Navigating Line and Assortment Planning Challenges in Apparel and Footwear Merchandising
The dynamic world of fashion and sports product merchandising is largely driven by seasonal trends & customer demands.
Line planning and assortment planning are central to keeping up with the new trends. Line planning involves selecting products for different seasons such as spring, summer, fall and winter. Assortment planning ensures that the optimal mix of products reaches target markets precisely when needed. These are crucial tasks for brands that aim to stay competitive and profitable in an industry driven by changing trends and consumer preferences.
It is common for Merchandisers to get lost in fragmented & siloed data from tens of thousands of product SKUs and manual processes for planning lines and assortments. This drastically hinders collaboration & impacts time to market. No wonder most fashion brands need more than 12 months to plan and ship every season’s product.
A seasoned merchandiser at a mid-sized sports apparel brand, Julia Robinson was gearing up for the Spring 2025 lineup. Her company specializes in athleisure for men and women across North America.
As Julia started working on the line and assortment plan, she had many questions on her mind, but the most important one that lingered was - “What did I do right last season?”
What were the best-selling products and sizes in maximum demand? What styles resonated the most with the market?
She couldn’t just replicate last season’s plan as her starting point. She needed a more data-driven head start.
Julia started with a long list of Excel sheets, printed reports, PPTs, Dropbox folders and data in isolated applications. It was severely unorganized & hard to decode!
She had to browse through tens and thousands of Excel rows and hundreds of columns to get information on one category of products. It was overwhelming!
All Julia wanted was a clear template that would give her a head start and streamline the line & assortment planning work.
Burden of Manual Line Planning: Julia's Struggle Before the Executives
Throughout the next week, Julia spent most of her time decoding lengthy Excel sheets, reviewing data from emails, and PowerPoint presentations, and on innumerable phone calls. But she could only get so much!
With this scattered information, she was unable to start putting together the line and assortment plan. Frustrated and overworked, Julia feared the initial executive meetings due in two weeks.
She needed accurate data for the last four Spring seasons since 2021 from humongous Excel sheets and data scattered all over the organization.
With wavering confidence, she requested more time. They allowed her three weeks to come up with all the requested information.
Overcoming Planning Nightmares: Julia's Eureka Moment with Visulon
Julia, seeking help from a friend and a mentor from within the industry, hears about this innovation – a Visual Line & Assortment Planning solution named Visulon.
Visulon offered seamless collaboration among diverse stakeholders & international teams, integrated real-time data, and comprehensive planning capabilities—everything that merchandizers like Julia need to develop data-driven, assortment & line plans.
She scheduled a demo with Visulon and requested her executive team to attend.
During their presentation, the Visulon team walked the executives through the visual line and assortment planning tools, 3D imaging capabilities, and seamless data integration.
Visulon could do multiple things that would ease Julia and her executives’ jobs.
- Unifying data from CRM, ERP, and PLM systems and other sources such as Excel into a single cloud-based platform, eliminating the need to manually gather and analyze data, and making it available in a couple of clicks.
- Providing comprehensive visualization tools tailored for assortment and line planning – helping create colorways, color chip selections, adding and dropping products based upon current market trends and historic sales data
- Advanced line planning tools such as custom templates, automated line plans and multipack product image creation making merchandizers’ jobs seamless and efficient.
- Powerful data analytics, reports and data visualization tools to give insights helping merchandizers make optimal decisions about line and assortment planning
- State-of-the-art capabilities such as creating mood boards to factor in new market trends and latest marketing images as well as collaboration tools that allow different stakeholders to share inputs on different products and milestone tracking tools
Want to know last summer's top sellers? Done in a couple of clicks.
Need to see top sellers by region? Just a few more clicks.
Curious about the new styles? Visulon's integrated 3D imaging tool set shows executives exactly what they need to see, without anyone having to hunt for samples in the warehouse.
Stunned, everyone looked at each other, thinking, "What have we been doing all these years?" Visulon platform was also used by many of the top brands in the industry for several years. The executives were visibly impressed. The decision was unanimous to implement Visulon as soon as possible.
Visulon’s Impact: Accelerating Julia’s Line Planning and Approval Process
As Julia's company embarked on implementing Visulon, the entire merchandising team were surprised by the platform's capabilities.
With Visulon, Julia gained access to comprehensive data from previous seasons for her line & assortment plans. She no longer needed to go back manually to each of those complex Excel spreadsheets & printed reports. She could slice & dice the information as required.
Visulon's AI-powered Visual Assortment Planning solution allowed her to swiftly generate detailed line plans using advanced 3D imaging.
She could now seamlessly share product assortments across international teams, leveraging Master Data and Universal Buyer Sheets.
Julia did not need to order sample runs manually or run around in the warehouse to find the samples for new styles for executive meetings. The 3D imaging feature allowed her to show the new and trending products to the executives effortlessly in clicks.
As a result, decision-making processes accelerated, facilitating quicker and smoother go-to-market cycles. This newfound efficiency streamlined the selection of SKUs and enhanced operational agility.
Moreover, Visulon's AI-driven insights empowered Julia to analyze categories, regions, seasons, styles and customer preferences with ease and to make informed decisions with speed and accuracy, without being confined to tedious data-gathering and analysis! This facilitated the creation of detailed, visually rich reports.
With Visulon, Julia's company could now stay ahead of market trends and swiftly respond to changing customer demands.
Revolutionize Line & Assortment Planning with Visulon
Julia’s experience underscores the significant role of Visulon in accelerating product assortments and fostering collaboration across teams, ensuring brands achieve unparalleled efficiency and agility in their market strategies.
Visulon transforms fashion & apparel merchandising with its AI-powered Visual Line Planning & Merchandising Platform, speeding up design-to-market by up to 50%. It integrates merchandising, visual line planning, assortment planning, 3D imaging, and more into a unified, scalable solution, powered by extensive data integration and industry expertise.
Learn more about how Visulon can bring your products to market with unparalleled speed and precision!