Consumer & Retail
Rationalising a 400-line range
Eighty lines earned; the rest did not. We cut the tail and held margin.
Northgate carried just over four hundred lines. Eighty of them earned their shelf space. The rest were defended on instinct — a line the founder liked, a line a buyer had fought for, a line nobody had looked at since it launched.
We took every line back to contribution after shelf, handling and markdown, then tested what customers would actually substitute if it disappeared. Cuts were made against that number rather than against gross margin, which had been flattering the tail for years.
Three hundred and twenty lines came out over two seasons. Revenue held at ninety-six per cent of the prior year and margin rose by two points.
320
Lines removed
96%
Revenue retained
+2.1 pts
Margin
Case studies
More work
Three engagements where the numbers were the easy part, the decision was not, and the answer still held once the room had moved on.
Forty more engagements sit behind these six.
