Merchandise Planning Hierarchy Trade-offs: Finding the Right Level of Complexity

/ Webinars

Your merchandise hierarchy is the backbone of everything — assortment planning, OTB, reporting, and even vendor conversations. But how granular should it be? And what do you sacrifice when you go too deep or stay too shallow?

In this webinar with Celerant Technology, we explore the practical methods retailers use to build and maintain their merchandise hierarchies — and the real trade-offs between complexity and strategic clarity.

Key takeaways:

• Why hierarchy depth affects more than just reporting — and how it shapes your buying decisions
• The hierarchy mistakes most retailers make — regardless of size or system — and why they’re hard to undo once baked in
• How to evaluate whether your current structure is helping or hurting your planning process
• Methods for rightsizing hierarchy to your assortment breadth and team capacity
• Hierarchy levels vs. product attributes — when to go deeper in the tree (Department → Class → Subclass) and when to add an attribute dimension instead (color, fit, fabric) — and why mixing them up creates planning and reporting problems that are expensive to fix
• What “strategic clarity” looks like when your hierarchy is working well