Merchant Agreement — Fashion Brand Finder

Before you accept — the five things people miss

Swiss law does not enforce a surprising clause that was buried in a long document. So the surprising ones are here, at the top, in plain words.

1. Your listing may already exist, and you did not put it there. We build the directory ourselves from public information. §3 explains how to take it over, correct it, or have it removed.
2. A listing is not a ranking promise. Paying us never buys you a higher position in a list that claims to be about relevance. What money buys is set out in §6 and §7.
3. We can suspend or remove a listing. We will always tell you why, in writing (§9).
4. These terms will change. How, and what you can do about it, is in §12.
5. Nothing here is about commission on sales. Commission is a separate agreement that does not exist yet (§8). Do not assume it is included.
6. We may feature your brand to promote Fashion Brand Finder — your name, logo, photos and text — including in our own advertising (§5). Always to promote the platform, never to suggest you endorse us or anyone else.
7. If you stop paying we do not refund the unused part of the month, and paid features stop (§10). Your baseline listing stays (§4, §11).

1. Who this agreement is between

This agreement is between:

• M8 Media by Manuel Bucher, Kaffeestrasse 6C, 8180 Bülach, Switzerland (CHE-203.493.947) — "FBF", "we", "us" — the operator of Fashion Brand Finder; and
• the company named in the acceptance record — "you", "the Merchant" — the brand or shop that holds the listing.

Contact: hello@fashionbrandfinder.com.

This agreement covers brands and shops. It is a business-to-business agreement. It is not a consumer contract, and consumers of FBF are governed by the platform terms and the privacy policy instead.

2. Who may accept it, and how acceptance is recorded

This is the clause that decides whether the rest of the document is worth anything.

Being an "owner" on an FBF team is a permission inside our software. It is not signing authority. Holding an owner seat does not tell us that you can bind your company, and we do not treat it as if it did.

So before an account can accept this agreement on behalf of a company, all of the following must be true:

At the moment of acceptance we record, and keep, a copy of the exact wording you agreed to, the time you agreed to it, and:

• the legal entity name and, where it exists, the commercial register number of the company being bound;
• the name of the person accepting and their function in that company (for example: managing director, authorised signatory, marketing manager);
• an explicit declaration, ticked separately from everything else: "I am authorised to enter into this agreement on behalf of {company}." If you cannot make that declaration honestly, stop and let someone in your company who can do it instead. If it later turns out that the person who accepted was not authorised, then under Swiss law your company is simply not bound — we will ask someone who is authorised to confirm the agreement, and until they do, the paid features that depend on it are not available. We do not take your baseline listing down over it.

We keep the acceptance record even if the person who accepted later deletes their personal account. The contract has to outlive the individual.

Under Swiss law this agreement needs no signature and no paper (OR Art 1, Art 11); acceptance in the portal is a valid conclusion of contract.

Minimum age. The person accepting must have legal capacity to contract. Where the Merchant is a sole proprietor contracting in their own name, that person must be at least 18. Under ZGB Art 19 a minor cannot take on obligations like these without their legal representative, so we do not let them try. The minimum age to hold any FBF account at all is 13 (see the privacy policy, §7); that is the consumer account minimum and has nothing to do with who may accept this agreement.

3. Listings we created before you arrived

Most of the directory was built by us, not by brands. This is deliberate and we want you to understand it before you decide what to do about it.

What a seeded listing is. We create listings for real brands and real shops from publicly available information — name, country, website, product categories, price band, publicly stated certifications. We do not invent brands. We do not invent facts. We do not copy your text: narrative fields like your story, your values statement and your sustainability goals stay empty until a real person from your company fills them in.

We should be straight with you about one thing: the app does not currently show consumers whether a page was written by the brand or by us. There used to be an "Unclaimed" badge and it was deliberately removed. Restoring a signal of some kind is on our list; until it is, a reader cannot tell the difference, and that is a fair thing to hold us to.

Nothing about a seeded listing binds you. You have not accepted this agreement, you owe us nothing, and you have no obligations to us at all until someone from your company accepts under §2.

Your three options.

We aim to act on correction and removal requests quickly, but we are a small team and we do not promise a fixed turnaround. Claims and ownership checks are reviewed by a person, not automatically, so they take as long as a person takes.

What we will not do. We will not restore a listing you asked us to remove unless you ask us to, and we keep a record of the request so that our own directory-building does not put it back. We will not treat a removal request as a licence to keep the data internally for other purposes.

4. What a listing entitles you to

Once you have claimed and verified a listing, you can:

• edit your profile — description, story, links, images and video embeds, countries, categories and the attribute tags we offer;
• appear in the public directory and in search, and be found by consumers who are not signed in;
• invite colleagues to your team with owner, editor or viewer seats;
• have discount offers published for you. Today you cannot create or edit a code yourself — you send us the offer and we enter it. A self-serve code tool is intended, not built;
• be listed by the shops that carry you, and list the brands you carry.

About your numbers. We count page views for your listing in aggregate only — a count against a brand and a date, with no user id, no session and no IP. We could not tell you who looked at you if you asked. We do not currently show you even that count in the portal; when we do, it will be that count and nothing more.

What a listing does not entitle you to: a position in any ranking, an amount of traffic, an amount of clicks, an outcome of any kind, or a right to remain in any editorial selection.

Baseline presence is never conditional on paying us. A brand that pays nothing, and a brand that never claims its listing at all, still exists in the directory and still has a public page. Non-payment does not remove you. That rule is deliberate and it is not negotiable from our side either.

5. Your content, and what you promise us about it

You keep everything. Your text, images, video, logo and marks stay yours. This agreement does not transfer any intellectual property to us.

What you grant us. A non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, display, resize and cache the content you upload, and to use your brand name, logo and the public information in your listing, for the purpose of operating and promoting Fashion Brand Finder. This covers the app, the website, FBF's social, editorial and press channels, and FBF's own advertising that promotes the platform. We use these only to feature you as a brand on Fashion Brand Finder and to promote Fashion Brand Finder itself: we do not present you as endorsing FBF or any third party, and we do not license your marks to anyone else.

The licence lasts as long as the content is on the platform, plus up to 90 days for caches and backups to expire. If you delete a listing or content, we stop displaying it. Where we have already posted something to a third-party platform such as Instagram, we will ask that platform to remove it, but we cannot guarantee a third party acts — so if that matters to you, tell us before we post, and we will not.

If we ever add machine translation, translations will be labelled as machine-made, the original language will be kept, and you will be able to correct them. That feature does not exist today.

What you promise us. That, for everything you upload:

• you own it or have the rights to use it, including model releases and photographer permissions for images of people;
• it does not infringe anyone's trade mark, copyright or other rights;
• it is not misleading about your products, your materials, your production, your prices or your identity;
• it complies with the law where you sell.

If a third party comes to us about your content, we will tell you and we will normally give you the chance to respond before we act, unless the content is plainly illegal or we are required to act immediately.

6. Claims about materials, sustainability and certification

This is the part we are strictest about, and the reason is straightforward: we do not just host your claims, we design the vocabulary, we display the labels, and consumers filter and search by them. That makes us a co-asserter, not a noticeboard.

The rules are set out in the content and claims policy, which forms part of this agreement. The rules that bind you today are:

• Generic environmental claims ("eco", "green", "climate neutral", "sustainable") with nothing specific behind them are not allowed, and neither is a sustainability label of your own devising that is not based on an actual certification scheme.
• Only attach a certificate tag you actually hold, for the products it actually covers, while it is actually valid. We may ask you for the certificate, and we may remove a tag if you do not produce it.
• Everything you attach is treated as your own statement. We do not check it before it goes up.

What is coming, and is not in force yet: we intend to record where each claim came from (your own statement, a public source we researched, a document we reviewed, or a scheme register we checked), to show that source to consumers next to the claim, and to record the scope and expiry of each certificate. None of that exists today — claims are currently shown to consumers unlabelled and unsourced, next to attribute tags we wrote ourselves. We are telling you that because it is true, and because when it changes it will change what your listing looks like.

The last four points are not house style. EU Directive 2024/825 (Empowering Consumers) applies in EU member states from late September 2026 and bans exactly those claims, and Swiss UWG Art 3(1)(b) already catches misleading statements today. If you sell into the EU, this affects you directly and not only through us.

A firewall we impose on ourselves: what you pay us never influences your claim provenance, your position in search relevance, or whether we feature you editorially.

7. Plans, and what money does and does not buy

We offer these plans:

The table above is the authoritative feature list; if we publish a pricing page it will match it. Prices are in USD, billed monthly, excluding any VAT that applies. Plans are available for brands. Shops do not have paid plans today; where this agreement talks about plans, payment or downgrades, it does not apply to a shop until we offer shop plans and tell you the terms.

Billing is not live yet. As of this version there is no payment integration connected, no plan is being charged, and no card is being collected. Everyone is effectively on Basic. When billing goes live we will tell you before we charge anything, and no plan starts charging without an explicit new purchase by you. There are no free trials at launch.

What money buys. Tools, features, presence in specific named rails, and — separately — paid placement (§7a). What money does not buy: a better position in any ranking that presents itself as relevance-based, a better transparency or completeness figure, a better claim provenance, or editorial selection.

Ranking parameters — the main ones, in order.

Two honest points a merchant is entitled to know, and which we would rather state than have you discover:

1. Paid slots currently sit above the organic order in "Trending" rather than in a separate block. They carry a "Sponsored" label. Moving them into their own labelled block above the list is a change we have committed to; until it ships, this is how it works.
2. Presence in the "similar brands" rail is a paid feature from Essential upwards. That is paid inclusion — money decides whether you appear there at all — and it does not carry a label today.

What money does not do: it does not change your position in search, it does not change your "For you" match, it does not change your view count, and it does not change your transparency figure or how a claim of yours is treated.

7a. Paid placement

Placement — the home hero, a slot in a curated rail — is sold as a fixed, exclusive time slot. Flat fee, agreed window, no auction, no cost-per-click, no cost-per-impression.

It is never targeted at a person. We do not build audience profiles, we do not track individual viewers, and we cannot tell you who saw your placement. What we can prove from our own booking records — and what you are buying — is that the slot was exclusively yours for that window.

Every paid placement carries a label that tells consumers it is advertising, and that label names the advertiser. Paid entries also sit in their own labelled block, outside and above the ranked "Trending" list, so payment never buys a position in an ordering that claims to be about popularity. Placement is booked by agreement with us; there is no self-serve console today.

8. Commission is not part of this agreement

FBF's commission model — a share of sales driven by platform-minted discount codes — is not covered here and is not in force. It will require a separate commission agreement that sets out the rate, the commission base, how a redemption is evidenced, the hold period for returns, the dispute process and the billing cycle. Nothing in this document creates a payment obligation on sales.

One structural point that will not change: FBF never takes money from your customer. Your customer buys on your own storefront, under your own terms, with your own payment provider. We never hold, route or touch that money. We invoice you afterwards, if and when a commission agreement exists between us.

9. Suspension, removal, and how you object

We may suspend a listing, remove specific content, or remove a listing entirely if:

• content breaches §5 or the content and claims policy;
• we have a credible report that the listing is illegal or infringing;
• the listing impersonates someone, or ownership turns out not to be yours;
• you are seriously or repeatedly in breach of this agreement;
• the law or a competent authority requires it.

Whenever we act, we record a reason, and we tell you what it was. Specifically we give you: what we did, which content it concerned, the ground we relied on — the clause of this agreement or the law — how long it lasts and whether it applies everywhere or only in one country, whether any automated tool was involved in the decision (today: never), and how to object, including that you can go to court. That is the statement of reasons required by Art 17 of the EU Digital Services Act, and we give it whether or not the DSA strictly applies to a given case.

How to object. Reply to the notice, or write to hello@fashionbrandfinder.com. A person reads it — there is no automated queue, because there is no queue. Before we suspend or remove anything other than in an emergency or where the law requires immediate action, we tell you what we intend to do and why, and give you a reasonable chance to fix it or reply. The full process is in the notice and action policy. We do not currently operate a formal internal complaint-handling system with defined deadlines — as a micro enterprise we are exempt from that part of the DSA (Art 19) — and we would rather say so than advertise a process we do not staff. If we got it wrong, we reinstate, and the reinstatement restores the state your listing was in before, not a better one.

Proportionality. We suspend before we remove wherever suspension is enough. A single bad claim gets the claim removed, not the listing.

10. Term, and how either side ends it

This agreement runs from acceptance until it is ended.

You can end it at any time, by deleting your listing or writing to us. If you are on a paid plan, ending it stops the renewal; we do not refund the part of a paid month you did not use.

We can end it with 30 days written notice, or immediately in the cases in §9. If we end it, or if we suspend your listing for a reason that turns out to be ours rather than yours, we refund the unused part of what you paid. The no-refund rule above is for when you leave, not for when we ask you to.

Before you go, tell us if you want a copy of what you wrote; we will export your own profile content and send it to you.

What ending it means. Your team loses access and your paid features stop.

• If you asked us to remove the listing, it goes (§3).
• Otherwise your page stays as a factual, unclaimed entry — name, country, website, categories — and the narrative content your team wrote comes down with your access. It is not deleted from our records for 90 days, so if you come back it can be restored.
• Discount codes that are live in the world keep working until their own expiry (§11).

What survives: the acceptance record, our accounting records (Swiss law requires ten years, OR 958f), and the record of any enforcement decision.

11. Downgrades — freeze, never retract

(This is a live founder decision. The rule below is the proposed one and is written here so it can be argued with before it ships.)

If you move to a lower plan, or your subscription lapses:

• Anything already published stays published. Discount codes that are live in the world keep working until their own expiry. News posts stay up. Consumers may already be holding those codes, and breaking a promise made to them to enforce a plan limit would be the wrong trade.
• Presence features switch off immediately, because they are read live — the "similar brands" rail is the main one.
• You keep what you have published; you just cannot add more. If your new plan allows fewer of something than you already have, the existing ones continue and you cannot create another until you are back under the limit. Drafts and unpublished items are frozen with the reason shown, and unfreeze if you upgrade again. (There are no numeric per-plan limits today; this rule is here for when there are.)
• Your baseline listing is untouched. See §4.

12. Changes to this agreement

We will change these terms — the product is early and some of what is described here does not exist yet.

• Every version is dated and kept. Nothing is edited in place; a change is a new version, and you can ask us for a copy of the exact wording you accepted and when.
• For a change that materially affects you, we give at least 30 days notice to your verified business email before it takes effect.
• Prices and plan composition may change, including upward. We may raise or lower a plan's price and may add, alter or remove the features a plan includes. For a paid plan you are on, a price increase or a material reduction of included features takes effect for you at the earliest at your next renewal after the notice above — never mid-period for a period you have already paid.
• If you do not want the change, you can end this agreement before it takes effect at no cost. That is your remedy.

13. Data protection

Each of us is responsible for our own use of personal data.

• We are the controller for the data we hold about your team members and your business contact — see the privacy policy for what and why. Your business contact email is kept in a separate table that is not publicly readable, and verification evidence is kept in private storage.
• You are the controller for whatever personal data you put in your own listing — the people in your photos, the names in your story. We host and display that material for you, which makes us your processor for it. The processing terms required by GDPR Art 28 are set out in the data processing annex to this agreement; if that annex is not attached to the version you are reading, ask us for it before you upload photographs of identifiable people.
• Our database and file storage are hosted by Supabase in Zurich, Switzerland (eu-central-2). Our other providers, where they are, and the transfer safeguards we rely on are listed in the privacy policy §4.

14. Liability

This clause has not yet been settled by a lawyer. It is drafted to be readable and to state a fair position; the numbers and the exclusions are the parts most likely to change.

• We are liable, without limit, for damage we cause intentionally or through gross negligence, and for personal injury. Swiss law does not allow us to exclude that and we do not try.
• For ordinary carelessness, our liability for any twelve-month period is limited to the greater of the fees you paid us in the twelve months before the event and CHF 2,000. The floor is there because most merchants pay us nothing, and a cap of zero is not a cap, it is an exclusion.
• We are not liable for lost profit, lost sales or indirect loss caused by ordinary carelessness.
• We make no promise about traffic, sales, uptime, conversion or search position, and nothing in our marketing changes that.

The service is provided as it is. We do not warrant that it will be uninterrupted or error-free, and we do not operate a service-level agreement.

15. Governing law and place of jurisdiction

Swiss law applies. The place of jurisdiction is Bülach, Switzerland.

If you are a sole trader and the law of the country you live in treats you as a consumer, that law's protections still apply to you and you can still sue us, and be sued, where you live. Calling this a business agreement does not decide that question; the facts do.

16. Miscellaneous

• Whole agreement. This document, the content and claims policy, the notice and action policy, the data processing annex and the privacy policy are the whole agreement between us on this subject.
• Order of precedence. If they conflict: this document first, then the policies. If we ever sign a separate individual agreement with you, that comes first and says so.
• Force majeure. Neither of us is in breach for a failure caused by something outside our reasonable control — an outage at a provider we depend on, a state act, a natural event — for as long as it lasts. It does not excuse paying money that is already due.
• Confidentiality. Anything either of us gives the other that is marked confidential, or is obviously commercially sensitive, is not passed on and is used only for this agreement.
• No set-off. You may not set a claim you have against us off against our invoices unless we agree or a court has decided it.
• Severability. If a clause is unenforceable, the rest stands and the clause is replaced by the closest enforceable meaning.
• Assignment. You may not transfer this agreement without our consent. We may transfer it as part of a sale or reorganisation of the business, and we will tell you.
• Notices go to your verified business email, and to hello@fashionbrandfinder.com for us. An email sent to a verified address counts as received on the next working day. Keep the address current — the notice period in §12 runs from it.
• Our EU representative under DSA Art 13, and the point of contact for authorities and for users under DSA Arts 11 and 12, are named in the notice and action policy.
• Language. English is the binding version. Any translation is for convenience.