For decades, planograms worked on a simple principle. Head office designed a shelf layout, printed it, and sent it to every store in the chain. A supermarket in inner Melbourne and one in regional Queensland received the same diagram, stocked the same products in the same positions, and were expected to hit the same targets.That model is breaking down. Customer demand now varies sharply from store to store, space is more expensive than ever, and shoppers notice quickly when the product they came for isn’t on the shelf. As a result, more retailers are moving away from chain-wide templates toward planograms built for each individual store.

The problem with one-size-fits-all layouts 

A standard planogram assumes that every store sells roughly the same mix of products at roughly the same rate. In practice, that is rarely true.Consider two stores in the same chain. One sits near a university and sells large volumes of ready meals, energy drinks and single-serve snacks. The other serves a suburban area full of families, where bulk packs, household essentials and baby products move fastest.

If both stores receive an identical layout, each ends up with too much shelf space devoted to slow sellers and too little for the products its customers actually buy.The consequences show up in the numbers. Fast-moving items run out between deliveries, while slow ones sit on shelves until they expire or need to be marked down. Staff spend time on manual workarounds, squeezing extra stock into gaps or ignoring the planogram altogether, which makes compliance harder to measure.

What makes a planogram “store-specific”