Sofas and Stuff - Privacy Policy

Here at Sofas & Stuff Limited we treat the privacy of our customers with the highest of priority and do the utmost to protect the security of your personal.

Our privacy policy defines the information Sofas and Stuff collects about you, when you use our website or contact us electronically. We may also collect information when you visit one of our stores or contact us via telephone. In this policy, we will also define how your information will be used and stored by us. This privacy policy is also in conjunction with our cookie policy and T&C’s which can be found on the website.

This privacy policy sets out how Sofas & Stuff Limited uses and protects any information that you give to us when you use this website. Sofas & Stuff Limited is committed to ensuring that your privacy is protected. Should we ask you to provide certain information by which you can be identified when using this website, then you can be assured that it will only be used in accordance with this privacy statement.

Sofas & Stuff may change this policy from time to time by updating this page. You should check this page from time to time to ensure that you are happy with any changes. If you have any questions or need further information about our privacy practices, please contact us at [email protected] or via post at Sofas & Stuff Limited, The Dairy, Tripp Hill Farm Buildings, Fittleworth, west Sussex GU29 0RA.

When purchasing a product or whatever else you may choose to do with Sofas and Stuff, be it using a service, contacting us by telephone, registering an account, ordering fabric samples, providing your contact details to us, either in store or online via social media or our websites, visiting sofasandstuff.com, placing an order, booking a design consultation, visiting our blog; You are giving your consent and agreeing to accept the practices set out in this policy.

When we say ‘we’, ‘our’, ‘us’ or ‘S&S’ ‘Sofas & Stuff’ in this policy we are referring to Sofas & Stuff Limited.

What information does S&S collect?

When placing an order or purchase with S&S in store, via the telephone, on our websites or any of our subsequent apps, the data and information we collect relating to you is mainly used in order to provide our products and services to you. This enables us to uphold our obligations to you which arise from any contracts entered into between S&S and you and to provide you with the information, services and products that you have requested from us.

We do supply your contact information to our furniture and delivery partners, including your Name, Address and contact details Sofas & Stuff will retain this information over the full lifetime of the furniture guarantee, which will allow us to commit to this guarantee and to assist further with support if required.

When contacting, us using our online chat facilities (once launched in 2018), we will be using a carefully selected third party to provide this support. They will store details of the chat securely on their own server for a period of 12 weeks.

When you request a fabric sample from us, it is sometime sent out by a third-party supplier. If this happens we share your contact information with our carefully selected fabric suppliers. They will use your name and address for providing you with the requested sample. Once the sample has been provided to you, your details will be deleted in accordance with their data protection policies.

If there is a problem with your product purchased from us and you require a service or a repair,this will normally be completed by our carefully selected third parties, Homeserve Furniture Repairs Ltd or Servico Ind Limited . There may be occasions when your product requires repair, in this event we may ask a third party to conduct the repair. Your contact details will be shared with this third-party service team, who will use this information only for providing you with the repair service.

If you choose to communicate with Sofas and Stuff via telephone, we will keep this information on our records for 12 weeks.

When using our website if you choose to create an account, enter a competition, complete a survey, supply us with customer photos, request a call back, book at Design appointment or report a problem with our products and services the information you provide to us will be stored and may be used to facilitate that request or service.

Finance Applications for Products on Credit: When you agree to purchase a product, and enter into a finance agreement, as part of our process, we will provide your information to the finance providers with whom we have agreed arrangements in place. Those finance providers are third party data controllers and are therefore responsible for any information that you provide to them. S&S act as a facilitator in this process and enable you to set up a direct relationship with these providers. These finance providers can conduct their own research on you and may, for example, ask credit reference agencies about you, this could include keeping records on you to help them decide to grant credit and to provide you with finance or not. The finance provider S&S works with is Klarna Finance Details about their own privacy policy is available on request. https://www.klarna.com/uk

StainGard: If you have chosen to purchase StainGard protection for your S&S product, we will need to share your details with them, in order to arrange your policy. We will also share details of your order, your name and contact details to our insurance administrator, Staingard. They will hold this information and if necessary will share it with any agents or associated company for the purposes of administering your policy. This may include carrying out customer surveys, claim handling and fraud prevention. Staingard are third party data controllers and are therefore responsible for any information that you provide to them. Details about their own privacy policy is available at www.staingard.co.uk/

Information Sofas & Stuff receives from other sources: At times it may be necessary for us to collect information about you from other sources, such as Google analytics software and others. We may choose to combine this information received with information we currently hold about you. This will include where:

• We make contact with members of your family or your household in order to uphold our service offering to you, such as arranging delivery of your product.
• Information is available about you publicly or is aggregated or anonymised by a third party. For example, on occasions we may conduct demographic research where we analyse the area where you live for things such as household earnings, size of residence and other general information.
• You provide information to us through your use or interaction with our social media channels. This includes but not limited to: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google Plus and Pinterest.

Why do we collect information and how do we use it?

With the new GDPR regulations S&S must have a lawful reason for using and / or processing your personal information. One such reason is 'legitimate interests'. Legitimate Interests indicates that we can process your personal information if we have a genuine and legitimate reason to do so and we are not harming or infringing on any of your rights and interests in doing so.

Essentially, when you agree to provide your personal details to Sofas and Stuff, we can use your personal information for our business interests, which are all legitimate and to make sure we can provide the best possible products and services to you, and that you only receive relevant information from us.

Before doing anything with your personal data and information, we as a thoughtful company will consider any potential impact on you and your rights.

Here are some examples of when we may choose to use this information, this is by no means the extent of the list: making improvements to our products or services, ensuring the security of our system and its data, analysing website usage trends, direct marketing including but not limited to email, via post and advertising banners, preventing fraudulent activity.

As an ethical company, S&S will process your personal information supplied in a way that will enable us to provide you with appropriate services, information, products and marketing. This will ensure you as a customer have the best and securest experience possible. These are all what we consider to be our ‘Legitimate Interests’.

Our Interests

The following are examples of when and why we would use this approach:

Direct Marketing: If you purchased from us prior to the 25th May 2018 and have not unsubscribed from receiving marketing information, we will send you emails which relate to relevant promotions and inspirational material that we feel may be of interest to you.

If you purchased from us after the 25th May 2018 we will only send you emails which relates to relevant promotions and inspirational material that we feel will be of interest to you if you have actively consented to receiving it.

We may choose to share this information with carefully selected partners, suppliers, and agencies so they can process your personal information on our behalf, in order to provide you with our services or products. We only share information that allows them to provide their services to us or to facilitate them providing their services to you. For example, some of our service providers place advertising for us online, which may include information about our products or services. As a result, where you have indicated you are happy to receive marketing from us, you might see online advertising that we have placed on the web sites you visit, or the interactive services you use.

Sofas and Stuff reserve the right to continue to process your information in this way until you advise us otherwise. You can remove yourself from any part of this processing activity at any point using the unsubscribe link on all our emails sent. Alternatively, you can contact Sofas and Stuff directly either by phone, email or website contact us, where we can remove your details from our system and opt you out.

We will never sell your details to other companies so that they can market to you.

Adding products to your basket: If you create an account on our websites or you add items to your basket, even if the sale is not completed, we may contact you by telephone or email to ensure that there were no technical issues that meant that you were unable to complete the purchase. This information will be stored for 30 days before being deleted.

Analytics: When purchasing a product from S&S we process your information in order to analyse and understand our customers better. This includes but is not limited to the processing of customer analysis, assessment, customer profiling and marketing activities. This helps us provide only the most relevant experience to you whilst protecting your personal rights and interests.

Telephone call recording: Sofas and Stuff may record any telephone calls. This includes calls you make to, or receive from S&S. These recordings are for training and quality purposes. They allow us to uphold our high level of customer satisfaction. On occasions, we may record the telephone number you contact us via and keep it on record. This will be deleted after 12 weeks.

Fraud protection: We take the prevention of fraud very seriously. We will use your information when processing transactions on our websites to ensure your information and our websites and systems are secure and are not open to fraudulent activity.

Using our websites: Each time you visit our website or blog, we will collect some if not all the following information from you:

• Technical data, including but not limited to the Internet Protocol (IP) address used to connect your device to the Internet, your S&S account information including login, browser type and version, time zone setting, the country and telephone area code where your device is located, browser plug-in types and versions, operating system and platform used to gain access.
• Information about your visit, including but not limited to the full URL click through to and from our websites, which pages you visit whilst on our site or applications, the products you viewed or searched for, page response times and how our pages loaded during your session, any errors arising from your session, how long you spend on each page, interaction on our pages (scroll behaviour, heat maps, click patterns and more), your journey through the site navigation along with methods used to navigate away from our pages, and any telephone number you dial to contact our stores, head office or customer services departments.

We will use this information collected via our website, or telephone services to improve our internal operations. This includes but is not limited to site and store testing, web and customer research, statistical analysis, data analysis, troubleshooting to improve our offerings, and survey purposes. Collecting this information will assist us to improve our services, which will ensure that you can access the most relevant information in an effective manner across any device, browser or platform you access our products or services from. This includes the ability for you to a participate our interactive features on our site, such as ‘design your own sofa’. It also allows us the ability to track the performance of our advertising network.

We may combine the information you give to us with information that we collect or buy from third parties about you. We use this information for the purposes set out above.

Any personal information we collect in this way, will be held on our secure servers for as long as is required for us to provide products and services in order to fulfil the transactions you have requested. They may be other reasons for holding this information including but not limited to: complying with legal obligations, upholding our agreements or resolving any disputes that may arise.

Your Interests

We take your privacy very seriously, as such whenever S&S use your personal data for our legitimate interests, we will uphold your personal rights under the data protection act and any other relevant law. Our legitimate business interests do not automatically override your interests – Sofas and Stuff will never prioritise using your personal data for our own interests if it has a negative impact to you.

How do we store your data?

Storing your personal data is of the utmost importance to us. We will store any personal data provided to us on our secure servers or those of the service provider with whom our site, blog or apps are hosted upon.

Any password, secure key, or order number which gives you access to an account on our site or apps, is your responsibility to keep this secure and confidential. We suggest you do not share this information with anyone you do not wish to have access to your account and its information.

S&S will only retain personal data for as long as is necessary to provide the products and fulfil the transactions you have requested, or for other essential purposes such as complying with our legal obligations. If you have any questions relating to our retention or destruction of your data, please contact us using the details set out in the Contact Us section.

In accordance with the General Data Protection Regulations (EU 2016/679), we employ strict physical, electronic and administrative security measures to protect your information from access by unauthorised persons and against unlawful processing, accidental loss, destruction and damage both on-line and off-line. The transmission of information via the internet is, however, not secure and therefore we cannot guarantee the security of data sent to us electronically by you. Any transmission of such data is therefore entirely at your own risk.

Legal Obligations

We would like to bring to your attention that data or personal information requested by the police or any other regulatory or government authority as part of their investigation into illegal activities, we shall provide this data as requested.

Where we sell part or all of our business to a third party, in which case we may disclose your personal data to the prospective or actual seller or buyer of such business or assets.

Where we are legally required to disclose your information or in order to enforce or apply our terms and conditions or other agreements; or to protect our rights, property, or safety or those of our customers or other third parties.

Access to information and other rights

Sofas and Stuff are a fully compliant company, as such you have the right to access information we hold about you. You can access this information by submitting a written request & providing proof of identity, only then will we supply the information requested.

For more information and to make a subject access request please contact us at [email protected] If you believe that any information we are holding on you is incorrect or incomplete, please write to or email us as soon as possible, at the above address. We will promptly correct any information found to be incorrect.

You also have the right to:

• Ask us to prevent processing that is causing - or is likely to cause - you substantial damage or distress;
• Require us not to make certain decisions automatically if they significantly affect you;
• Request for us to make any necessary changes to the personal data we hold about you to ensure that it is accurate and up to date;
• Ask us to have your personal data erased and to prevent processing in specific circumstances these include but not limited to the following:
• Where there is no longer a need to hold the data for the purpose it was originally intended for.
• If you as the individual withdraw consent for this data to be used.
• When the individual objects to the processing and there is no overriding legitimate interest for continuing the processing.
• The personal data was unlawfully processed (i.e. otherwise in breach of the GDPR).
• The personal data has to be erased in order to comply with a legal obligation.
• The personal data is processed in relation to the offer of information society services to a child.

We may refuse to comply with a request for erasure when personal data is processed for the following reasons;

• To exercise the right of freedom of expression and information;
• To comply with a legal obligation for the performance of a public interest task or exercise of official authority.
• For public health purposes in the public interest;
• Archiving purposes in the public interest, scientific research historical research or statistical purposes; or
• The exercise or defence of legal claims.

Sofas and Stuff Cookies

What are cookies?

A cookie is a small text file which is stored on your computer when you visit a website. Cookies are used to enable websites and browsers to recognise a user’s device. Items such as passwords, logins, preferences are stored in cookies on websites. S&S use cookies for a whole host of reasons, for things like, storing items in your basket for your next visit to the checkout, only showing you messages on our site a relevant number of times, saving passwords and previously searched items.

For more information regarding cookies and their purposes please see the information commissioner's website home page.

Cookies may be additionally used to establish various statistics connected with the website including: most visited pages, time spent on each page, site performance etc by gathering and remembering information about your preferences.

A cookie in no way gives us access to your computer or any information about you, other than the data you choose to share with us. We use traffic log cookies to identify which pages are being used. This helps us analyse data about web page traffic and improve our website in order to tailor it to customer needs. We only use this information for statistical analysis purposes and then the date is removed from the system.

Our Cookies

The cookies on www.sofasandstuff.com are not harmful and are used to make your browsing experience better by providing better site functionality and customised experiences. Cookies are widely used across the internet to improve user experience.

Sofas and Stuff do NOT store sensitive or personally identifiable information, such as name, address or credit card details, in our cookies. So your personal data remains secure.

In order to collect anonymous data we may use session cookies that remain in the cookies file of your browser until the browser is closed. Information generated by the use of cookies may be compiled into an aggregate form so that no individual can be identified.

The table below shows a list of all of the cookies on our website and how we use them.

Opting Out

You may choose to restrict the collection or use of your personal information in the following ways

• Whenever you are asked to fill in a form on the website, look for the box that you can click to indicate that you do not want the information to be used by anybody for direct marketing purposes
• If you have previously agreed to us using your personal information for direct marketing purposes, you may change your mind at any time by writing to or emailing us at [email protected] We will not share, sell, licence or distribute your personal data with an unrelated third party, expect as otherwise provided for in this privacy policy and under the following circumstances:
• Where we are required to do so by law
• In connection with any legal proceedings or prospective legal proceedings.
• In order to establish or defend our legal rights
• In order to provide you with the information or services that you have requested personal data may occasionally be transferred or shared with other nominated companies or third parties who act for or with us for further processing in accordance with the purposes for which the data was originally collected or for purposes to which you have consented.
• Where you have consented, we may also disclose your personal data to other business's who may contact you about their services that may interest you.
• We may share, transfer or disclose your personal data to a potential or actual successor to us.

Links to Other Websites

This website may contain hyperlinks to other websites including, but not limited to the websites of our overseas agents, which may be of interest to you. These websites are not operated by us and the links are provided for your reference and convenience only and do not imply any endorsement of the activities of such third party websites. We are therefore not responsible for the protection and privacy or any information which you provide whilst visiting such sites and such sites are not governed by this privacy statement.

Security and Changes to this Policy

We are committed to ensuring that your information is secure. We will take reasonable technical and organisational precautions to prevent loss, misuse or alteration of your personal information. In order to prevent unauthorised access to such information we have in place suitable physical, electronic and managerial procedures to safeguard and secure the information we collect online.

Changes To This Policy If we change this privacy policy the amended privacy policy will be posted on this website and the revised policy will take effect once posted. Your continued use of this website after the posting will signify your agreement to the new terms.

If this policy differs substantially from the one originally in place then this will be addressed on the homepage of the website.

Your Privacy

Sofas and Stuff use banner advertisements to convey our latest promotions, offers and to promote our site. These advertisements are delivered to you on other carefully selected websites and social media based on your browser history. This service uses cookies to deliver the most relevant content to you our users. The data contained in these advertising cookies is anonymous and does not contain personal information, nor do any of the cookies used on www.sofasandstuff.com