is sometimes right and should always be visible. Where the open-to-buy itself comes from, and how an envelope at cost becomes a supportable option count, is worked through on what is line planning.

The blended markup against target is the total that passes by tier and fails in blend. A plan can hold every tier at or above its target markup and still miss the blended target, because the blend is weighted by retail dollars and a plan that puts most of its units in the lowest-markup tier blends toward that tier. The option count only has the same property when the category ceiling is set below the sum of the tier ceilings. The newness share is the reverse case: by slot it is usually comfortably above target, because new slots are many and shallow; by unit it is often below, because carryover is few and deep. Both numbers are true and both should be on the page.

The last two — units per platform and units per delivery — are the supply-side and calendar-side tests, and they are the ones that cannot be run at all unless the plan carries a platform column and a delivery column on every row. A plan that reconciles its first five totals and has no platform column has not been tested against the thing most likely to make it unbuyable.

An illustrative line plan: women’s dresses, three tiers, two drops, twenty-four slots

Every figure below is illustrative — not a benchmark, not drawn from any brand, and chosen so the arithmetic can be checked. It is a post-lock version, which is the version most people mean when they ask to see a line plan: counts locked, two slots still cost open.

The header, in prose. Category: women’s dresses. Season: a hypothetical spring with two drops. Counting unit: style-colorway. Version: post-lock, dated. Owner: the category planner, with merchandising signing the lock. Envelope: $250,000 open-to-buy at cost; $640,000 planned receipts at retail in the financial plan; a blended initial markup target of 61%; an option ceiling of 28, set at the architecture stage as 12 Good, 10 Better and 6 Best from the budget and the factory minimums. Price architecture: Good at $60 retail and a $24.00 target cost, a 60.0% initial markup; Better at $90 and $34.20, 62.0%; Best at $140 and $51.80, 63.0%. Planned depths of 500, 300 and 150 units per slot, with the anchor carryover deeper and the tests shallower. Factory minimums of 350, 200 and 120 units per slot in the three tiers.

Read down the units column and the shape of the category is visible before any style exists. G-01 at 700 units is the anchor: the carryover jersey body that sells every season and is bought deepest. G-05, G-09 and G-10 at 400 are the linen-blend slots, planned shallower because linen is a newer platform for the category. B-09 at 200 units is a test on a new lyocell twill, direct only, sitting exactly at the Better factory minimum. S-01 at 200 units is the Best hero, the deepest slot in its tier by a third. None of that reads at cell grain; at cell grain the Good tier in the first drop is five options at an average of 520 units.

By tier, Good holds ten slots and 4,900 units: 700 + 500 + 500 + 500 + 400 in the first drop is 2,600, and 500 + 500 + 500 + 400 + 400 in the second is 2,300. At $24.00 that is $117,600 at cost, and at $60 it is $294,000 at retail; (294,000 − 117,600) ÷ 294,000 is 60.0%. Better holds nine slots and 2,550 units — 1,200 in the first drop, 1,350 in the second — for $87,210 at cost and $229,500 at retail, a 62.0% markup. Best holds five slots and 800 units — 350 and 450 — for $41,440 at cost and $112,000 at retail, 63.0%. The category sums to 24 slots, 8,250 units, $246,250 at cost and $635,500 at retail, and the blended initial markup is (635,500 − 246,250) ÷ 635,500 = 389,250 ÷ 635,500, which is 61.25%.

By delivery, the first drop holds eleven slots and 4,150 units: 2,600 Good, 1,200 Better and 350 Best, for 62,400 + 41,040 + 18,130 = $121,570 at cost and 156,000 + 108,000 + 49,000 = $313,000 at retail. The second holds thirteen slots and 4,100 units: 2,300 + 1,350 + 450, for 55,200 + 46,170 + 23,310 = $124,680 at cost and 138,000 + 121,500 + 63,000 = $322,500 at retail. The drops sum to the same 8,250 units, $246,250 and $635,500 as the tiers do, which is the first test a plan has to pass: the tier read and the delivery read are two sums of one table, so they cannot disagree. The units are nearly level across the two drops, but the newness is not: three of the first drop’s eleven slots are carryover and only two of the second drop’s thirteen are, so the second drop is the newer one by slot and by unit, which is a deliberate choice to land the story after the anchors.

By platform, cotton jersey carries 2,200 units across four slots, cotton poplin 2,100 across five, linen blend 1,700 across five, viscose crepe 1,400 across five, silk-blend satin 500 across three and lyocell twill 350 across two — 8,250 again. This is the read that catches what the tier and drop reads cannot: the lyocell twill platform carries only 350 units across two slots, both cost open, so if the mill’s minimum for that fabric is above 350 garments’ worth, the platform fails even though both slots clear their factory minimums. That is a question the plan can now ask sourcing, with the number attached.

The reconciliation reads as follows. At cost, $246,250 against a $250,000 envelope leaves $3,750, or 1.5%, which is the plan’s entire room for a cost move. At retail, $635,500 against the financial plan’s $640,000 is $4,500 under, or 0.7%, close enough to call planned but worth a line in the notes. Twenty-four slots against a ceiling of 28 leaves four slots of room, distributed as two in Good, one in Better and one in Best. The blended markup of 61.25% against a 61% target passes by a quarter of a point. Newness by slot is 19 of 24, about 79%, above an illustrative 75% target; newness by unit is 5,900 of 8,250, about 72%, because the five carryover slots carry 2,350 units between them — an average of 470 against about 311 for a new slot. Both newness figures are true, and a plan that reports only the first will surprise the buy.

Now the sensitivity, which is why the headroom column exists. Suppose the two cost-open slots confirm at target but the silk-blend satin quotes come back worse, and the Best tier’s cost moves from $51.80 to $56.00. Best receipts at cost become 800 × $56 = $44,800, $3,360 over the $41,440 planned. Total cost becomes $249,610 — still $390 inside the $250,000 envelope, so the first reconciliation still passes. But Best’s markup falls to (140 − 56) ÷ 140 = 60.0%, and the blend falls to (635,500 − 249,610) ÷ 635,500, about 60.7%, which misses the 61% target. Two totals rows, two different answers to the same cost move: the envelope holds and the margin does not. A plan that carries only the envelope reconciliation would call this a pass. What to do about it — re-cost, re-tier, cut a Best slot, or accept the margin knowingly — is a line planning decision, and the point of the document is that the decision is made on the plan, before the buy, with the arithmetic on the page.

The same plan can be run as working formulas in the line plan workbook, whose sample category follows the knit-tops example on how to build a line plan rather than this one; the structure — slots, tiers, drops, minimums, the dollar-weighted blended markup — is identical. For a category-level plan without tiers or drops, the line plan template on retail-plan.com is simpler.

How to read a line plan: four readers, four questions

The same table is read four ways, and a plan is laid out well when each reader can find their answer without rebuilding it. The planner reads the totals, the designer reads the open slots, the buyer reads the deliveries and finance reads the money and what is still unconfirmed.

The planner starts at the bottom. Do the seven totals reconcile, and where is the slack? In the illustrative plan the answer is that everything passes and the slack is thin: $3,750 at cost and a quarter of a point of markup. The planner’s second read is down the units column against the minimums in the header, looking for slots at or near a minimum — B-09 is the one — because a slot at minimum has no room for a short booking, and the planner’s third read is the status column, because two cost-open slots in the same new platform is one risk, not two.

The designer reads the plan as a brief. Filter to new, group by tier and drop, and the plan says: seven new Good bodies, three in the first drop on poplin and linen and four in the second on jersey, poplin and linen; seven new Better bodies across crepe, poplin, linen and one twill test; five new Best bodies, three on satin, one on crepe, one on twill. Each has a retail, a depth and a delivery, so the designer knows before drawing which ideas have a slot and which will have to displace one. The reserve list — concepts that did not fit, each named against the slot it would replace — belongs beside the plan for exactly this reader. How the brief turns into a board is on how to build a line board.

The buyer or wholesale lead reads across, by delivery and channel. Does each drop merchandise on its own? The first drop lands eleven slots including both Good carryover anchors and the Best hero; the second lands thirteen including the two direct-only slots and the one wholesale-only slot, so a wholesale account sees eleven of the second drop’s thirteen and a direct customer sees twelve. Is there enough for an account to fill a prebook? The plan can answer by channel because every slot is flagged. The buyer’s other read is carryover depth, because carryover is where the buy’s confidence is highest and the reorder most likely.

Finance reads two columns and one word. Receipts at cost against the envelope, receipts at retail against the plan, and the word open in the status column — because every cost-open slot is a number in the margin that is still a target, and finance’s question is how much of the signed margin is resting on targets rather than quotes. In the illustrative plan it is $14,610 at cost across 350 units, which is small; a plan where it is a third of the envelope has not been costed, whatever its markup column says.

The five versions of a line plan through the season

A line plan is not one document edited in place; it is a series of dated versions, each adding columns and certainty to the one before it. Five versions, and the discipline is that a later version never rewrites an earlier one — the architecture lock stays as it was cut, so that the hindsight can compare the line as planned with the line as bought and as sold.

Strategy draft

The first version has a header and no rows. It states the category’s role for the season, the tiers and their planned retails, an option count per tier as a range rather than a number, the newness share the strategy wants, and how many deliveries the season will have. It exists so that the architecture can be argued about before it is built: whether this is the season Best goes from four slots to six, whether the second drop should be the newer one, whether the linen platform is ready to carry three slots. Nothing in it reconciles yet, because nothing in it has units.

Architecture lock

The second version is the first real line plan: every slot row, with its tier, delivery, carryover or new flag, planned units, target cost and markup, and all seven totals reconciled to the header. It is cut before design is briefed, and it is the version design is briefed with. Slots have IDs and no style numbers; carryover slots are named, because the hindsight has already chosen them; new slots are empty frames with a price, a depth, a platform and a delivery. This is the version the illustrative plan would have been in before any status read anything but planned, and it is the one that the seven steps on how to build a line plan produce.

Post-review

There is one of these after every line review — usually two or three in a season — and each records what the review did to the plan: which proposed styles were mapped to which slots, which slots were swapped, which cards were cut and what happened to their units, which fabric platforms were confirmed and which changed, and what went to the reserve list. Counts can still move between cells at this stage, and the version shows them moving, with the reason in the notes column. The status vocabulary does its work here: a slot is proposed when design has put a style against it, reconciled when planning has rerun depth, minimum and margin on design’s numbers, and still planned when nothing has been put against it yet. How the review itself is run is on how to run a line review.

Post-lock

The version cut after the final line review is the one that releases downstream work: sampling to production, fabric bookings, the line sheet, the assortment build. Counts are locked cell by cell, style numbers are in, and the cost column is in the middle of changing from targets to quotes — which is why the status column needs cost open as well as locked. After this version the plan changes by swap only: a reserve concept can replace a locked slot in the same tier and delivery if it clears the same checks, and an addition has to name what comes out and who absorbs the cost of the work already released. What the lock commits, and the ladder of concept, range, commercial and buy locks that the one word covers, is on locking the line; where each lock sits in the calendar is on the line planning calendar.

Hindsight

The last version is the locked plan with actuals appended beside every slot: the receipts that actually landed, sell-through at the read dates, markdown taken, realized margin. Nothing planned is edited. The value is in the gap, slot by slot: the anchor that was bought at 700 and sold through, the test at 200 that should have been 400, the Best hero that carried the markup and the Best slot that gave it back in markdown. Read by tier, by delivery, by platform and by carryover flag, this version is the first input to the next season’s strategy draft, and the reason the architecture lock was never overwritten. The board-side read of the same season is on hindsighting the line.

The line plan beside the board, the sheet, the range plan and the assortment plan

Five documents get called the line, and they are told apart by what each contains, the question it answers, who owns it and when it exists. The detailed comparisons live on their own pages and are linked rather than re-argued here; the one-line version is that the plan says how many, the board says which, the sheet says what an account can order, the range plan is the plan under another vocabulary, and the assortment plan says where each locked option goes.

The plan against the board and the sheet is on line board vs line sheet vs line plan. The range vocabulary is mapped word by word on how to build a range plan. The plan against the assortment plan is on line plan vs assortment plan, and the board-side version of that handoff on line board vs assortment board. The one relationship worth restating here is the plan’s with the board, because it is the one that fails most: the two are counted in the same unit or they are not comparable, and a card cut on the board changes a count in the plan or the plan has stopped being a constraint. The definition of the board, and of the visual line plan it is also called, is on what is a line board.

How the line plan document differs by vertical

The header, the grain, the columns and the seven totals hold in every vertical. What changes is what one row stands for, which column the depth is bounded by, and what the delivery column is phased against. A plan written for apparel and handed to a footwear or a furniture team is wrong in its unit before it is wrong in anything else.

• Footwear — pairs, size runs and model-year carryover. One row is a style-colorway, but its units are pairs across a full size run, and a width run where widths are offered, so the units column is planned as runs rather than as a round number: a slot at 600 pairs is a size curve times a run count, and a slot cannot be made shallower than one run per door it serves. The carryover flag does more work than in apparel, because core models carry over for several model years with colorway refreshes, and the plan distinguishes a carried model, a carried model in a new colorway and a new last. The platform column names the last and the outsole rather than a fabric, because tooling is where the long lead and the minimum sit; the delivery column is phased against model-year introductions and the prebook windows that read the line before production. Receipts at cost carry the tooling amortization where a new last is planned. See the footwear and accessories guide.
• Beauty — shades within a franchise, and the launch calendar. One row is a shade or variant within a franchise, and the plan is usually organized franchise by franchise rather than by price tier, because the franchise is the planning unit and the shade ladder does the size curve’s work. The depth column is bounded by batch minimums per shade and by shelf life — a shade bought deep and sold slowly expires on the shelf — and the plan carries the shelf life and period-after-opening per shade as a bound on depth, plus a tester and gratis allowance that consumes units which never sell. The delivery column is phased against launch windows and retailer gondola resets, so a slot that misses a reset waits for the next one; the carryover flag separates continuity shades from limited editions, and the channel flags separate retailer exclusives from the brand’s own site. See the beauty and personal care guide.
• Home and furniture — models in finishes, long lead and floor sets. One row is a model in a finish, fabric or configuration, and the plan often carries a second grain beneath it: the special-order options that widen the line without committing stock, flagged as made-to-order so they add to the option count and not to the units. The depth column is bounded by container minimums and ocean lead time, so receipts at cost are landed cost including freight and the margin check runs on landed; the delivery column is phased against floor sets, market dates and dealer prebook windows, and the plan locks months earlier than an apparel plan does. Core models carry for years, so the carryover flag is the majority, and newness is often a finish refresh on a carried chassis, which the platform column — the chassis — makes visible. See the home, outdoor and sporting goods guide.
• Toys and juvenile — items, licensed windows and the gifting peak. One row is an item, sometimes with a pack or case-pack variant that changes the unit, and the plan states whether units are eaches or cases. Licensed items carry a license window as a hard date on the row, because the slot expires with the license, and the delivery column is weighted to the holiday gifting peak and to retailer commitments made well ahead of it. The depth column is bounded by tooling for new molds and by the safety-testing lead time, which caps how late a new item can enter; in juvenile, the plan separates the chassis from the colorway in the same way furniture separates the model from the finish, because the chassis is where the tooling and the testing sit. See the toys, juvenile and jewelry guide.
• Jewelry and watches — designs in metals, and a moving cost base. One row is a design in a metal, and often in a stone grade, so a single design can occupy three slots at three price tiers; the plan carries the metal in the platform column because that is where the cost base lives, and the target cost column is the one that moves after lock, with the precious-metal price. Depth is bounded by casting minimums and by capital, since units at a Best jewelry retail tie up more money per slot than any apparel tier; the delivery column is phased against the model year and the gifting peak; and the carryover flag is the norm, with newness as a new design or a carried design in a new metal. See the toys, juvenile and jewelry guide.

In each case the test is the same one the header asks: is the row counted in the unit the buy will be placed in, and is the depth column bounded by the thing that will actually refuse the order — a factory, a mill, a mold, a container, a batch or a casting? The per-vertical bounds on the option count, for ten verticals, are on how to build a line plan.

The common defects in a line plan document

Most bad line plans are not wrong in their numbers; they are missing a column, a header field or a version, and the missing thing is what makes them wrong later. Seven defects recur, and each one has a one-line fix that is cheaper at architecture than at the buy.

Option counts without units is the oldest defect and the most common, because a count is easy to agree and units are not. A plan that says Better holds nine options and stops there cannot be tested against anything: not the envelope, because nine times nothing is nothing; not the minimums, because there is no depth; not the margin, because there is no retail base to weight it on. The count feels like a decision and is not one. The fix is to refuse to discuss a count that has no units behind it, which is the discipline the architecture lock exists to enforce.

A plan that cannot be summed is the defect that comes from building the tier view and the delivery view as two separate tables. They start equal and drift: a swap is recorded on one tab and not the other, a cut moves units on the tier view and leaves them on the drop view, and by the final review the two reconcile to two different envelopes. The fix is structural: one table at slot grain, and every view a sum of it, so that the tier read and the delivery read cannot disagree because they are the same numbers added in a different order.

Cells with no owner is the defect that turns a plan from a constraint into a record. If nobody can say yes to a swap, the swap does not happen; the add happens instead, because an add needs nobody’s permission when the plan belongs to a team. The fix is a name in the header and a name against every post-lock change, and it is the cheapest fix on the list.

The unit mismatch between plan and board is the defect that wastes the most meeting time, because it produces a room in which the plan says twenty-four, the board shows fifty-odd cards and nobody is wrong. It is fixed in the header, by stating the counting unit, and on the board, by counting in it. The remaining three — no version or date, target costs that never become quotes, and channel-blind totals — are each a missing column, and each is fixed by adding it before the architecture lock rather than after the buy has found the gap. A plan with all seven fixes in place is still a spreadsheet; the question of whether the board can drift from it is a separate one, covered on line board vs spreadsheet, Miro and Airtable and visual line planning software.

• What is line planning? The process that produces the plan →
• How to build a line plan, step by step →
• Line board vs line sheet vs line plan →
• What is a line board? The visual surface the plan is filled on →
• How to build a range plan: the same document, the UK vocabulary →
• Style, option, colorway, SKU: what counts as one thing →
• Line architecture: good, better, best and price tiers →
• Costing the line to a margin target →
• Balancing carryover and newness →
• Planning drops on the line board →
• Locking the line: what sign-off commits →
• The line planning calendar: milestones by date →
• Hindsighting the line →
• Line plan (glossary) →
• Line plan workbook →
• Line plan vs assortment plan (retail-plan.com) →

Frequently asked questions

What is a line plan?

A line plan is the numeric architecture of a season’s line: the planned option slots by category, price tier and delivery, with the planned units, retail, target cost and margin each slot carries, agreed before the styles exist. It is a table with a header, one row per planned option slot, and totals rows that reconcile to the open-to-buy at cost, the planned receipts at retail, the option ceiling and the margin target. The line board fills its slots with styles and colors; the line sheet later sells what the board became.

What does a line plan contain?

A header stating the category, season, counting unit, version, owner, envelope and price architecture; one row per planned option slot carrying its slot ID, category or class, price tier and planned retail, target cost and initial markup, planned units, receipt dollars at cost and at retail, delivery or drop, carryover or new flag, fabric platform or material group, channel flags, status and owner; and totals rows by tier, by delivery and by material group that reconcile to the open-to-buy, the receipts plan, the option ceiling, the blended margin target and the newness target.

What is one row in a line plan?

One planned option slot: a place in the line that a specific option will fill, defined by its tier, delivery, units, price and cost before the option is designed. In apparel the slot is a style-colorway. In footwear it is a style-colorway committing a size run of pairs; in beauty a shade within a franchise; in home and furniture a model in a finish; in toys an item; in jewelry a design in a metal. The plan states its unit in the header, because a count in styles and a count in style-colorways differ by the average number of colorways per style.

What totals does a line plan have to reconcile to?

Seven. Receipt dollars at cost to the open-to-buy envelope; receipt dollars at retail to the financial plan’s receipt line; the option count to the ceiling the architecture stage set from minimums and budget; the retail-dollar-weighted blended initial markup to the margin target; the newness share, by slot and by unit, to the newness target; units per fabric or material platform to the mill or component minimum; and units per delivery to the delivery calendar and the floor or account capacity in that window.

How is a line plan different from a line board?

The plan is the numbers and the board is the picture of the same range. The plan says how many slots each tier and delivery holds and what units, price and margin each carries; the board decides which bodies and colors fill those slots and shows whether the result reads as a range. They have to be counted in the same unit, and a card cut on the board has to change the count in the plan. The full three-way distinction, with the line sheet, is on the line board vs line sheet vs line plan page.

How does a line plan change through the season?

It is cut in five versions. The strategy draft carries tiers, count ranges, the newness share and the delivery count, with no slot rows. The architecture lock adds every slot row with units, cost and delivery and reconciles the totals to the envelope. The post-review versions map slots to proposed styles and record swaps and cuts with reasons. The post-lock version locks counts cell by cell and replaces target costs with quotes as they confirm. The hindsight version appends actual receipts, sell-through, markdown and realized margin beside every slot.

What is the illustrative plan on this page?

A hypothetical women’s dresses category across good, better and best and two drops: 24 slots, 8,250 planned units, $246,250 of receipts at cost against a $250,000 envelope, $635,500 at retail, and a blended initial markup, weighted by retail dollars, of 61.25% against a 61% target. Every figure is invented so that the arithmetic can be checked; none of it is a benchmark.

Is a line plan the same as a range plan?

Yes. Range plan is the UK and European name for the same document — the counted slots by tier and phase with their units, price and margin — and range architecture, range review and phasing map to line architecture, line review and drops. The word-by-word map is on how to build a range plan.