Casepack Studio

Case Packs, Wholesale Price And Margin

Three numbers decide whether a buyer orders from you: what a case costs them, what they can sell it for, and what they keep. Most line sheets show one of the three. This is how to show all of them, and why the case pack is the one that quietly controls everything else.

The Case Pack Is The Shape Of The Order

A case pack is the number of units in one orderable case. It is not a detail and it is not a shipping note. It is the unit the buyer actually commits to.

Consider a $9 wholesale napkin. In a case of four, the buyer risks $36 and gives you a small corner of a shelf. In a case of twenty-four, the same buyer risks $216 and has to find a place to put two dozen napkins. Same product, same price, completely different decision. A buyer who cannot see the case pack cannot make that decision, so they email you, or they do not.

Three rules that hold across almost every category:

Put the case pack in a fixed column on every row, so the eye can run down it. Do not bury it in the product description on some rows and not others.
Say whether your price is per unit or per case. Ambiguity here produces short orders and awkward invoices. Per unit is the usual convention. State it anyway.
Keep case packs small for opening orders. A four or a six lets a shop try you. A twenty-four asks for a commitment they have no reason to make yet.

If you sell inner and outer packs, show both, and be explicit about which one the minimum applies to.

Show The Retail Price, Even Though It Is Only A Suggestion

Independent retailers set their own prices, so MSRP is genuinely a suggestion. Print it anyway, for three reasons.

It tells the buyer where you think the product sits in the market, which is information they cannot get anywhere else. It keeps your stockists roughly aligned with each other, which protects all of them. And it is half of the margin calculation, which is the number they are really after.

Do The Margin Arithmetic For Them

Margin is what the retailer keeps as a percentage of what they charge: retail minus wholesale, divided by retail. A $9 wholesale napkin at $22 retail is a margin of about 59%.

Most gift and home retailers work to keystone, which means doubling the wholesale price. Keystone is a 50% margin. Anything meaningfully below that gets scrutinised, and below about 30% most shops will not stock the item at all no matter how good it is.

So put the percentage on the page, in its own column, calculated. It costs you a column of space and it removes the single largest piece of friction in the document. If one of your items comes out at 42%, a buyer seeing that number can decide it is worth it for the traffic the product brings. A buyer who has to work it out themselves will usually just skip the row.

If your MSRP is not exactly double your wholesale, say so plainly. A buyer who spots the discrepancy without an explanation assumes you made a mistake, and now they are checking your other numbers too.

The Margin Check You Should Run Before A Buyer Does

Sort your whole range by margin, lowest first, and look at the bottom of the list. Every item under about 30% is a conversation you are going to have, so decide now how it goes. Either the price moves, the retail moves, the case pack changes, or you have a reason worth stating on the page.

Doing this once, before the line sheet goes out, is worth more than any design decision on the document.

Where This Falls Apart

It falls apart in the spreadsheet, not the layout. Case packs entered inconsistently, a price updated in one file and not another, an MSRP that was right last season. Once bad data reaches a page it gets copied into the catalog, the sell sheet and the order form, and then a buyer finds it.

The fix is boring and it works: keep one row per orderable item in one file, carry case pack, wholesale, MSRP and category on that row, and let every document read from it rather than retyping it.

Files That Already Do This

The product spreadsheet starter at $9 is that one file. Case pack, wholesale and MSRP columns, an automatic margin column that tints anything under 30%, and column checks so the data is clean before it reaches a page.

The line sheet template reads that format and lays out SKU, case pack, wholesale, MSRP and margin as aligned columns. The free one-page version shows you the structure at no cost.

If you would rather send the spreadsheet and get the document back, the Line Sheet Build is $190 and takes four days, and every gap in your data gets flagged before anything is built.