Notice and Action — how to report something on Fashion Brand Finder
1. What this page is
Fashion Brand Finder ("FBF") is a directory. It hosts brand pages, images, news posts and discount offers — some written by the businesses themselves, some compiled by us from public sources. (Shop listings exist in the service's data; public shop pages will follow, and everything here about brand pages will apply to them too.)
Because we host content that other people supply, EU law calls us a hosting service. That means anyone — you do not have to have an account, and you do not have to be affected personally — can tell us that something on FBF is illegal, and we have to deal with it and tell you what we decided. That obligation comes from Articles 16 to 18 of the EU Digital Services Act, and it applies to us at any size. This page explains how it works in practice.
We also act on content that is not illegal but breaks our own rules. Same intake, same ladder, and we always tell you which of the two grounds we used.
We are a very small company, and some parts of that law — a formal complaints system with fixed deadlines, and out-of-court dispute bodies — do not apply to companies our size. We say below where that changes what you get, rather than promising a process we do not run.
Languages. Write to us in English, German, French or Italian. We answer in the same language where we can, and in English otherwise.
What we do with your report. We use your name and email address only to answer you and to keep a record of the decision. We never pass them to the business you reported. What we keep, and for how long, is in the privacy policy.
2. Who can report, and how
Write to report@fashionbrandfinder.com. That is the reporting channel, it needs no account, and it is open to anyone about anything on FBF.
There is also a Report link on brand pages, on news posts and on discount codes, which is quicker if you are already looking at the thing. It needs an account, because it is rate limited per person. The email address needs no account, is open to anyone about anything, and stays the channel of record for illegal content whatever else we build.
3. What a report should contain
You do not need a lawyer to write one, and we will not reject a report for being informal. But the more of this you give us, the faster and better the answer:
- What exactly. A link, or enough to identify the page, image, post or code. "Somewhere on your site" is not something we can act on.
- Why you think it is unlawful or against our rules. In your own words is fine.
- How to find it, if it is not obvious from the link.
- Your name and an email address, so we can acknowledge and answer you. You may leave these out for a report about child sexual abuse material or a sexual offence — we will still act, we just cannot write back.
- A statement that you believe, in good faith, that what you have told us is accurate and complete. This is a DSA Art 16(2) element, and it is also the sentence that makes a deliberately false report something we can act on.
If you are the rights holder — a trademark or copyright owner, or the brand itself — say so and say how you are connected. It changes what we can verify.
4. What happens after you send it
| Step | What we do | Timing |
|---|---|---|
| Acknowledgement | We confirm we received it, to the address you gave us. | Without undue delay. FBF is one person; assume the next working day, not the next hour. |
| Assessment | A person reads the report and looks at the content. There is no filter and no automated triage. | See below. |
| Decision | We do one of the things in §6, or nothing. | — |
| Statement of reasons | We tell you what we decided and why, and what you can do about it. If we acted, we tell the business affected too. | With the decision. |
We deliberately do not promise a fixed number of hours to a decision. We would not be able to keep it. What we do commit to:
- Reports of illegal content, and anything about a child's safety, a credible threat of violence, or someone's personal data being exposed, are looked at before anything else.
- We do not leave a report unanswered. If a report is hard and takes longer, you get told that rather than silence.
- If we become aware of anything that makes us suspect a criminal offence involving a threat to someone's life or safety, we tell the police or the relevant authority ourselves, promptly, whether or not anyone asks us to.
5. How we decide
Two separate questions, in this order:
Is it illegal? Under Swiss law, and under the law of the country you live in if you are in the EU. We are not a court. Where the answer is genuinely unclear we say so, and we may leave the content up while telling you what we did check.
Does it break our rules? Our published terms and this policy. Common grounds, in the order we actually see them:
- The listing is factually wrong or out of date.
- Someone is passing themselves off as a brand or shop they have no connection to.
- A sustainability or certification claim that the brand cannot support (see §9).
- A discount offer that does not exist, has expired, or is not honoured at checkout.
- An image the uploader had no right to use.
- Counterfeit goods, or a shop listing that points at one.
- Abuse, harassment or hate in any free-text field.
Three rules govern every decision:
Volume never decides anything. Ten reports about one brand are one signal, not ten. A directory of competing businesses is close to the perfect target for coordinated false reporting, and a system that acts on a count is a system a competitor can drive. Severity comes from the category and from what we can actually see, never from how many people complained. Nothing on FBF is ever hidden automatically because a number of reports was reached, and we will not build a mechanism that does that.
No automated enforcement. Every action in §6 is taken by a person, signed in, with the authority to take it. We use no automated detection tool to remove content, and if we ever do, we will say so here and in every statement of reasons.
One thing that is not enforcement. Images uploaded to FBF are not public until a member of staff has looked at them. That is a standing rule applying to everyone's uploads equally, not a decision about anyone, so it does not come with a statement of reasons. We mention it because otherwise it looks like a silent restriction.
We act on the smallest thing that fixes it. If a single wrong sentence is the problem, we ask for that sentence to change. We do not remove a business's whole page over it.
6. What we can do — the ladder
From lightest to heaviest. We start as low on this ladder as will actually solve the problem.
| Action | What it means | Built today? |
|---|---|---|
| No action | We looked and found nothing to act on. You still get an answer. | n/a |
| Warn | We write to the business, explain the problem, and ask for a correction by a date. | |
| Correct | We fix a factual error ourselves on a listing nobody has claimed. | |
| Hide content | One image, one news post or one discount code stops being visible; the rest of the page stays. | |
| Restrict a feature | The business keeps its page but loses one capability, for example publishing new codes — or has its position in ranked lists lowered for a stated period, with any paid boost switched off while it lasts. | |
| Suspend the page | The whole page comes out of public view. The team can still sign in and see it. Only a claimed page can be suspended. | |
| Remove the page | The page comes out of the directory. The record survives internally so we can still answer for the decision. | |
| Reinstate | We undo a suspension and put the page back into the state it was in immediately before, including its verified status if it had one. Reinstating never creates a verified status that was not there before. | |
| Account level | Restricting or closing the account of a person who repeatedly and deliberately misuses the service. |
Not all of these are equally built, and this paragraph says which. Warning, hiding a single item, restricting a single feature, suspension, removal and reinstatement are all proper functions with a permanent record — each one writes an entry we cannot edit afterwards, sends you the statement of reasons in section 8, and puts a message in your inbox on the same day. Correcting a factual error on an unclaimed listing is still done by hand. Action at the account level is not built.
Two consequences of the smaller rungs that we would rather state than have you discover:
- Hiding an item does not free up an allowance. If we hide one of your discount codes, it still counts against the number your plan lets you run. Otherwise hiding a code would simply invite an identical replacement. You can free the slot yourself at any time by deactivating the code — that is your decision to make and it is never charged for.
- Restricting a feature never unpublishes what is already up. If we pause your ability to publish news, everything you have already published stays exactly where it is. The restriction governs what happens next, not what has already happened.
Nothing on this ladder happens automatically. We count how often we have had to write to a business, and a moderator reads that count before deciding. But no number of warnings suspends anything by itself, and no automated tool decides any of this. Where the statement of reasons in section 8 tells you that no automated means were involved, that is a statement of fact about how the decision was actually made.
Lowering your position in a ranked list — always disclosed, never quiet. Where a lighter touch than suspension fits, we may lower a business's position in a ranked list for a stated period. We will only ever do this as a disclosed action: you receive the same statement of reasons in section 8, the same message in your inbox, and a live entry in your own portal that says the position is lowered and what has to change for it to be lifted. We will not do it silently — a demotion nobody is told about is unenforceable and, against a business that pays us for reach, is undisclosed non-performance of what it bought. While a demotion is in force, any paid boost on your listing is switched off, so a demotion cannot be bought back, and your listing is not shown as promoted during it. We do not put a penalty mark on your public page: the record goes to you, not a badge to shoppers.
If you pay us and we suspend you. Suspension stops what you are paying for, so it suspends the fee too: we do not charge for a period in which your page was not visible because of our decision, and if we turn out to have been wrong we refund it. The merchant agreement §10 says the same thing.
Suspension, removal and reinstatement are recorded permanently — the reason, who did it, and what state the page was in beforehand — in the same operation as the change itself, so there can be no record of an action that did not happen and no action without a record. The lighter rungs are, for now, an email and a note.
7. The statement of reasons
If we act on something, both the person who reported it and the person or business affected get a written statement. It says, in plain words:
- What we did — which rung of the ladder, and whether it affects one item or the whole profile.
- How wide it goes — today this is always the whole of FBF, because we have no way to hide something in one country only. If that changes, the statement will say which countries.
- How long — permanent, or until a stated condition is met.
- Whether we used automated means. Today the answer is always no, and we say so.
- The facts we relied on, and where the report came from — a user report, our own review, or an order from an authority. We say which. We never pass on the reporter's identity or the text they wrote.
- The legal ground (with the law named) or the contractual ground (with the clause named). One or the other, never a vague mixture.
- How to challenge it — §8, and the routes in §10, including that you can take it to court.
We keep the statement as sent. If we change our mind later, that is a new record, not an edit of the old one. The reasoning we gave has to still be readable a year later, including by us.
We never put the reporter's name or their words into the statement.
Today a statement of reasons is an email written by a person. There is no template and no automated sending. That makes it slower; it does not make it less binding on us.
8. If you disagree
Anyone affected by a decision — the business we acted against, or the person whose report we rejected — can challenge it for six months from the date of the statement of reasons.
Write to report@fashionbrandfinder.com, quote the reference in the statement, and tell us what we got wrong. New information helps more than a restatement.
Who reviews it, honestly. FBF is one person today, so we cannot promise that a different person looks at your challenge — that would not be true. What we promise is that it is looked at again, with your new information and the original reasoning side by side, and answered. When there is a second person, the rule becomes that whoever made the original decision does not decide the challenge, and we will say so here.
If we still disagree after that, §10 is the route out, and it is a real one.
We do not charge for a challenge. If we were wrong, we restore what we removed and say so.
9. "This is my brand and I never agreed to be listed"
This is not a rule violation and it does not fit anywhere in §5 — and it is the report we expect to receive most often, because most of the directory is built by us from public information, without the brands' involvement.
It has its own route. There is a form on every brand page for exactly this, and you do not need an account to use it — needing one is part of what you are objecting to. (Shops do not have public pages at the moment; the same form returns with them.) You can also write to report@fashionbrandfinder.com with "listing objection" in the subject.
Nothing you send through that form takes a page down by itself. It opens a case that a person answers, and any removal is then made by a person and recorded. We built it that way on purpose: a form that delisted a business automatically would be a delete button for its competitors.
What we will do:
- Confirm what we hold. Every seeded page is built only from publicly available facts — name, website and public social links, country, category, public certifications, plus the brand's logo loaded from its own site and a short description we wrote ourselves from the brand's public About text. We take no photographs from anyone's site, we do not invent and we do not write in a brand's voice; the story and values fields stay empty until a brand claims the page.
- Give you the choice. You can (a) claim the page, verify that you control the brand, and edit it yourself; (b) ask us to correct specific facts, which we will do without you needing an account; or (c) ask us to remove it.
- Remove it if you ask. An unclaimed page comes out on request, and we will not argue you into staying in the directory. We do ask you to show you are connected to the brand — an email at the brand's own domain is usually enough — because otherwise a competitor could delete your page with one message. That is the only reason we ask.
- Answer within 10 working days. This is the one timescale in this document, and it is here because this is the request we can actually answer quickly.
If your brand name is your own name — a sole proprietorship, or an eponymous label — then the listing is personal data about you, and this is a data-protection objection under Art 21 GDPR and Art 30 nDSG rather than a moderation report. Same address, same outcome, and we will treat it as an objection on the record. See the privacy policy for your other rights.
10. Courts, authorities and other routes
Nothing here takes away your right to go elsewhere.
- Courts. This page is not a contract, and reporting something to us does not sign you up to anything. Where you can sue us, and where we can sue you, is in the terms of use §13 for consumers and the merchant agreement §15 for businesses. If you are a consumer you can always go to the courts where you live.
- Data protection. The Swiss FDPIC (edoeb.admin.ch), or your national supervisory authority in the EU.
- In the EU, you can complain about how we handled a report to the Digital Services Coordinator of the Member State where you live.
- Out-of-court dispute settlement bodies under DSA Art 21: we are not obliged to take part while the micro-enterprise exemption in Art 19 applies, and this draft does not promise that we will. If that changes, this section changes with it.
11. Misuse of this process
Filing reports you know to be false, in volume, or to damage a competitor is itself a breach of our terms and, in Switzerland, potentially an unfair-competition matter under UWG Art 3. If an address repeatedly sends reports that are obviously baseless, we will warn it, and we may then stop replying to it and stop treating its messages as priority work — never as a silent block, and always with a warning first. We will not close the channel for a report of illegal content, from anyone, whatever they have sent before. That is not something we are willing to trade away.
We say this without a threshold attached on purpose. A published number would be a target.