range planning: how winning collections are actually built

✨ A successful collection isn’t just built with beautiful designs.
It’s built through disciplined planning, balancing creativity with commerciality.

The brands with consistent strong performance are approaching range planning with these key pillars in mind...

💡Brand Aesthetic
All brands need a unique aesthetic to stand out in a crowded market; having the integrity to stick to it in the long term will pay off. Customers don’t want more stuff, they want something that feels like it was made just for them. Don’t jump on bandwagons & allow irrelevant trends to cloud your judgement. Customers are looking for the brand that represents the life they want to step into.

❔Think: What should it mean when someone wears one of our pieces?

💡Upholding Brand Handwriting
Your brand should be written in every detail, and if you can make your pieces recognisable without looking at a logo then you've nailed your brand DNA.

✨ If we see 4 white stitches securing a back neck label - Everyone knows it's Margiela. Bottega's Intrecciato woven leather is so sought after, there's no need for logo embossing. A more nuanced example of brilliant handwriting is Cece Jewellery's champlevè enamel technique; Her fairytale miniature artworks, painstakingly etched into gold & scattered with tiny diamonds are unmistakably hers.

Cece Jewellery’s unique designs have attracted bespoke clients such as Taylor Swift, Sydney Sweeney, Scarlett Johansson and Tom Holland.

💡Design Stories
Designing in stories creates coherence in a collection, ensuring each piece feels part of an authoritative look for the season. A clear story guides the range using select form, colour, materials & detailing across categories.

Design stories make the range more intuitive to shop and easier to merchandise, while economies of scale from this strategy reduce costs and inefficiencies, allowing us to offer the customer a better retail price.

🚀 Finding the Ultimates
Defining your season’s key pieces and then creating the ultimate version of those items is the smartest strategy - Tell your customer this is ‘the one’.
Nailing those ultimate pieces will improve your brand reputation, lengthen product lifecycles, simplify customer decision-making and avoid splitting sales.

📊 Range Architecture
Following a thorough sales analysis, extracting clear lessons learned will identify the opportunities and liabilities within the assortment. Use of planning tools and frameworks to guide the shape of the range ensures decisions are data-led rather than instinctive. Whilst attributing styles and clearly mapping where growth or decline is planned in options, volume & value will create powerful strategies to meet your sales goals & KPIs.

💶 Price Architecture
Evaluate your sales history in each price band and determine the optimal price mix accordingly. Establishing an organised, logical price architecture will build brand consistency, gain customer trust and can even boost conversion.

✨ Ultimately, With a considered & strategic approach to range planning, you can make more confident decisions, grow faster & further strengthen your brand in 2026! If you need help range planning a winning collection, please reach out and contact me!