From Line Plan to Final Allocation. One Connected Workflow.
RetailNorthstar connects design, merchandising, buying, and vendor execution in one workflow — so plans stay current, decisions are backed by data, and every season closes with more margin intact.
Built for startup, small, and mid-market apparel, footwear, accessories, home & furniture, beauty, sporting goods, outdoor, toys & games, baby & juvenile, and jewelry & watch brands. Live in weeks — no implementation partner required.
Planning for apparel, footwear, accessories, home & furniture, beauty, sporting goods, and outdoor brands.
Designers, planners, buyers, and leaders — one system, not four.
Most planning tools serve one function. RetailNorthstar connects all of them — so design decisions flow into merchandising, merchandising drives buying, and buying feeds allocation without a handoff spreadsheet between each stage.
An OTB that reconciles itself.
Your OTB, assortment, and buy plan stay connected — automatically. Hindsight data is in the workflow, not in a separate export. In-season actuals update the plan in real time. The pre-meeting file sync disappears.
For Merchandise Planners →From buy plan to PO — without starting over.
Your assortment drives buy quantities. Buy quantities drive size curve allocation. POs generate directly from the buy plan. Vendor splits and delivery windows — managed in one place, not three.
For Apparel Buyers →Your line plan is in the system buyers actually use.
RetailNorthstar starts where Illustrator ends. Post products directly into the line plan. Visual board and gallery view for assortment review. Merchandising and buying work from the same product record — no spreadsheet handoff between design and commercial.
For Designers & Product Teams →See where the season stands. Without asking anyone.
Season-level margin. OTB against plan. Two seasons open simultaneously. In-season sell-through vs target. Real-time visibility into decisions while they can still be changed — not just reported on.
For Merchandising Leaders →// The Business Case
What's financially at stake when planning is disconnected.
For growing apparel brands, the gap between disconnected and connected planning shows up in three numbers — every season.
buy is a margin decision
pre-season through clearance
OTB–assortment disconnection puts imperfect data in front of every decision point, and the exposure compounds across the season calendar.
excess is the tell
of an estimated OTB
Buy plans that run on an estimated rather than a reconciled OTB overshoot, and the overshoot only becomes visible once the season has closed.
of merchant time
on non-analysis work (McKinsey, 2018)
McKinsey's 2018 survey of 30+ retailers found merchants spend about two-thirds of their time gathering data, managing exceptions, firefighting, and in syndication meetings. File consolidation and version reconciliation are our own read on where that goes in a spreadsheet operation.
The sharpest planning teams work from one plan. Every team. Every stage.
When OTB updates, the assortment budget adjusts instantly. When the assortment locks, the buy plan is ready. When the PO is placed, WIP tracking begins. Your team can work that way — and when they do, every decision is made with the full picture.
RetailNorthstar gives every team — design, merchandising, buying, and leadership — one shared data model, so the plan is always current and everyone is always working from the same truth.
See how teams move to one connected plan →- Buy reviews in minutes — the plan reconciles itself
- OTB, assortment, and buy plan always in sync, automatically
- Size curves from actual sell-through data, built into the workflow
- In-season signals surface early — before the markdown window opens
- Finance and merchandising always working from the same number
- Design and commercial connected from the first line plan
Every stage feeds the next. Nothing to reconcile.
The connection between stages is structural — not a data export or a nightly sync. Changes propagate in real time.
Five pillars. Twenty-two workflow stages. One shared data model — so every team works from the same plan. See the full platform →
Five pillars that share a data model. No integration required.
Organized around how merchandise brands work — not how software vendors categorize modules.
Visual Product & Line Collaboration
Connect creative and commercial teams from the first line plan.
- Post-Illustrator line plan workflow
- Visual board for design review
- Gallery view for assortment sign-off
- Line list as the central product record
- Cross-team visibility across design, merch, and wholesale
Merchandising Planning
OTB, assortment, and size planning as one connected plan — not three separate files.
- Open-to-Buy auto-reconciled by channel, dept, season
- Assortment planning constrained by OTB automatically
- Seasonal planning: pre-season, in-season, carry-over
- Size curve management from actual sell-through data
- Demand forecasting and margin scenario modeling
Buying & Vendor Execution
From buy plan to delivery receipt — without switching systems.
- Structured buy plan: quantities, sizing, vendor splits
- PO generation direct from the buy plan
- WIP tracking by style and production milestone
- Vendor and factory collaboration
- Allocation optimization across stores and channels
Planning Intelligence
In-season performance and prior-season hindsight — built into where planning decisions happen.
- In-season sell-through by style, channel, and department
- Prior-season hindsight surfaced during assortment build
- AI-assisted anomaly detection — variances flagged early
- Margin scenario modeling against financial targets
- Size curve accuracy from actual historical sell-through
Product Data Foundation
One product record from design intent to marketing output.
- Product data distributed across DTC, wholesale, and retail
- Product attribute and taxonomy management
- Style-level data and version control
- Channel-specific content from a single product record
- Integration with ERP, PLM, and BI systems
What changes when the plan is always current.
When planning, buying, and execution share a data model, the downstream effects are concrete — fewer margin leaks, less overhead, and faster decisions every season.
Days of reconciliation become hours.
When OTB, assortment, and buy plan share a data model, there is no file to sync before the review. The reconciliation step is not made faster — it stops existing, and the hours it consumed go back into decisions.
Buys informed by actual sell-through, not memory.
Size curves calculated from historical sell-through and applied at buy time. Carry-over decisions backed by hindsight analysis. Depth calls supported by current demand signals — not last season's instinct.
Margin visible in-season — not just post-season.
Margin trajectory updates as the season runs. Leadership sees where the business tracks against plan while there is still time to course-correct — not in the post-season review when it is too late to act.
Design brief to allocation receipt. No gaps to fill.
Planning tools that cover only one stage force teams to rebuild the gaps in spreadsheets. RetailNorthstar covers the full arc — from line plan and visual review through buy execution, WIP tracking, and allocation — so there is nothing left to do outside the system.
Planning decisions informed by your data — automatically.
RetailNorthstar doesn't ask you to build a separate analytics workflow. Commercial intelligence is built into the planning process — surfaced where decisions happen, in the format planners actually use.
The intelligence layer learns your catalog, your business type, and your planning patterns. Every season, the recommendations get sharper — without requiring a data science team or a separate BI platform.
See the Intelligence Pillar →- Size curves from actual sell-throughSize distribution calculated from your historical sell-through data — applied at buy time, updated each season. Not a manual curve-building exercise every pre-buy cycle.
- Assortment recommendations from prior performanceAttribute-level sell-through from prior seasons surfaces during assortment build — so carry-over and new style decisions are backed by what actually sold.
- Anomaly detection before problems compoundOut-of-plan variances — styles tracking below target, OTB trending over committed — are flagged automatically while there is still room to adjust.
- Scenario modeling before the buy is placedCompare buy alternatives against margin targets before committing. See the projected impact of a deeper buy or a tighter assortment before the PO goes out.
Live in weeks. Run by your team. Used every day.
Designed by people who have planned apparel. Planner-owned — not an IT project. No implementation partner required. The planning depth larger teams pay for — at economics built for growing brands.
Live in weeks — not months.
No implementation partner. No services engagement. Easy configuration — departments, channels, season structure — and a straightforward data import. Most teams are running live plans within their first month.
Planner-owned — in apparel terms.
OTB by department, assortment by attribute, buy by vendor. The terminology is native to how your team already works. The structure matches the season calendar. No database schema to learn, no developer to configure it.
One plan. Every team. Always current.
When the workflow covers every stage — from line plan through allocation — your team stays in one place and the plan is always ready. No catching up, no reconciling, no asking someone else what the number is.
In production at a national apparel brand since 2022.
line plan, assortment, buy plan, sizing, PO, WIP and analytics — in daily use, on live seasons, by the team that owns the plan. Renewed every year since. This is a paid production deployment, not a pilot and not a proof of concept.
We do not publish the brand or their numbers. Whether a customer is named is their call, not ours, and their planning data is theirs. What changes when planning is connected →
Questions we hear from planning teams
What is RetailNorthstar?
RetailNorthstar is a connected apparel planning platform that brings design, merchandising, buying, and supply chain into one commercial workflow. It covers line planning, Open-to-Buy, assortment planning, buy planning, PO generation, WIP tracking, allocation, and product data management — replacing fragmented spreadsheets and disconnected point tools with a single system for apparel, footwear, accessories and bags, home and furniture, beauty, sporting goods, outdoor, toys and games, baby and juvenile, and jewelry and watch brands.
Who is RetailNorthstar built for?
RetailNorthstar is built for apparel, footwear, accessories and bags, home and furniture, beauty, sporting goods, outdoor, toys and games, baby and juvenile, and jewelry and watch brands — DTC, wholesale, and multi-channel. It is designed for merchandising teams, merchandise planners, buyers, and merchandising leaders who manage seasonal collections and multi-channel inventory.
What is assortment planning?
Assortment planning is the process by which apparel brands determine which products to carry, in what quantities, across which channels and locations. It involves analyzing sales performance, customer demand, and financial targets to build a seasonal product assortment that maximizes sell-through and margin.
Does RetailNorthstar require an implementation consultant?
No. RetailNorthstar is designed for self-serve onboarding. Planning teams configure the platform directly in the UI without requiring IT resources or external implementation consultants. This is a core design principle that differentiates RetailNorthstar from legacy enterprise planning tools.
See a season of planning in 30 minutes.
We'll walk through a real brand scenario — line plan, OTB, assortment build, and buy plan — so you can see exactly what a connected apparel workflow looks like in practice.
Connected merchandise planning — live in weeks, not quarters.