What a 150-piece minimum actually does to your range plan

Our minimum is 150 pieces per colour. Buyers usually hear that as a price signal — a small factory, therefore a cheap one, or a small factory, therefore an expensive one. Neither is the interesting part. The interesting part is what it does to the way you plan.

The arithmetic of being wrong

Take a brand with a budget for 4,800 pieces in a drop. At a 500-piece minimum you can carry roughly ten colourways. At 150 you can carry thirty-two.

Nobody predicts which four styles will carry a drop. Retail is a guess refined by data you do not have until the goods are on the floor. With ten colourways, a wrong guess costs you 10% of the drop and there is nothing to move into instead. With thirty-two, a wrong guess costs 3% and you already have the next candidate in stock, selling, with size curve data attached.

That is what a low minimum buys. Not cheapness — optionality. You are converting one large bet into several small ones, which is almost always the better shape when demand is genuinely unknown.

The honest cost of it

A 150-piece colourway costs more per piece than a 1,000-piece colourway, and any factory that tells you otherwise is either hiding it in the fabric or planning to renegotiate later.

• Dyeing has a minimum batch. Below it you pay for capacity you do not use, or you accept a stock shade rather than your exact shade.
• A line changeover costs an hour or two of a whole line. Spread over 150 pieces that is real money; over 2,000 it disappears.
• Marker efficiency is worse on a short lay, so fabric consumption per garment is slightly higher.
• Trims, labels and packaging all have their own minimums, and they rarely sit at 150.

So the per-piece number goes up. Whether that matters depends on a calculation most range plans do not make: the cost of the extra per piece against the cost of the markdown you avoid. On a garment where a full-price sale is worth several times the make cost, carrying 40% more styles at a slightly higher cost is usually the cheaper mistake. On a basic tee competing on shelf price, it is not, and you should be buying that tee at volume from someone built for volume.

How the range plan changes in practice

Split the range into bets and bankers

The styles you know work — last season's repeat, the shape your customer buys every year — go in at volume, because volume is where they are cheapest and their risk is low. The new shapes go in at 150. Do not spread the same quantity evenly across everything; that treats a proven style and a guess as equally risky, and they are not.

Keep one fabric across several styles

This is the move that recovers most of the cost penalty. Six styles in one linen at 150 pieces each is a 900-metre-scale fabric order with volume behaviour and small-batch flexibility. The dye batch is efficient, the shade is consistent across the group, and you can shift the mix between those six styles later than you could otherwise, because the cloth is already committed and the styles are not.

Plan the repeat before the first order ships

The commercial value of a low minimum only lands if you can chase the winner. A repeat in a shade we have already dyed runs in 12 to 15 days. That means a style selling well in week two can be back on the floor inside three weeks — but only if the size curve, the ratio and the approval route are agreed in advance rather than negotiated from scratch when you are already out of stock.

Count colourways, not styles

The minimum is per colour, not per style. A dress in three colours is three minimums — 450 pieces. Two colours and a stronger buy on each is often a better plan than three thin ones, and it is the mistake we correct most often when a first range plan arrives.

Where a low minimum is the wrong tool

If your programme is 20,000 pieces of four styles, a low minimum is irrelevant to you and you should be choosing a factory on cost per piece and cost of failure at scale. If you need 40 pieces for a capsule or a shoot, 150 is still too many, and a sampling unit or a local atelier serves you better than we do.

A low minimum is not a favour to small brands. It is a different risk model, and it costs slightly more per piece to run.

The brands who use it best are the ones who treat those 150 pieces as an experiment with a defined question attached: does this shape sell, does this length sell, does this price hold. Ask a clear question, buy the smallest quantity that answers it, then buy the answer properly.