Consumer ranges accumulate products almost by default. The marketing team has a reason for each new variant, the operations team has the capacity to make it, and the sales channels report that more products bring more visits. The cumulative effect is drift, meaning a range that doubles over five years without the revenue doubling with it, complexity that taxes the operation, and a customer journey nobody in the business can describe cleanly any more.
The discipline to add is the easiest to neglect and the most consequential. A new product should earn its place against the repeat purchase the brand already has, instead of against the extra visits it might attract. A product that lifts visits and does not move repeat purchase is recruiting customers who cost more to win than they will ever return.
The discipline to consolidate is to look at the range every quarter and ask which products are below the level where they earn their place. That level should be a function of the margin they contribute, the part they play in bringing customers back, and their role in defining the range, rather than a function of who launched them and how recently. Products that earn their place stay. The rest should go, whatever the internal politics.
The discipline to walk away is rarer and harder. Sometimes the answer is not to trim within a category but to leave it. The category that looked attractive at launch may have shifted, the customer the range was designed for may have moved on, or the competition may have made the economics unworkable. Selling, licensing or simply discontinuing is occasionally the most disciplined move available, and it is almost never the most comfortable one.
Our own label, wearon.co, is run with a deliberately narrow range, and the range is reviewed regularly against exactly these questions. Keeping it narrow is harder than it sounds, because every proposed addition has a reasonable argument behind it. The value of the discipline is not in any single decision. It is in the ten additions that never happened.
A practical test for a review meeting. Ask what would have to be true for a product to be discontinued, and write the answer down before anyone looks at the numbers. A range where nothing could ever be discontinued is not a range. It is an accumulation, and the operation is paying for it somewhere.
Our work with consumer businesses is described on the consumer goods page, and the discipline above is usually where a conversation starts, because it costs nothing to apply and it changes what the marketing is being asked to do.
