The master visual line plan: a retailer friendly template, adopted across categories

What it is

Nike's merchants built seasonal assortments in the company's Assort/Visual tool, known as AV. In Running the seasonal document was the footwear master visual line plan. In October 2016 it was a list of stories with style names, retail prices and partial style numbers.

Khounlavong had spent the prior year in marketplace merchandising, facing retailers. He reviewed the holiday 2017 line in his second month in Running. His scorecard, which carries his initials, recorded the tools problem in three lines. The master visual line plan should be revisited to make it more digestible for downstream partners. The season needed a line list that defined the total model offering and price points, the new offerings and a comparison to the prior year. The tools should align across men's and women's.

What Khounlavong did

• Rebuilt the plan as the North America men's footwear master visual line plan. The holiday 2017 versions in his files are dated January 26 and February 3, 2017.
• Opened it with the color collections and packs, each under its launch date and its channel. One pack was marked for Nordstrom only, one for family footwear and one for moderate department stores.
• Gave every product a full line: wholesale and retail price, color code, product code, first offer date and color name.
• Laid out each style by the month it flowed, with a count of colors for each month.
• Labeled each color by its role and its door. A color was foundation, seasonal or energy. It was carryover or new. It was open to a channel tier or held for one account, such as Foot Locker, Finish Line, Dick's Sporting Goods or Kohl's.
• Wrote his merchant notes on the same pages, so the recommendation sat next to the product. One read "Create boutique specific pack." Another read "Final season. Edit colors to maximize efficiency."
• Carried the format forward each season: spring 2018 in February 2017, and summer 2018 in seven versions between April 10 and May 16, 2017.
• Set the North America version beside the global version in one comparison deck in April 2017.

Results

• Khounlavong's fiscal 2017 review records the result in his own words: he developed and drove adoption of a retailer friendly AV template that was being leveraged across categories.
• His fiscal 2016 review had already marked the goal of AV tool proficiency as completed, to raise the relevance and adoption of assortments.
• The documents do not name the categories that adopted the template.

At a glance