Mastering Colorways and Colorchip Selection in Apparel and Fashion Merchandising
The success of apparel, footwear, and fashion brands hinges on creating cohesive and trend-driven line and assortment plans of their products that capture customer interest.
Line & assortment planning involves key steps such as designing colorways, selecting color chips, and managing product selection to ensure an aesthetically appealing, trend-driven, and color-matched collection that directly influences sales performance.
Lisa, an experienced merchandising manager of one of the big trendy apparel brands, was set to start working on the new product line for Fall 2025, with the focus on a young target group of customers below the age of 35.
Her task involved crafting visually appealing and market-ready colorways, selecting appropriate colorchips, and managing the assortment to ensure it aligned with the latest trends and the brand’s distinct style.
Lisa and her team started with enthusiasm, eager to create a standout collection.
Creating Colorways: Lisa’s struggle with the season’s line planning…
Lisa was crafting colorway options that matched the current market trends, specifically based on the shifting preferences of the youth.
Colorways are about applying different color combinations to a product design to create multiple versions of the same item, enhancing visual appeal for a broader range of customers.
As she started her research using previous years’ printed reports, PowerPoint presentations, and various isolated design solutions, she realized that the task was not going to be trouble-free at all as she didn’t have easy access to the data from the last couple of Fall collections.
Without any real-time data, Lisa was stuck in a loop of revisiting previous seasons’ colorway options, rechecking her selections based on outdated data, and brainstorming the shade palette for the new season. The task was definitely time-consuming. Plus, sharing updates with the team led to further delays in communication and collaboration.
The process was manual, cumbersome, laborious and inaccurate.
Creating colorways with inaccurate data can lead to a mismatched and unappealing product lineup, resulting in poor sales performance and a disconnect with target market preferences.
Comparing her results with competitors’ data to ensure that her brand does not lack the edge involves manually reviewing images, color palettes, and details of past products.
Every minute spent on these excruciating Excel sheets and PowerPoint presentations felt like a loss.
The process became overwhelming for her. It left her feeling frustrated and unprepared for the crucial sketch review meeting with her internal executives.
The pressure of potentially delivering subpar work to her manager weighed heavily on her mind, further amplifying her frustration.
Additionally, Lisa was also set up for a meeting with a prominent retailer in about a week. It was a race against time!
Request for Colorchip Selection: Double whammy for Lisa
Amidst this chaos, as Lisa had expected, the client wanted to see colorchips and visualize the product shade range, and her team was not ready with that. Lisa had some ideas regarding the new season’s color palette, but it was all in her head.
Colorchips showcase the color samples that help maintain accuracy and consistency throughout the design and production process.
Lisa had only two weeks to get back to the clients with the required details, which was a mammoth task.
Her team members were scrambling to gather samples. Already overwhelmed with the colorway selection, Lisa was struggling to get the colorchips ready ahead of the deadline, cross-referencing multiple sources, including outdated printed reports and disconnected, isolated design tools to see what they had done last season.
This inefficient workflow slowed her down and increased the likelihood of selecting incorrect or mismatched color chips delaying the production process.
Success looked unattainable from where she was now!
Managing Product Drops: Another Hurdle
As the collection progressed, some styles and colors needed to be dropped to keep the collection focused and aligned with the brand’s vision and maintain a trendy assortment.
Lisa faced the daunting manual task of cutting products from the global line and communicating the decisions with various teams. The lack of a Universal Buy Sheet made it difficult to manage product drops effectively.
Lisa’s focus was on the following:
- Identifying last Fall’s least-selling products
- Eliminating out-of-trend products
- Aligning fresh season plan with market trends
Each change required her to update multiple spreadsheets, which led to discrepancies and confusion.
This cumbersome process hampered agility in decision-making, hindering the production start & sales process. With competition being stiff, Lisa was highly tensed about missing opportunities.
Visulon: Endless Possibilities to Redefine Merchandising for Lisa and Her Team
According to a report by McKinsey, the application of analytics in sales and merchandising drives 4-5% growth in both the top and bottom lines.
Desperate for a more efficient solution, Lisa began researching tools to streamline these critical tasks.
One of her fellow merchandisers, Julia, who works for an athleisure brand, recommended Visulon, an AI-powered Visual Line Planning & Merchandising Platform designed to address the challenges she was facing. Julia had explained how her company achieved amazing results with Visulon.
Lisa checked Visulon’s website and found incredible analytic tools and options that would swiftly reduce her workload.
She wasted no time and approached her boss. Following an internal meeting, the team opted for a Visulon demo to explore its features. The decision was swift. Their data was seamlessly integrated onto the Visulon platform within days. From that point on, Lisa never looked back.
For merchandising teams, Visulon offers multiple solutions, addressing concerns related to creating colorways, colorchip selection, and selecting & dropping products:
- Add or Swap Colorway toolset: The “Add or Swap Colorway' toolset allowed Lisa to add new colorways for the product quickly and substitute existing ones. The platform’s real-time collaboration capabilities could further enable her to make adjustments during meetings.
- Add/ Edit Colorchips Functionality: Lisa could now add colorchips for the collection by simply right-clicking on the product and selecting the ‘Add/ Edit Colorchips’ functionality. Additionally, Visulon’s vast ‘Colorchip Library’ allowed Lisa to create and add new colorchips directly.
- Assortment Module: The Assortment Module allowed Lisa to open the collection, select the products, and click on the ‘Drop/ Active on Assortment’ option. If needed in the future, Lisa could reactivate these styles in clicks, ensuring her collection was always up-to-date and accurately reflected the brand's strategic decisions.
With Visulon, Lisa successfully impressed the big retailers and secured a contract for her company that had earlier seemed nearly unattainable.
Empowering Merchandisers: Transform Line Planning with Visulon's Full Suite of Tools
Lisa’s journey underscores the upfront real-world challenges faced by merchandisers in the fast-paced fashion industry, especially in creating colorways, selecting colorchips, and managing product assortments.
As an AI-powered Visual Line Planning & Merchandising Platform, Visulon addresses these challenges comprehensively. The potential to unify data, enhance visualization tools, and offer AI-driven insights assists merchandisers in optimizing line planning and assortment management.
To know more about Visulon’s diverse tools that not only streamline workflows, enhance collaboration amongst teams, and fast-tracks approvals, but also accelerate time to market for your products by 50%,
Contact us now!