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Once you have bought your initial breeding stock (often a trio of two does and one buck), you will want to figure out how to choose which rabbits to save back for future breedings and which bucks to breed to which does. Every breeding you do should have a purpose and goals, even if you are breeding rabbits strictly for meat and fur. If you make good breeding matches, you will produce more meat per rabbit and better quality fur with each generation than if you breed haphazardly.
We started by breeding our two does to our buck when the does were old enough (many breeders follow the rule of 9 pounds or 9 months for breeding age for does, which is what we do). From the resulting litters, we selected the rabbits with best body type for commercial meat rabbits and saved those back to keep or sell as breeding stock. In our case, we also decided to add some more does to have more options to make the best buck to doe pairings and to be able to breed unrelated rabbits to sell as breeding trios. If you start with a breeding trio, it is also just fine to save back does to breed back to your buck, bucks back to breed to your does, or half-siblings to breed to each other. "Linebreeding", as it is known, is widely-practiced in the rabbit breeding community as it produces rabbits with stronger type and does not cause problems for many generations. I like to only do two rounds of linebreeding (children back to parents or half siblings together) before adding in some unrelated stock to keep the gene pool from being too limited, and to correct for any flaws that have developed.
When pairing rabbits, assess your does and figure out what she may be lacking as well as what her best qualities are. Does she have strong, full hindquarters, and long, dense fur but lacks shoulder depth or length? She would be best paired with a buck who has good shoulders to produce babies of high quality. While my recommendation is to buy bucks who are as perfect as possible since they are the rabbits who will appear in the pedigree of more rabbits you produce, you should also consider the qualities of the buck and what does may be a good fit to cross with them. Each breeding should be aiming to highlight the best qualities while improving any weaker areas.
Another consideration is color. Black Silver Foxes are the standard, but can also be bred in blue, chocolate, lilac, REW, and the Alaskan Red Fox tort variety. While these fun colors provide variety in the breeding barn and in the pelts from cull rabbits, they aren't as valuable as show stock, so you'll want to consider whether you want to aim primarily at producing black rabbits, or if you want to enter the realm of color genetics. We chose the latter because we like variety and wanted a rainbow of pelt colors to use from our cull rabbits. As such, we also consider color pairings for our rabbits to allow us to work towards producing all color varieties of the silver fox.
Each time you breed, your should have goals you want to accomplish with that breeding. For us, those goals include first and foremost the right "type", second on our list is temperament, and the third consideration is color. With every generation, we hope to hone in these three goals and produce better and better rabbits. With time, we will get closer to our goals, but we will also likely find other things that are slipping (like fur quality or shoulder depth), and then we will add correcting those to our list of goals. Breeding the "perfect" rabbit is not something you ever quite achieve, you chase it and chase it but it remains ever out of reach. Even so, it is worth aspiring to and with time, you do get closer. You just find along the way that your own standard of perfection has become more and more exceptional with time. This is the stamp of the best rabbit breeders - they cull and cull and cull time and time again, believing that they are contributing to the breed, its preservation and utility and that their work as a breeder matters. This should be true of each and every breeder, and it is what we attain to with our rabbitry. Everyone has to start somewhere, but we can all aim to create better and better rabbits with each breeding we do.
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