Most ranges are too broad, and it costs margin

Nobody decides to over-range. It happens one reasonable line at a time. A buyer adds a colourway, a supplier pitches a line extension, a category head wants to plug a gap a rival just opened. Every one of those calls is defensible on its own. Stack three seasons of them and you have a range no one actually designed and no one can quite explain.

The tail is where it hides. Pull your line list, rank it by margin contribution, and the shape is always the same. A minority of lines earn the money. The bottom third earns almost nothing and still takes shelf space, working capital and a slot in every planogram you could have spent on something that sells. You are paying full operating cost to move product that barely moves.

And the dead weight does not just sit there quietly. It bleeds the lines you care about. Twelve near-identical black jumpers split demand twelve ways, so every forecast is softer, every buy is smaller, and your genuine bestseller goes out of stock in week three while its lookalikes hang on the rail until markdown. Complexity taxes the winners hardest.

Your margin has already worked this out, even if your buying team has not. Read your markdown rate against availability on your top fifty lines. One is creeping up while the other slips. That is the range telling you it is too wide. "Customers want choice" is the reflex defence, and past a point it is simply wrong. Choice nobody asked for does not lift conversion, it slows the decision and fattens the clearance rail.

So set a floor and hold it. Rank every line by gross-margin contribution, draw a hard line under the bottom, and give each tail line one season to earn its place or come out. Put the freed cash and space back into depth on the lines people actually buy. Range is not a measure of ambition, it is a cost you carry until it pays its way. Trim it properly and you will find the margin you have been chasing was sitting in your own catalogue the whole time.