More Is Not A Strategy.

The instinct makes sense. More styles means more customers. More options means more sales. A bigger range means a more serious brand. It doesn't. More styles usually means unsold stock, diluted focus, and an unclear audience.

For a young brand, every additional SKU arrives with an array of hidden costs. When a single dress comes in five colours and six sizes, and you carry three silhouettes, you are suddenly managing ninety SKUs for one style. Multiply that across a debut collection and the numbers become unmanageable before a single sample is cut.

The deeper problem is one nobody names: range bloat isn't really a styling problem, it's a sourcing problem. It doesn't happen through too many styles. It happens through too many fabrics. Each fabric requires a separate mill relationship, separate minimum order quantities, separate lead times, separate testing, separate care instructions for the customer, separate development logic for the factory. The brands that launch with thirty styles aren't making a creative decision. They're making a financial one, and most don't realise it until the invoices arrive.

So what does a range plan actually need? Not a list of styles you want to make. A range plan is a commercial architecture. It needs hero products - the two or three pieces that carry the collection commercially, the ones a brand can re-order, the ones customers come back for. It needs a price architecture that makes sense across the range, so the positioning supports a statement price. And it needs supporting products - pieces that complement the heroes, extend the wear occasion, and raise average order value. The constraint forces clarity, and clarity produces a tighter, more cohesive, more sellable collection.

The most commercially intelligent thing a young fashion brand can do before its first collection is cut the range by a third. Not because small is inherently better, but because a smaller range built with full attention - properly developed, fully sampled, fully right, will outperform a larger range built under divided attention every single time. The edit is not a compromise. It is the work.

Range planning is one of the first things we do with founders, in Phase 1, at Selvedge, not because it's administrative, but because the decisions made at the range stage determine almost everything downstream in development, production, and commercial performance. Get the range right before you cut a single sample.