[00:00] Introduction
I want to tell you about a client I worked with early in my consultancy career. She had launched a collection of twenty-seven pieces. Twenty-seven. She had spent enormous amounts on sampling, she had beautiful photography, she had worked with a great manufacturer, and she had sold three units in three months. When we sat down to look at why, the answer was actually very simple: nobody could understand what her brand stood for, because the collection itself did not know. There was no through-line. There was no entry point for a new customer. There was no hero product that someone could fall in love with and come back for. She had designed everything she liked, and then priced it all afterwards, and the result was a collection that felt random, even though every individual piece was genuinely well-made.
That is what happens when you skip range planning. And almost every first-time founder skips it, because nobody tells them it exists. Today I am going to walk you through the framework I use with every single client, and by the end of this episode you will understand exactly how to build a collection that is strategic, coherent, and commercially viable.
The most common reason a beautiful collection fails is not quality, it’s structure. The customer doesn’t know where to start, so they don’t start at all.
[02:00] What Range Planning Is and Why It Matters Before Design
Range planning is the process of deciding what you are going to make, in what quantities, at what price points, and for what commercial purpose, before you start designing. I know that sounds backwards. Most founders design first and plan afterwards. But the sequence matters more than almost anything else in product business, because the decisions you make at the design stage are almost impossible to undo by the time you get to production without significant financial loss.
When I work through a range plan with a client, we are not talking about aesthetics at all in the first conversation. We are talking about roles. Every product in your range needs to play a role. It needs to have a reason to exist that is commercial, not just creative. A product that exists because you love it, without any consideration of what job it does in the range, is a liability, it costs you sampling money, production time, and mental energy that could have gone into something that genuinely serves your customer and your margin.
[06:00] The Four Roles Every Product Must Play
I use four categories to define what every product in a collection needs to do. The first is your hero product. This is the one piece that represents what your brand stands for most completely, the thing that someone associates with you, the product that does the most work in communicating your identity. You need at least one. Some brands have two. You do not have twelve heroes, because then you have no hero.
The second role is the gateway product. This is your most accessible piece, usually your lowest-price-point item, something that allows a new customer to come into your brand without a huge commitment. It might be a smaller accessory, a consumable, a lower-cost version of your hero. Its job is to remove the barrier and start a relationship.
The third role is the statement piece. This exists for impact, not necessarily for volume. It might be your highest price point, your most avant-garde design. Its job is to make people stop and look, to establish your creative credibility and your positioning in the market. You might sell far fewer of these, but they pull the whole collection upward.
The fourth role is complementary. These are the products that work with something else in your range, they extend the transaction, they increase the average basket value, they give the customer who already loves your hero a reason to come back and buy again.
If you can’t tell me what role a product plays in your range, it shouldn’t be in the range. Being a beautiful design is not a commercial role.
[12:00] Pricing Your Range as a System, Not as Individual Products
Here is the mistake I see constantly: founders design everything first, then cost it, then price it, and then discover that all their prices are clustered at the same point. Or that their hero product has the worst margin. Or that there is no clear entry point for a new customer. Pricing needs to be part of the range plan from the beginning, not an afterthought at the end.
I use a three-tier pricing system. Your gateway tier is your most accessible price point, this is where a new customer starts. Your core tier is where the majority of your volume sits, your hero and complementary products. And your statement tier is your premium, your highest-priced pieces. When these three tiers are right, something called price anchoring works in your favour: the customer sees the statement price first, which makes the core tier feel reasonable, which makes the gateway feel like an easy yes.
The other number I always calculate for a range plan is blended margin. Individual product margins matter, but what really matters is the margin across the range as a whole. Your gateway product might have a thinner margin. Your statement piece might have an excellent one. If you know what your blended margin is, and I recommend targeting sixty percent or above, you know whether the range is commercially viable before you have spent a single pound on sampling.
[17:00] How Many Products Do You Actually Need?
The answer, almost always, is fewer than you think. For a first collection, I recommend five to eight products. That is not a limitation, it is a strategy. A tight, focused first collection communicates confidence. It says you know exactly who you are building for and you have made deliberate choices. A collection of twenty products from a new brand says the opposite: it says you are not sure what will sell, so you made everything.
Five to eight products also means you can invest properly in each one. You can afford better sampling. You can photograph them properly. You can understand your margin accurately. And when you know which products perform, which customer responds to which piece, you have real data to inform your second collection. That is how brands grow intelligently, not by trying to cover every possible customer with the first drop.
[21:00] Building Your Range Plan Document
Your range plan document does not need to be complicated. It needs five sections. First: your customer profile, who you are designing for, what they already own, what gap your product fills for them. Second: your product list with roles assigned, hero, gateway, statement, complementary. Third: your three-tier pricing structure with target retail prices and target costs. Fourth: your blended margin calculation. Fifth: your planned production quantities for each product, separated by whether you are selling direct-to-consumer, through a retailer, or both, because the margin requirements are different for each channel.
When you have that document, you have something genuinely powerful: the ability to make every design decision, every sampling decision, every pricing decision with reference to a plan that is commercially grounded. You stop designing by feeling and start designing by strategy, without losing the creative part at all.
A range plan is not a constraint on your creativity. It is the structure that makes your creativity commercially useful.
Key Takeaways
Range planning happens before design, not after. Decide what roles you need filled and at what price points before you sketch a single piece.
Every product in your collection must play one of four roles: hero, gateway, statement, or complementary. If it cannot be assigned a role, it should not be in the range.
Price your collection as a three-tier system from the beginning. Price anchoring only works if the tiers are deliberate, not accidental.
For a first collection, five to eight products is not a limitation, it is a strategy. Focus beats volume every time when you are starting out.
Calculate your blended margin across the whole range and target sixty percent or above before you commit to sampling anything.
Action Step
Open a blank document. List every product idea for your collection. Assign each one a role: hero, gateway, statement, or complementary. If you cannot assign a role, cut it. Then check: do you have at least one hero and one gateway? Is your pricing across at least two tiers? That is your range plan.
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