Your range review is a margin decision in disguise

Range review season has a particular feeling. The email arrives, the deadline is tight, and the commercial team drops everything to defend the range — every SKU, every facing, as if losing any of it would be a failure.

Here's an uncomfortable question worth asking before the next one: if you were building your range from scratch today, would you choose the one you have?

For most suppliers the honest answer is no. Ranges accumulate rather than get designed. A flavour extension from 2019 that never found its audience. A pack size added for a promotion that ended years ago. Lines kept because a particular buyer once liked them. Each individual decision made sense at the time; the sum of them is a range where a surprising share of SKUs contribute complexity, cost and very little else.

The tail costs more than it looks

On the surface, a slow-moving SKU seems almost free to keep. It sells a little, it holds a facing, why not?

Load in the real costs and the picture changes. Short production runs. Working capital tied up in slow stock. Higher waste and markdowns. The trade spend it takes to keep a weak line on shelf. The management attention it absorbs at exactly moments like range reviews. Genuinely profitable tail SKUs exist — but they're rarer than most portfolio reports suggest, because most portfolio reports stop at gross margin.

There's a competitive cost too. Every facing a passenger SKU occupies is a facing your strongest lines don't get, and shelf space handed to a weak line is space a competitor will happily target.

Give every SKU a job

The discipline that changes range reviews is simple to describe: every SKU in the portfolio gets an explicit role and an action attached to it.

• Grow — the lines you'd back with investment, innovation and your best shelf argument.
• Hold — solid earners that need protection, not investment.
• Fund — lines you'll manage for cash to pay for growth elsewhere.
• Exit — lines you'll trade away, on your terms, for something you want.

That last category is where range reviews flip from defence to offence. Walking in with SKUs you're prepared to give up — in exchange for distribution on a priority line, better positioning, or support for a launch — puts you in a completely different negotiation than clinging to everything. Retailers make ranging decisions on category economics, and a supplier who arrives speaking that language, with a proposal that makes the category better, tends to be treated as a partner rather than a problem.

Do the work before the email arrives

The suppliers who do well out of range reviews aren't the ones who write the best defence documents under deadline. They're the ones who did the portfolio work months earlier, know exactly what each line earns and what job it does, and turn up with a story about where the category is going.

The review email is going to arrive either way. The only question is whether it starts a scramble or executes a plan.