5 Key Questions to Improve Your Assortment Plans (2021)
Critical Considerations for Retail Assortment Plans A retailer’s assortment planning process can make or break their selling season (or even their entire fiscal year). If your predictions are inaccurate (or your assortment plan fails to reflect consumer demand) -- you’ll be facing out-of-stocks, markdowns, and unhappy customers all year. But if you manage to predict consumer demand accurately and plan your assortment accordingly -- you’ll rake in the profits. This is easier said than done. Even if you could predict exactly when (and how) to shrink or expand your assortment on a macro-level, it is a task of herculean complexity to effectively translate this to individual store assortments (especially if you work for a large retailer). Think of the man-hours required to wrestle tens-of-millions of spreadsheet cells into compliance. That’s why many medium and large retailers don’t bother planning so granularly during the pre-season. Their only option may be high-level planning that doesn’t take individual stores, demographics, and constraints into account. Furthermore, there’s no “one-size-fits-all” approach to assortment planning. Your assortment planning process will look very different depending on whether: You sell hardgoods or softgoodsYou have access to an accurate demand forecastYou’re using Excel or a specialized assortment planning softwareEtc. Given the complexity (and variability) of assortment planning, you...