Draft it on the board. Commit it together.
Never re-key it.
Visual assortment planning is assortment planning done on an image-first board backed by the plan's data. Merchandisers place products onto boards by category, delivery, channel or store cluster, and price tier. The placement records what the assortment carries, where and when, and open-to-buy, option counts, margin and mix update as the board changes.
In RetailNorthstar it runs in Canvas, across the whole assortment workflow: the merchandiser's first draft, the team review, and the final meeting where stakeholders commit it. The committed board is the assortment plan.
The assortment gets built three times
In most apparel teams the assortment is drafted in a spreadsheet, presented as a deck or a pinned wall, and re-keyed into the plan after the meeting. Every handoff is a transcription, and each one costs time and can lose a decision.
Decisions are made without their cost
The review works from a deck or a wall of printed cards. An added colorway looks free in a picture. Its open-to-buy cost, the option count it breaks and the newness share it shifts are worked out later, after the people who made the call have left the room.
Re-keying takes days and drops attributes
After the meeting, a planner works through notes and phone photos and keys every add, cut and move back into the spreadsheet. A product moved to Drop 2 for stores only arrives with its delivery and without its channel, and allocation finds out later.
Two versions of the assortment
What the room agreed and what got entered become two documents. When they disagree, nobody can say which is the assortment plan, and the buy is built from whichever one planning opened.
The meeting happens twice
When the re-keyed totals come back over budget or off mix, decisions the room thought were closed are reopened, usually by email and without the people who were in the room.
One board from first draft to signed-off plan
Placement is the data entry. Drop a style-color into the Drop 2 column of the stores board, in the Better tier of knit tops, and the plan records all four attributes at once. Everything else follows from that.
Start from the line, already on the board
Products come onto Canvas from the product record with their image, attributes, cost and retail, so the board can count and cost what is placed on it from the first move.
Draft alone by placing products
The merchandiser who owns the category drags or places products onto four layouts: category and class grids, delivery and drop boards, channel and store-cluster boards, and price-tier and story boards. Where a product sits sets its attributes.
Review as a team with the numbers moving
The merchandising team reviews the drafts together, with planning. Every placement, move or removal updates open-to-buy against plan, option and SKU counts, units, sales and margin, and mix balance on the board in front of them.
Agree and commit the plan
The final meeting with design, planning, buying, wholesale and leadership settles the open questions as trades on the board. Once everyone agrees, the board is committed, and the board as agreed is the assortment plan the buy plan is built from.
Everyone in the assortment review works from the same board
The assortment review ends with the assortment plan done.
Teams running Canvas in production tell us this is the workflow they value: a visual, creative way to build and agree the assortment, backed by data. They see the impact of each change while it is still being discussed, and they have nothing tedious to re-key once the group has agreed.
Visual assortment questions
What is visual assortment planning?
Visual assortment planning is assortment planning done on an image-first board backed by the plan's data. Merchandisers place products onto boards by category, delivery, channel or store cluster, and price tier; the placement records what the assortment carries, where and when; and open-to-buy, option counts, margin and mix update as the board changes. In RetailNorthstar it runs in Canvas.
Is visual assortment only for the final assortment meeting?
No. It covers the whole assortment workflow on one board: the merchandiser drafts the first assortment alone, the merchandising team reviews the drafts together, and the final meeting with stakeholders finalises and commits it. Because all three stages work on the same board, the draft is never exported for the review and the review is never rebuilt for the meeting.
Which ways can a team lay out the assortment in Canvas?
Four: a category and class grid, delivery and drop boards, channel and store-cluster boards, and price-tier and story boards. Each answers a different question about the season, and teams move between them during a review. Every layout reads the same assortment plan.
What happens when the assortment meeting commits the board?
The board as agreed becomes the assortment plan, with every attribute its placement set: class, delivery, channel or cluster, and price tier. The buy plan is built from it. Nobody transcribes the meeting or re-keys the assortment into another tool afterwards.
Make the assortment meeting the last step.
Start a free trial and see how Canvas carries the assortment from the merchandiser's first draft to the committed plan, with nothing re-keyed in between.
No credit card. No commitments.
Connected merchandise planning — live in weeks, not quarters.