Line Board
A line board is a visual workspace where an apparel team lays out a season’s range as a grid of styles — with images, colorways, price tiers, and categories — to see and shape the whole line at a glance before it is committed to a buy.
The line board is where the range becomes tangible. Instead of reading option counts down a spreadsheet column, the team sees the collection the way a customer eventually will: as products, side by side, in proportion. That makes gaps, overlaps, and price-tier imbalances obvious in a way rows of numbers rarely do.
A line board is an internal planning artifact, not a wholesale catalog. Its job is to build and pressure-test the range with design and merchandising — distinct from a wholesale line sheet, whose job is to present a finished range to buyers so they can place orders.
A board stays useful only if it is connected to the numbers behind it. A static image grid drifts from the plan the moment option counts, costs, or the open-to-buy change; a connected line board keeps the picture and the plan in sync.
Canvas — the visual line board inside RetailNorthstar — puts these on one connected board, live against the plan from board to buy.