A line sheet is a short PDF that shows a buyer every product you sell, what it costs them, what it sells for, and how to order it. Done well, a buyer can place an order from it without asking you a single question. That is the whole test, and most first line sheets fail it not because they look bad but because something they need is missing.
This is the build, in order, for a small jewellery brand: brass hoop earrings at fifty-eight dollars retail and twenty-six wholesale, minimum three per style, nine styles in the range.
Before you open any software
Three decisions have to exist before layout, and doing them in the wrong order means rebuilding the file.
Decide which products are on it. Not all of them. The line sheet is the range you can reliably supply for the next six months, in quantity, with photography. Limited runs, one-offs and anything you are unsure about stay off. Nine styles is a good number for a first sheet; twenty-five is a catalogue problem pretending to be a line sheet.
Fix your item codes. Short, stable, readable: HP-BR-SM for the small brass hoop. These codes will appear on the line sheet, the order form, the carton label and the invoice, and changing them later breaks every one of those. Set them now, write them down, never reuse one.
Settle the numbers. Wholesale price, suggested retail, minimum per style, minimum opening order, and your terms. If any of those are still "it depends", the line sheet will say so and buyers will read it as inexperience. The arithmetic behind the first two is in wholesale pricing formula.
The photography is most of the job
A line sheet is judged on its photos in about two seconds, and this is the step brands try to skip with their existing product shots.
Use one consistent treatment across every product. Same background, same lighting, same angle, same distance, same crop. Nine earrings shot identically look like a range. Nine earrings shot in nine different ways look like a folder.
Plain white or a single soft neutral works best, because a buyer is mentally placing the product on their own shelf rather than in your world. Save the lifestyle photography for the first page and for the email — one hero image is enough context.
Shoot square. Square crops grid cleanly and survive being dropped into any template without reflowing. Export at a size that prints acceptably but keeps the file under about ten megabytes total, because a line sheet that will not attach to an email is a line sheet nobody sees.
If a product has variants — three finishes of the same hoop — show one clearly and put the finishes as small swatches or as separate rows with their own codes. Do not show three near-identical photos; it makes a nine-product range look like a twenty-seven-product range that a buyer then has to work through.
Laying out the page
Two pages is the target. Three is acceptable. Anything longer belongs in a catalogue.
Page one, top: brand name, a one-line description of what you make, the season or effective date, and your contact details including the email orders should go to. One hero image if you have a good one. That is the entire top of the page — resist the founder story, the mission statement and the map of where your materials come from. A buyer who wants that will look at your site.
The grid: three across, three down, nine products on one page. Under each photo, four lines: product name, item code, wholesale price, suggested retail. Nothing else. A fifth line for material or size only if the product genuinely needs it.
The footer block: this is the part that makes the sheet orderable. Minimum opening order. Minimum reorder. Minimum per style. Lead time. Freight policy and the threshold above which you cover it. Payment terms. Where to send the order. Seven short lines, and they are the most-read part of the document.
Whitespace does more for a line sheet than any design choice. A cramped grid reads as a market stall; the same nine products with air around them read as a brand. What that finished layout looks like in practice is easier to judge from line sheet examples.
The tools, honestly
Any of these produce a fine line sheet, and the choice matters less than the consistency of the photography.
A slide tool is the fastest path for most people. Set the page to the size you want, build the grid once, duplicate the slide. Export to PDF. It is not elegant but it is done in an afternoon and it updates in minutes.
A design tool with a template gets you a better-looking result for roughly the same effort if you are comfortable in one. The risk is spending three days on typography that no buyer will notice.
A spreadsheet works if your range is large and your photos are small — it is really a price list at that point, which is a different and equally necessary document. The distinction between the two is set out in wholesale price list.
What to avoid: anything that only exists as a link behind a login, and anything that reflows on the buyer's machine. Buyers forward line sheets, print them and annotate them. A PDF survives all three.
The details that get it ordered from
A handful of small things separate a line sheet a buyer can act on from one that generates an email.
Put the minimum next to the price, not only in the footer. Twenty-six dollars, minimum three, is a complete instruction. Twenty-six dollars alone is a question.
Show the pack format explicitly. For the earrings, say whether they arrive on individual cards, whether there is a display, and whether the display is charged or included. Buyers are deciding about a shelf, not an object.
Include a simple order form. A final page with a table — item code, name, wholesale price, quantity, line total — that a buyer can print and fill in or type into. It sounds old-fashioned and it materially increases the number of orders you receive.
Date and version the file. Brand, line sheet, effective date, in the file name. Buyers keep these for years, and an untitled PDF in a downloads folder is a lost order.
State a validity window. Prices effective from a date, valid through another. It ends the argument about last season's numbers before it starts.
Sending it
The line sheet goes as an attachment, in a short email, with the price already visible. Brands who hold the prices back to force a conversation get fewer conversations, not more.
For a first approach to a shop, the email is three or four sentences: what you make, one reason this shop specifically, the minimum opening order, and the attachment. Buyers open dozens of these and the ones that state the minimum in the first email get read, because the minimum is what tells them whether this is worth five minutes.
Keep the file small enough to attach. If it will not go under about ten megabytes with reasonable images, reduce the image export quality rather than splitting the document.
If you are not yet sure which shops to send it to, paste your store or product link into WholesalePilot and look at the preview of the retailers and distributors that stock comparable products, then work through that list rather than through search results.
Keeping it current
A line sheet goes stale faster than brands expect, and a stale one is worse than none.
Update it whenever a product is discontinued, a price changes, or you add a style worth selling in. Reissue with a new effective date rather than editing quietly, and send the new version to every active account with one sentence saying what changed.
Keep an archive of old versions. When an account orders from a two-year-old sheet — and one will — being able to see exactly what they were looking at makes the correction a two-minute email rather than an argument.
And resist adding products to it just because they exist. The line sheet's job is to make ordering easy, and every marginal product you add makes the decision harder for the buyer. A tight nine-style sheet that a shop can order from in five minutes beats a twenty-four-style sheet they mean to read properly later. What belongs on the longer document instead is covered in wholesale catalog template.
Questions brands ask about making a line sheet
Does a line sheet need prices on it? Yes. A line sheet without prices is a lookbook, and a buyer cannot do anything with it except email you.
Should it show my retail price as well as wholesale? Both, on every product. The buyer wants to see the margin without calculating it, and you want the shelf price on record.
How many products is too many? If a buyer cannot take in the range in one scroll, it is a catalogue. Somewhere around twenty products is the practical ceiling for a line sheet.
Do I need a different sheet for each account type? Not at the start. One sheet with clear minimums covers independents; distributors and chains will ask for their own format when the time comes. The underlying document structure is the same either way, and wholesale line sheet covers what it has to contain.