Cookies and Privacy

1. Who runs this site

The Apparel OS (theapparelos.com) is published and operated by RetailNorthstar. This notice covers what this website stores on your device and how to change it. It is the document the cookie banner on this site refers to.

Everything else — what we do with information you send us, how long we keep it, who it is shared with, and the rights you have over it — is governed by the RetailNorthstar Privacy Policy, which applies to this site as well as to retailnorthstar.ai.

2. What this site stores on your device

We group it into three categories. Analytics and Marketing are off until you turn them on — for every visitor, in every country, from the moment the page loads. The banner does not decide whether you are protected; it only records what you choose.

• Essential — always on, and not something you can switch off. This covers remembering your cookie choice, security, basic site operation, and counting visits in a mode that writes nothing to your device and reads nothing from it. That last part is why it needs no consent: Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive is about storing or accessing information on your device, and cookieless counting does neither. On this site that is Google Analytics 4 running under Google Consent Mode v2 with storage denied, which sends cookieless measurement pings and writes no _ga or _ga_<id> cookie. To be straight about the limit of that: a cookieless Google ping still transmits your IP address and browser user-agent to Google LLC, so it is not accurate to call it private or unshared — only to say that it puts nothing on your device.
• Analytics — optional, off unless you turn it on. This is the cookie-writing half of the same tool, plus session recording. Turning it on lets Google Analytics write _ga and _ga_<id>, and loads Microsoft Clarity, which records sessions and heatmaps and sets _clck, _clsk and a _cltk key in your browser’s session storage. Clarity has no cookieless mode, so until you turn this on its script is never downloaded at all. If you do turn it on, every form on this site is marked with Clarity’s masking attribute, so what you type is masked in your browser before anything is sent.
• Marketing — optional, off unless you turn it on, and carrying nothing today. We run no advertising pixel, no remarketing tag and no cross-site tracker on this site. The category exists so that the advertising signals we send to Google are managed rather than unmanaged, and so that a refusal you record now already applies if that ever changes. Leaving it off today removes nothing, because there is nothing there to remove.

3. Your choice, and how we remember it

When you answer the banner we set rn_consent, a first-party cookie lasting six months. It records two things only: whether you allowed Analytics and whether you allowed Marketing. We cannot honour a “no” without remembering it, so this cookie is strictly necessary and is set without consent, as the law permits. It contains no identifier and is never shared with anyone else; like any first-party cookie it is sent to this site along with your requests.

Closing the banner counts as declining. If you close it with the X rather than answering, we record that as a refusal of both optional categories and we do not ask you again. We never treat closing the banner, scrolling, or simply carrying on browsing as consent.

Where we ask. We show the banner to every visitor, everywhere, until they decide. Your approximate country — worked out from the IP address your request arrives with, then discarded — changes only how the buttons are laid out: in the EU, EEA, UK and Switzerland, Accept and Decline are shown identically, because refusing has to be exactly as easy as accepting. If we cannot work out where you are, you get that same layout.

4. Changing or withdrawing your choice

Use the Cookie settings link at the bottom of any page, or the control below. It re-opens the banner with your current choices shown, so you can switch a category off, switch one on, or decline everything in one click. Withdrawing is as easy as giving consent, and you can do it as often as you like.

You can also delete the rn_consent cookie in your browser settings, which resets you to undecided and brings the banner back, or block cookies entirely — the site works without them.

5. What happens when you turn Analytics off

We stop the cookie-writing mode straight away, expire the _ga, _ga_<id>, _clck and _clsk cookies we can reach from the page, tell an already-loaded Clarity tag to stop, and reload so that a script your browser has already run is gone rather than merely told to stop.

The honest limits. A script the browser has already executed cannot be removed in place, so if that reload is blocked it stops at your next page view instead; the cookies and the signals sent to Google have already changed by then. And Clarity’s _cltk value lives in your browser’s session storage rather than in a cookie: it is not one of the values we expire, and your browser clears it when you close the tab.

6. If you send us your details

Some resources on this site ask for your first name, work email and company before you download them. That goes to RetailNorthstar, is used to send you the file and to follow up about the platform, and is covered by the RetailNorthstar Privacy Policy. Nothing on this page changes that, and none of it depends on the cookie choice above.

To ask for a copy of what we hold, a correction, or deletion, contact the RetailNorthstar privacy team. No account or reference number is needed.