Range plan

A range plan is the planned line-up of products for a season — which styles and options you'll carry, how much depth you'll buy into each, and which channels they'll sell through. It's built before buying starts, and it's the document that turns a strategy into a specific shopping list.

The range plan is the bridge between the financial plan and the buy. The open to buy sets the budget; the range plan decides how that budget is spent across the line-up; and once the season is trading, the buy flows through to intake and lands in the WSSI. Without a range plan, buying becomes a series of one-off decisions with no view of the whole.

What a range plan defines

A working range plan answers four questions for the season:

• Breadth — how many distinct styles or options the range carries. This is the option count, set at category and channel level.
• Depth — how many units you buy into each option. Deep on the bets you're confident in, shallow on the ones you're testing.
• Channel — which options go to D2C, which to wholesale, which to marketplace. Not every option belongs everywhere.
• Phasing — when each option lands and goes live, often grouped into a drop rather than landing all at once.

The plan is usually built at category level first — total options and total budget per category — then broken down to the option line. That top-down-then-bottom-up structure stops the range from being a pile of individually-justified products that don't add up to a coherent season.

Newness versus core

Every range balances two jobs. Core products are the reliable sellers — the styles that return season after season, carry predictable rate of sale, and underpin the plan. Newness is the fresh product that gives customers a reason to come back and lets you test where the range should go next.

Lean too far into core and the range goes stale; customers stop discovering anything. Lean too far into newness and you're betting the season on unproven product with no sales history to plan against. The range plan makes that mix an explicit decision rather than an accident of what the buyers happened to like.

A common split for a scaling brand is a majority of the budget on proven core, a meaningful slice on newness, and a small allocation on genuine experiments — the options you'd be happy to learn from even if they don't repeat.

Depth versus breadth

Breadth and depth pull against each other because they share one budget. More options (breadth) spreads the buy thinner across the range. Fewer, deeper options (depth) concentrate the bet.

The right balance depends on the category and the channel:

• Breadth-led ranges give customers choice and capture more of the long tail, but risk thin buys that go out of stock on winners and leave residue on the rest.
• Depth-led ranges concentrate the buy into fewer, better-backed options — stronger availability on the styles that work, but less to discover and more risk if a hero bet misses.

Editing the range — cutting options that don't earn their place — is as much a part of range planning as adding them. A tighter range with the budget behind the right options usually trades harder than a sprawling one.

Why the range plan can't live in its own file

The range plan only does its job if it connects to everything downstream. The depth decisions become buy quantities; the buy quantities become intake; intake becomes the stock and cover position in the WSSI. When the range plan lives in a separate spreadsheet, every one of those handovers is manual, and the plan drifts out of sync with what's actually been bought the moment the first order is placed.

Kept connected, the range you build is the range you trade — the option line, the depth, and the phasing flow through to the buy and the WSSI without being re-keyed.