Most planners who try Claude for the first time ask it a question, get a decent answer, and then forget about it for two weeks. The problem is the lack of context. A bare Claude account knows nothing about your fiscal calendar, your margin targets, your size curve logic, or the difference between "original plan" and "master plan." Every conversation starts from zero.
A Claude project fixes that. It's a persistent workspace where everything Claude needs to know about your category lives in one place, so you stop re-explaining yourself every time you open a new chat.
This post walks through how to set one up from scratch. If you want to understand what Claude can actually do with that context once it's set up, read up on AI Skills and MCP servers.
What a Claude Project Is (and When to Use One)
A Claude project is a container. It holds:
- A set of instructions that persist across every conversation (your custom instructions)
- Documents and files Claude can reference when answering your questions
- A shared context that carries forward, so you're not starting over each time
The Right Mental Model
Think of it like onboarding a very smart analyst to your category. You wouldn't hand them a spreadsheet on Monday and expect them to understand your business by Tuesday without any background. You'd give them context: how you define things, what you measure, what you care about, and what they should never assume. A project is how you do that with Claude.
When to Use a Project vs. a Regular Chat
Use a project any time you'll be asking Claude similar questions repeatedly, working in the same data context, or wanting Claude to know your business the way a colleague would. A one-off question doesn't need a project. Your weekly sell-through recap does.
Structure — How to Organize Your Retail Planning Projects
The first question is grain: should you have one project per division, per department, or per class?
Match your project to the unit you plan at. If you own dresses across the business, that's one project. If you own a full department, Tops, Bottoms, Dresses, and you think about them together, that's a reasonable single project too. Where it breaks down is when you try to cram too much in. A project that covers the full business becomes so broad that the context stops being useful.
For most planners, the right grain is one project per department, maybe per division for smaller teams.
What to put in it on day one:
- Your current season's plan (a clean export or range plan)
- Last year's recap at whatever level of detail you have it
- Your line plan or style master for the current season
- Any brand guidelines around margin floors, AUR targets, or inventory turn expectations
- A vocabulary document you write yourself explaining how your team defines things (more on this below)
The last one is the most important and the most skipped.
Context and Vocabulary — Teaching Claude Your Retail Business
This is where most project setups fall short, because the definitions are missing.
Claude is trained on general knowledge. It does not know that your fiscal year starts in February. It doesn't know that "Spring 1" means something different at your brand than "Spring 2." It doesn't know that when you say "plan," you mean the most recent approved version, not the original board plan. Until you tell it, it will make reasonable assumptions, which can often be wrong.
The fix is a vocabulary document. One page is enough. Cover:
- Fiscal calendar. What week does your year start? How are your seasons named and when do they start and end? Do you use a 4-5-4 retail calendar or a standard fiscal calendar?
- Season and stage codes. If you're using codes like "SP1," "SP2," "SPG SEAS," or "FALL TRANS," define them. Show what weeks each covers.
- Plan versions. Do you have an original plan, a master plan, a current plan? When is each set, and which one is the default reference when you say "plan"?
- Key metrics and how you calculate them. Don't assume Claude knows your margin definitions; does it include freight? Are you calculating AUC as a landed cost? What's your ROS methodology; trailing 4 weeks, 8 weeks, or season-to-date?
- Anything a new hire would get wrong in their first week. If you've had to correct an analyst on something more than once, put it in the document. It's a reliable filter.
Category-Specific Vocabulary Worth Calling Out
For a planner owning dresses, Claude needs to understand how you think about lifecycle: early reads, peak weeks, tail.
For accessories, the logic is different: higher turn, less markdown risk, but assortment depth matters more.
For footwear, you're dealing with a size run structure that's more complex than most departments. Same template, but the vocabulary section will look meaningfully different across categories.
Recurring Planning Work — What You'll Actually Use This For
Think through your week. Most planners have a pattern that looks something like this:
- Monday: Pull performance recap. Review the week vs. plan, vs. LY. Flag anything outside tolerance. Write a brief for your DM or DMM.
- Tuesday/Wednesday: React to the recap. Run what-ifs on markdown timing, receipt adjustments, or promotional assumptions.
- Monthly: Reforecast. Review your OTB position. Update projections by department or class.
- Quarterly: Season review, hindsight, buy preparation.
Every one of those is a candidate for a recurring Claude workflow. The value of a project is that Claude already knows the context; you don't re-explain your fiscal week, your margin floor, or your category logic every time. You paste in the data and ask the question.
Specific examples of recurring questions that work well inside a well-set-up project:
- "Here's last week's data. Give me a performance recap in the format we've used before."
- "Bottoms is 15% below plan on demand $. Walk me through possible causes given what you know about our season plan and the weeks we're in."
- "I need to reforecast Spring 2 through end of season. Here are the actuals through FW18. What's my projected sell-through at current ROS?"
- "Draft the weekly exec recap for my DM — one paragraph, the three things she needs to know."
Custom Planning Instructions — How You Want Claude to Behave
The custom instructions section is your standing operating procedure for Claude. It applies to every conversation in the project. Think of it as the briefing you'd give to an analyst before they started working with you.
A few questions to answer here:
Format Preferences
Do you want bullet points or prose? Do you want Claude to always lead with the headline number before explaining it? Do you want a specific structure on recaps: performance first, then trend, then recommended action?
Numbers You Always Want to See
If you never want to look at demand without also seeing margin, say that. If comp-to-LY is always the first comparison you care about, make it explicit. "Always show LY comp alongside TY, even when I don't ask for it" is a perfectly reasonable instruction.
What Claude Should Never Do
This is underused.
- If Claude should never recommend a markdown action without you explicitly asking, say so.
- If it should never assume a receipt can be cancelled without checking your lead times first, put that in.
- If your brand has a margin floor that can't be crossed without executive sign-off, state it clearly.
The goal is to make Claude a smart collaborator, not an autonomous decision-maker.
Tone. If you want concise bullets for your own use but full sentences for executive-ready drafts, say both. "When I ask for a recap for myself, use bullets. When I ask for something to share with my DM, write in full sentences."
Planning Files and References — What to Upload
The files that belong in a project are the ones you reach for constantly. If you've ever had a tab permanently open in your browser or a folder you return to every week, that's your list.
Common candidates:
- Current season line plan or style master
- Last year's season recap by department or class
- Your OTB or open-to-buy summary
- Brand guidelines: margin floors, AUR targets, turn expectations
- Vendor or supplier list, if vendor performance is something you track
- Size curve reference by category
- Your vocabulary document
What should stay out:
- anything with personally identifiable information,
- anything governed by NDAs with vendors
- anything your legal or finance team would flag as confidential.
A useful rule: would you print this and leave it in a shared conference room? If not, don't upload it.
Connections to Other Planning and Data Tools
Most planners pull from more than one place: site analytics, a data warehouse, finance reports, vendor scorecards. If you're using Toolio with MCP enabled, Claude can pull directly from your planning data without requiring a file export. That changes the workflow significantly: instead of refreshing a data file on Monday morning before running your recap, Claude queries it live.
For everything else, a clean export into the project is still the right approach. The key is making the export repeatable and consistent: same format, same column names, same fiscal week structure every time — so Claude doesn't have to relearn your data layout each week.
There's also context that lives in your head or in Slack threads and never gets documented anywhere. Seasonality nuances. The category that always underforecasts in February because of how a particular promo falls. The vendor whose lead times are always two weeks longer than stated. That kind of institutional knowledge is worth capturing in a short notes document and adding to the project. It won't be perfect, but it's a lot better than losing it when someone on the team turns over.
Differences Across Planning Roles
A planner's project looks different from a merchant's, which looks different from an allocator's.
Planners
Needs strong financial context: plan versions, margin definitions, OTB structure, forecast methodology. The recurring work is performance analysis, reforecasting, and executive communication.
Merchants
Needs assortment context: line plans, attribute hierarchies, trend references, competitive pricing. The recurring work is range reviews, attribute reporting, and buy preparation support.
Allocators
Needs location-level context: store tier definitions, size curves by door, transfer logic, ROS by location. The recurring work is replenishment analysis and exception flagging.
For a junior analyst or new hire starting week one, a project is actually a useful onboarding tool. Give them a read-only version with the vocabulary document, the current season plan, and last year's recap. Let them ask Claude questions about the business before they ask their manager. It reduces the learning curve and cuts down the "sorry, what does FW stand for?" moments.
Getting Started: The Claude Project Setup Every Retail Planner Needs
A Claude project doesn't require a lot of time to set up. It requires the right things: a vocabulary document, a clean season plan, a handful of recurring files, and a few lines of custom instructions that tell Claude how you want to work.
Done right, it's the difference between a tool you use once and forget and one that becomes part of how your team operates every week. The Monday recap runs faster. The reforecast takes minutes instead of an afternoon. The exec brief writes itself because it finally understands your business well enough to be genuinely useful.
If you're already using Toolio, the MCP integration takes this further: Claude can query your planning data directly, without the export-and-upload step. That closes the last gap between your data and your workflow.
The project setup is the foundation. The skills and MCP connections are what you build on top. Start with the foundation, get one workflow running well, and expand from there.
