The principle

Fashion intelligence only works if a brand can trust where the intelligence came from. So we hold ourselves to one rule:

If it isn't publicly published, or explicitly shared with us by the person it belongs to, it doesn't enter Threddle.

That single rule is what the rest of this page unpacks.

1. Your store data — yours, borrowed with permission

When you connect your store, you authorise Threddle through Shopify's official OAuth flow. You see the exact permissions requested before you approve them, and you can revoke them at any time by uninstalling the app.

What we read: your products, variants, pricing, collections, inventory levels, locations, and order totals — the commercial shape of your catalogue.

What we deliberately do not read: your shoppers. Threddle is not approved for Shopify's protected customer data, and we built the integration that way on purpose. Our sync requests order identifiers and aggregate values only. We do not receive, store, or process:

• customer names
• email addresses or phone numbers
• shipping or billing addresses
• payment details

A Threddle recommendation can tell you that a linen shirt is selling faster than you can restock it. It cannot tell you who bought one — because we never asked for that, and we don't want it.

Your data is never pooled into another brand's insights. Every query in our platform is scoped to your tenant. Your catalogue, your margins, and your sales velocity are never exposed to another Threddle customer, aggregated into a benchmark another brand can see, or sold to anyone.

2. Market data — public signals, gathered politely

Trend forecasting and competitor intelligence draw on information brands and platforms have already published to the open web. Four sources:

• Published product pages. Public product listings and shopping results — the same pages any shopper sees without logging in. We record product-level facts: title, category, price, availability, currency, and the page URL.
• Public search interest. Aggregate, anonymised search-demand indices by country and category. These are already-aggregated statistics about categories — never about individuals.
• Public social posts. Publicly posted content that platforms serve without a login: captions, hashtags, engagement counts, and the publicly attached creator handle, exactly as published. We use these in aggregate to detect what a category is doing, not to profile a person.
• Published editorial and press. Publicly available fashion press and editorial coverage.

How our data ingestion behaves

• Low and slow. Product-page ingestion runs at a concurrency of 2, with per-minute rate limits on every external API. We are optimising for a light footprint, not for speed.
• Public surfaces only. We fetch pages that are served to any visitor without authentication. We do not log into accounts, buy accounts, or use anyone's credentials to reach content.
• No private, paywalled, or protected content. If a page requires a login, a subscription, or a granted permission to view, it is out of scope.
• Geography, honestly. Market demand is different in Mumbai than in Toronto, so we route requests through commercial proxy infrastructure to see a market the way a shopper in that country sees it. It is there for accuracy of the signal, not to disguise who we are.
• Facts, not copies. We extract structured commercial facts — a price, a category, a date. We do not republish another brand's creative assets, product photography, or copy as our own.

3. What we will never do

• Collect, infer, or resell your shoppers' personal information.
• Sell, licence, or share your store data with other brands, including your competitors.
• Buy leaked, stolen, or breached datasets, or data of unknown provenance.
• Access a competitor's private systems, internal dashboards, or non-public APIs.
• Use credentials, purchased accounts, or borrowed sessions to reach gated content.
• Present a recommendation whose evidence we can't show you.

4. Traceable by design

Every Playbook card carries its evidence: the trend, the competitor listing, the social signal, or the inventory position that produced it, with the source it came from. If a recommendation can't be traced back to a real, checkable signal, it doesn't ship.

We think this matters more than any promise on a page like this one. Trustworthy sourcing isn't a claim — it's something you should be able to click into and verify on every card we show you.

5. Retention, deletion, and control

• Market signals are retained as historical time series, because a trend is only meaningful against its own history.
• Your store data is retained for as long as your account is active and deleted when you close it, on the timelines set out in our data retention policy.
• Removing Threddle's access is one action: uninstall the app in Shopify, and the authorisation is revoked immediately.

Full detail lives in our Data Protection & Subprocessors page and Privacy Policy.

6. If we've got something wrong

If you believe Threddle has collected something it shouldn't have, or you'd like your brand's public data excluded from our market signals, write to us. Tell us the domain or content in question and we will review it and confirm what we've done. We would rather remove a signal than defend one.

We revise this page whenever our data sources or ingestion practices change.