A line sheet is the one or two page document a retail buyer orders from: every item you sell wholesale, with a photo, a wholesale price, a case pack and a suggested retail price, plus your minimum, your terms and how to place the order.
It is not a brand book and it is not a catalogue. A buyer opens it on a phone between customers, scans it for about as long as it takes to drink half a coffee, and either builds an order or closes it. Everything about the design follows from that.
What a line sheet is for
It answers the only three questions a buyer has once they like the product: what does it cost me, how many do I have to take, and what do I charge.
Anything that helps answer those belongs on it. Anything else, including your founding story, your ingredient philosophy and a full-bleed photograph of a hand holding a necklace on a beach, belongs somewhere else.
This is also why a line sheet and a catalogue are different documents. A catalogue sells the range and a line sheet prices it, and once a brand has more than about thirty items the two genuinely separate, which is the argument in wholesale catalog.
The eight things it has to carry
Use a small jewellery brand as the example: fourteen pieces, brass and enamel, boutique price band.
- Item name and SKU. The same code that appears on your invoice, the carton and your inventory. Buyers reorder by writing codes in an email, and a piece called "the small green one" gets ordered wrong.
- A photograph. One clear image per item, on white or a single consistent background, cropped the same way for every row.
- Wholesale price per unit. The number they pay.
- Case pack. How many they must take of that item. Where this number comes from is in case pack.
- Case price. Wholesale times the case, printed as a real number so nobody has to multiply.
- Suggested retail price. Their shelf price, which is how they see their margin instantly.
- A one-line description. Material, size, finish. Fifteen words, not fifty. A buyer needs to know it is a nine-inch brass chain, not what it means to you.
- Stock or lead time. In stock, or ships in two weeks. Buyers plan around dates, and a sheet without them invites an email you have to answer.
Miss any of those and the buyer either emails you or gives up, and most of them give up.
How the page should be laid out
A grid, not a story. Rows of items, each row identical in structure, so the eye can scan down a single column of prices.
Group by category rather than by launch date, because buyers shop by section: earrings together, chains together, seasonal at the end. Within a group, put your best seller first. First position gets ordered.
Keep it to one page if you can and two if you must. A fourteen-piece jewellery brand fits on one page comfortably with four columns of thumbnails. A brand with forty items should split the sheet by category into two pages rather than shrinking the type.
Leave the top strip for the three things a buyer checks before reading anything: brand name, the season or effective date of the prices, and your minimum order.
And put a real order path at the bottom: an email address, a phone number, a link to your wholesale portal if you have one. A buyer who has decided to order should not have to hunt.
Photography that survives a thumbnail
The photographs on a line sheet are doing a job that has nothing to do with the photographs on your store.
They need to be legible at the size of a postage stamp, on a phone screen, in a shop with bad lighting. That means the product fills the frame, the background is plain and identical across every item, and there is nothing else in the picture.
Lifestyle shots do not work here. A model wearing three of your necklaces at once is a lovely image and a useless line sheet row, because the buyer cannot tell which product they are ordering.
Shoot every item the same way on the same day if you can. Inconsistent crops and shifting backgrounds make a range look like a market stall, and that impression is hard to undo once it is in a buyer's inbox.
Keep the file size sane. A sheet that takes thirty seconds to open on mobile data does not get opened twice.
The terms block
One short block, usually at the foot of the last page, that pre-answers everything a buyer would otherwise write to ask.
- Opening order minimum and reorder minimum, in dollars.
- Payment terms: prepaid on opening orders, and what an account has to do to qualify for credit later. The ladder for that is in net 30 terms.
- Lead time from order to despatch.
- Shipping: who pays, and the order value above which you cover it.
- Any volume tiers, as three rows at most.
- Damages and returns: the window to report a breakage and what you do about it.
Write it in plain sentences. Terms that read like a contract make a small shop nervous, and nervous buyers postpone.
Sending it so it gets read
Send a PDF. Not a link to a folder, not a spreadsheet, not a password-protected portal that emails a code. A buyer forwarding your sheet to a partner should be able to do it in one gesture.
Name the file properly: brand, document type, season. A file called linesheet_final_v3.pdf is going to be lost in a downloads folder within a day, while brandname-wholesale-line-sheet-spring.pdf is findable eight months later when they want to reorder.
Attach it rather than making them click through, keep it under a few megabytes, and put the three headline facts in the body of the email itself: what the product is, the opening minimum, and the lead time. Some buyers order from the email without opening the attachment.
If you are cold-emailing shops, the sheet is the second thing you send, not the first. The first email is three sentences about why this shop specifically, with one image. The sheet follows when they answer. That sequence is the substance of how to get your product in boutiques.
Keeping it current
A line sheet has a date on it for a reason. Dated sheets can expire; undated ones follow you around for years.
Reissue it when prices change, when items are discontinued and at the start of each buying season. Keep the old versions, because a buyer will eventually order from a sheet you stopped using and you will want to know what it said.
Two habits keep it honest. Never send a sheet with items on it you cannot make in quantity, because a buyer ordering a discontinued piece is an awkward first impression. And whenever you change a case pack or a price anywhere, change it on the sheet in the same sitting, since the sheet is the version buyers treat as true.
When you are ready to send it somewhere, the harder question is who. Pasting a product link into WholesalePilot previews the retailers and distributors that stock products like yours, which turns a finished sheet into a list of accounts worth sending it to.
Questions brands ask about line sheets
Do I need a line sheet if I sell through a marketplace? Yes. Marketplace listings do not travel, and a buyer who meets you at a market or by email expects a sheet.
Should wholesale prices be public on my website? No. Keep them behind an account login or in the PDF you send. Consumers should never see the wholesale column.
How many items should be on it? As many as you can make consistently. A focused fourteen-item sheet outsells a padded forty-item one, because the buyer can decide.
What does a good one actually look like? Easier to show than describe, which is what line sheet examples is for, and the structure to start from is in line sheet template.