What Belongs On A Wholesale Line Sheet

A line sheet is not a brochure and it is not a lookbook. It is an ordering document. Its only job is to let a buyer decide what to order and how much, without emailing you a single question. Judged that way, most line sheets in circulation fail, and they fail in the same predictable places.

Here is what belongs on one, in the order a buyer actually reads it.

1. Who You Are, In One Line

Brand name, where you are based, and the season or the date the prices hold to. That is the whole masthead. A buyer who picked your sheet up at a show three weeks ago needs to know instantly whose it is and whether the prices are still good.

The date matters more than people think. A line sheet with no season on it is a line sheet a buyer cannot trust to quote from.

2. Your Terms, Before The Products

Opening order minimum, reorder minimum, freight threshold, lead time, payment terms. Five facts, one strip, above the product table.

This feels backwards to a lot of brands, who want the products to lead. It is not backwards. A buyer with a $150 budget and a $500 minimum needs to know that in the first two seconds, and a buyer who can meet your minimum reads the rest of the page differently once they know they qualify. Burying terms on the last page wastes both of your time.

3. Every SKU, With Six Fields

This is the body of the document, and the six fields are not negotiable:

• Product name, written the way you want it to appear on a shelf tag
• SKU or style code, unique, and the same code you will use on the invoice
• Case pack, the number of units in one orderable case
• Wholesale price, per unit unless you say otherwise
• MSRP, your suggested retail
• Margin, the percentage the retailer keeps

The last two are where nearly every line sheet stops short. Plenty of them carry a wholesale price. Far fewer carry the retail alongside it, and almost none do the margin arithmetic for the buyer. That arithmetic is the actual buying decision, and every minute a buyer spends doing it in their head is a minute they are not spending choosing your products. There is a longer piece on case packs and margin if you want the detail.

4. Products Grouped By Range, Never Alphabetically

Buyers do not order one SKU out of a collection. They take a range and cut it down. A line sheet sorted A to Z scatters your scent family across four pages and forces the buyer to rebuild the collection in their head before they can edit it.

Group by range. Put a clear break and a range name above each group. Say how many SKUs are in it. A buyer should be able to look at six pieces and see that they belong on a table together.

5. Photography That Is Consistent Before It Is Beautiful

One background, one light direction, one scale relationship across every product. A page of merely competent photographs shot consistently reads as a brand. A page of individually lovely photographs shot four different ways reads as a hobby.

If your photography is inconsistent, fix that before you touch the layout. No amount of typography rescues it.

6. How To Actually Place The Order

Email address, phone number, and whether you take orders through a platform such as Faire, Abound, Brandboom or NuORDER. If you have an order form, say so and attach it. If a buyer has to build their own spreadsheet to order from you, a certain number of them will simply not bother, and you will never know which ones.

The Test

Hand your line sheet to somebody who has never seen your brand. Give them ninety seconds. Then ask them three questions: what would this cost me for one case of your best seller, what would I sell it for, and what do I have to spend to open an account.

If they cannot answer all three, the document is not finished. That is the whole standard, and it is a harder one than most brands are holding themselves to.

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A Working File, Free

The fastest way to see all of this on a real page is to open one. The one-page line sheet template is free, carries twelve products, and has no watermark, no locked layers and no trial period. It is a full page of the paid file, built by the same system.

If your product data is the part that is scattered, start with the product spreadsheet starter at $9 instead. It carries case pack, wholesale, MSRP and an automatic margin column, and every template and every done-for-you kit reads that exact format.

Download the Studio Catalog (8-page PDF)

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