Aligning Top-Down and Bottom-Up Plans
The financial plan says one thing, the assortment plan says another, and nobody reconciles them until it is too late. How to align the two before receipts.
The misalignment that costs millions
Top-down planning starts with financial targets: revenue by period, margin goals, and OTB budgets. Bottom-up planning starts with product decisions: which styles, how many units, what price points, what delivery dates.
In a well-run planning process, these two approaches converge — the sum of all bottom-up product decisions fits within the top-down financial framework. In reality, they almost never do on the first pass.
The CEO targets $8M for the season. The planner builds an OTB budget of $3.2M in receipt cost to support that target at 60% margin. The buying team builds style-level plans that total $3.9M in receipt cost — 22% over budget. Nobody catches the gap until the orders are placed. The result: overbuying, cash strain, and excess inventory.
In our experience, this is the most common planning failure in growing apparel brands.
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