3 ways to improve your assortment planning process

Enhance Your Assortment Planning Process: Three Strategies for Better Decision-Making

Assortment planning determines which items to buy and in what quantities across omnichannel platforms to maximize profitability. While most retailers have their approach, many still rely on outdated methods that leave room for improvement. Now is the time to refine your assortment planning process and drive better results.

1. Prioritize Customer Demand

Retailers typically follow a structured buying process: financial planners set the open-to-buy budget, merchants purchase inventory based on those plans, and allocation teams distribute products according to customer demand. However, this sequence creates a challenge—once a merchant finalizes a buy, adjusting it becomes impossible. If they order too much or too little, the allocation team must scramble to make it work.

Instead, retailers should analyze customer demand across omnichannel touchpoints before purchasing assortments. During buy planning, merchandise planners should evaluate how online and in-store sales influence demand across different sales volume groups. By calculating buy quantities based on store performance tiers and omnichannel data, merchants can optimize inventory distribution and ensure a seamless allocation process.

This proactive approach strengthens gross margins. It prevents overbuying for low-demand stores, reducing markdowns while ensuring top-selling locations remain stocked to meet customer needs.

2. Leverage the Entire Team’s Expertise

Many retailers rely on a top-down planning approach, where merchandise planners create highly detailed budgets dictating buy quantities and dollars at the style level. Merchants then purchase inventory according to these financial guidelines. While this method helps managers control spending, it often stifles flexibility and misses key insights.

Planners excel at financial management, understanding product performance and fund allocation. However, they may lack the customer insights needed to determine how many styles of a product should be purchased. Buyers, on the other hand, have a strong pulse on fashion trends and customer preferences.

Empowering buyers to make assortment decisions—while ensuring financial planners provide structure and oversight—creates a balanced approach. Merchandise planning should guide decisions at the store or product level, while buyers refine assortments based on customer demand. This collaboration ensures the right products reach the right customers at the right time.

3. Enable Managers to Make Real-Time Decisions

Requiring teams to pause their work for weekly buy plan roll-ups wastes time and slows decision-making. Buyers must stop their workflow for data entry, while managers wait for reports to analyze outdated information.

Assortment planning revolves around real-time data. Instead of weekly roll-ups, retailers should integrate a centralized system that allows instant access to the latest buy plans. A shared database ensures everyone sees up-to-date figures without disrupting their workflow.

Spreadsheets make this efficiency impossible. Retailers must invest in modern tools that eliminate redundant data entry, provide real-time visibility, and free buyers to focus on strategic tasks. By streamlining the process, managers gain immediate insights, enabling faster and smarter decisions.

Optimizing Assortment Planning for Long-Term Success

Your assortment planning process may not be broken, but it can likely become more efficient. Shifting to a bottom-up approach empowers those closest to customer trends to make better decisions. Factoring in customer demand before purchasing improves inventory management and reduces markdowns. Providing managers with real-time data enhances decision-making and fosters a more cohesive team strategy.

By implementing these changes, retailers can move beyond outdated methods and create a more agile, customer-focused, and profitable assortment planning process.

daVinci’s Assortment Planning solution gives merchants the power to tailor buys by the customer to improve sell-thru and ensure each assortment is profitable from the start.