Not every SKU is there to sell

A product tier rarely has one feature holding the price gap together. It has several, and they do not carry the same value across every category.

The feature that makes a higher price credible is effectively a fence between tiers. In a jacket, that might be a waterproof membrane the customer can understand immediately. Apply the same premium logic to a base layer and it may become almost invisible. Nobody stands in a shop feeling for thread count on something they are about to put under another layer.

Build the range as if one material story justifies every price step and somewhere in it the story stops working. Usually in the SKUs where the margin needed the explanation most.

The other mistake is assuming every SKU in the top tier is responsible for volume. Some are. A tight or a short with a genuinely improved construction can carry real numbers if the difference is felt at the point of purchase. Others are there to anchor the range. A flagship jacket can move very little and still be doing its job because its price makes the tier below look like the sensible choice. Discount the jacket simply because its sell-through is low and the gap it was placed there to protect starts collapsing.

This is where range plans get the maths right and the roles wrong. The price points are set. The margin looks plausible. Then every product inside the tier is given the same commercial expectation. Halo product gets judged against a volume target it was never meant to hit, while a supposed volume line escapes scrutiny because the category total is holding.

The role has to be assigned before the buy: volume, margin, recruitment, anchor, halo or continuity. That decision changes the depth, the success measure and what happens when the first sell-through report arrives. Without it, every product gets judged against the same number and the range learns the wrong lesson from the result.

Where this breaks most often is at the handoff between development and merchandising. Development signs off construction differences category by category. Outerwear works through membranes. Apparel works through fabric weight. Accessories work through their own feature set. Merchandising then applies one tier logic across all of it. Nobody owns the question of whether the fence in outerwear is doing the same commercial job as the fence in base layers.

I've seen a premium tier where outerwear more than covered its number while the base layer inside the same tier quietly bled volume back to the middle. The blended margin looked acceptable because the outerwear was carrying it. It took a season of markdown before anyone returned to the construction and found there was nothing in the fabric to justify where the base layer sat.

By then the stock was being cleared at a price that made the whole tier look weaker. The following range was built more cautiously because the number everyone remembered was the markdown, not the product decision that had caused it.

That's the real cost. Not one bad SKU. A discount that hides the diagnosis, followed by a range plan built around the wrong lesson.

The spreadsheet does not usually have a column for volume, anchor or halo. It should. If the role is not defined before the buy, low sell-through will be treated as the diagnosis when it may only be the consequence.