Assortment Planning: Boost Sales and Maximize Profits

Discover how to blend art and science in merchandising—covering product development, visual merchandising, trend forecasting, brand storytelling, and assortment planning to maximize profits.

Taxonomy groups products into buckets to reveal broader trends and guide category setup. Start broad, drill down into segments that reflect core traits, and enforce taxonomy rules for unambiguous data.

Explore the art and science of product merchandising, apply tools to categorize your business, and prepare for the next chapter on the product life cycle and its components.

Explore the product life cycle to ensure the right products are available at the right time, place, amount, and price, focusing on analyze and plan phases to boost sales.

Analyze market trends and performance through the BCG matrix to optimize an assortment, balancing core, seasonal, promotional, and hype styles with middle out planning.

Define seasons in retail and plan for demand fluctuations through pre-season, in-season, and post-season phases. Align selling periods to your business, monitor trends, adjust pricing, and analyze outcomes across seasons.

Review the product life cycle overview to understand the potential order of operations for strategically running your business, and refresh retail math to grasp the levers that drive your plan.

Explore retail math fundamentals to evaluate your business, with a Retail Math Cheat Sheet organized into four categories: basic terms and formulas, sales metrics, pricing, and profit and stop metrics.

Explore basic terms and formulas for assortment planning, including style definitions like cc count, on hand inventory, retail price, and key performance indicators guiding percent change and decimal conversion.

Explore essential sales metrics, including gross sales units, net unit sales, sales dollars, net sales, and units per transaction plus average order value.

Analyze pricing and profitability by examining cost of goods sold, unit costs, and average cost per unit. Calculate EIR, AUC, IMU, gross margin, and net margin to inform pricing strategies.

Learn how stock metrics reveal inventory performance and profitability by tracking beginning and ending inventory, cost receipts, sales receipts, weeks of supply, and stock-to-sales.

Strengthen your mastery of retail math and its formulas. Download the retail math cheat sheet and get ready for the next chapter on the assortment planning tool setup.

Explore the assortment planning tool, learn best practices, set up taxonomy and targets, and customize via a Google Sheet or Excel download to fit your brand.

Learn best practices for the assortment planning tool: edit only green cells, respect protected cells and formulas, and preserve tag colors and category tab colors to maintain tool integrity.

Build a clear taxonomy by defining categories and subcategories, using ten slots and aligning with yellow tabs. Identify attributes such as color and fabrication, noting assignment is optional.

Set top-down inventory targets using cost receipts, auc, irr, and imu to estimate inventory. Apply a tolerance, set category targets, and plan pricing strategy to reconcile top-down with bottom-up planning.

Craft a pricing strategy that entices customers and protects margins using competitive analysis, strategic group analysis, and perceptual mapping, and sharpen your value proposition with relevancy, benefit, energy, and risk.

Apply your understanding of the assortment planning tool to the next level by learning to plan at the style level in the upcoming chapter.

Plan at the style level by weighing customer data, market trends, competitive analysis, and budget, then consider space and breadth versus depth to shape profitable assortments.

Master subcategory planning for assortments by detailing each style's attributes, unit depth, and costs, then roll up into category targets to reconcile with top-down goals.

Complete style planning and review the total category roll up, which automatically aggregates category results, compares targets and variances, and shows tolerance and optional attribute roll ups across the assortment.

Discover how a thoughtful assortment and style level changes influence the bigger picture, and tailor your strategy to your brand and customers while reconciling planning with targets.

Identify the next steps after finalizing your strategic assortment plan and tailor the process to your business to guide implementation.

Review your assortment plan with stakeholders, secure consensus, and lock in buys. Implement pricing and logistics, then test visual merchandising to maximize sales and profitability.

See how your assortment plan aligns with the product life cycle balance and connects to strong business results. Start with a strong plan.

Reflect on what we've learned in the assortment planning course after completing it; we've covered quite a bit.

Master merchandising basics, taxonomy, and the life cycle to stock the right products at the right time, place, amount, and price using retail math and the assortment planning tool.

Develop a dynamic assortment strategy that meets customer needs, aligns with brand pillars, and drives profitability, recognizing assortment planning as an ongoing journey.