Content & Claims Policy — Fashion Brand Finder

1. Why this policy exists

Fashion Brand Finder is a directory of fashion brands and the shops that carry them. A large part of what people come here for is values: how something is made, by whom, and out of what. That makes claims the product. It also makes them the risk.

FBF is not a neutral noticeboard for these claims. FBF wrote the vocabulary, FBF built the filters, FBF computes scores, and FBF ranks brands using the result. When a brand ticks "GOTS" and FBF turns that into a filter chip, a badge and a higher position in a list, FBF is asserting something too — not just the brand.

So this policy has two halves, and both are binding:

• What a brand may say on its profile, and what it must be able to show.
• What FBF may say about a brand, including the words FBF puts on its own filters, labels and scores.

This policy applies to everything published on FBF: brand and shop pages, news posts, paid placements, creator posts made through FBF, and the pages FBF builds itself. It is part of the merchant agreement and of the creator terms, and it sits alongside the terms of use. If it ever conflicts with one of those contracts, the contract wins — this policy sets the standard, it does not override what anyone signed.

Effective date. §4 (provenance) and the parts of §6 that depend on it describe how FBF intends claims to work and are not yet in force. Everything else applies now. §4 comes into force on the date FBF publishes for it, which will be after the labelling exists, not before.

2. The rule underneath everything

Say only what you can show.

If a brand cannot produce something a reasonable person would accept as support for a claim, the claim does not belong on the profile. Not in the "about" text, not as a certificate tag, not as a sustainability goal, not in a news post.

This is not FBF being cautious. Swiss UWG Art 3(1)(b) makes misleading statements about goods, business or supply relationships an unfair-competition breach, and under UWG Art 13a the burden of proving an advertising claim sits with the person who made it. EU law goes further from late September 2026, when Directive 2024/825 (Empowering Consumers) is applicable in the Member States: several environmental claims become prohibited outright, regardless of whether they are true.

3. What a brand may say on its profile

3.1 Facts about the business

Allowed and encouraged: founding year, country of origin, countries of manufacture, price class, product categories, styles, who the brand makes for, links to its own channels, its narrative, and its own sustainability goals with a target year and a status.

These are ordinary statements about the brand's own business. They must be accurate and kept current. If a brand stops manufacturing in a country it lists, it removes the country.

3.2 Sustainability goals

A goal is a statement about the future. It is allowed, and it is one of the more useful things a brand can publish here, provided it reads as a goal and not as an achievement.

A goal must carry a target year. A goal at 0% progress may still be published — a stated intention honestly labelled as an intention is not misleading. What is not allowed is publishing a goal and then describing the brand in the present tense as though the goal were met.

One warning about the near future. From late September 2026, EU law prohibits claims about future environmental performance unless they rest on clear, objective, publicly available and verifiable commitments, set out in a detailed and realistic implementation plan with measurable targets, and with progress verified by an independent third party. A goal on FBF today is a title, a year and a percentage the brand types in itself. That is below the standard the new rule sets. Either the goal feature gains a plan and independent verification, or environmental goals stop being publishable as such — that decision has to be made before September 2026, and it is a product decision, not a wording one.

FBF renders goals with their target year and status (on_track, at_risk, achieved, missed) visible. A brand may not use FBF's goal feature to make a general claim that belongs in §3.4.

3.3 Attribute flags

The profile carries yes/no flags: charity, influencer collaborations, customised products, women-owned, black-owned, discount codes open. These are factual and self-declared. They must be true on the day they are set, and a brand must correct them when they stop being true. FBF does not verify them and does not present them as verified.

3.4 Environmental and social claims — the restricted set

These are the claims this policy exists for. A claim is in the restricted set if it says or implies that the brand, a product, or a process is better for the environment, for animals, or for the people who make the goods.

Four rules, and they are hard rules:

(a) No generic environmental claims. "Eco-friendly", "green", "climate-friendly", "conscious", "responsible", "kind to the planet", "environmentally friendly" — used on their own, about the brand as a whole, with nothing behind them — are prohibited under Directive 2024/825 unless the brand can demonstrate recognised excellence in environmental performance relevant to the claim. Not "we try hard". Recognised excellence, of the kind the EU Ecolabel or an equivalent scheme certifies.

If a brand wants to make an environmental point, it must be specific and about a specific thing: "the denim line is 78% recycled cotton" is a claim FBF can host. "We're a sustainable brand" is not.

(b) No climate neutrality based on offsetting. Claims that a product, a service or the brand has neutral, reduced or positive environmental impact because emissions were offset are prohibited. "Climate neutral", "CO2-neutral", "carbon neutral", "net zero" — where the basis is buying credits — cannot be published on FBF, in any field, including the free-text narrative and news posts. Claims about the brand's own actual emissions reductions are fine if they are specific and supportable.

(c) A sustainability label must rest on a certification scheme. Displaying a sustainability label that is not based on a certification scheme, or not established by a public authority, is prohibited. In practice this means:

• A brand may display a third-party certification it actually holds — GOTS, bluesign®, Fair Wear Foundation, OEKO-TEX®, EU Ecolabel and the rest of FBF's certificate vocabulary — under §3.5.
• A brand may not display its own invented badge, seal, star rating, score or internal grading as though it were a certification. Uploading a self-made "eco seal" image as profile media is the same violation as tagging a certificate it does not hold.

(d) No comparative claims without a stated basis. "More sustainable than conventional brands" needs the comparison spelled out: compared to what, measured how, over what. Without that it is not publishable here.

3.5 Certificates

A certificate tag is a statement that a named third party has certified something. It is the highest-value claim on the profile and the one most likely to be relied on, so it carries the most conditions.

A brand may attach a certificate only if all of the following are true:

Scope matters more than people expect. A brand certified for one organic cotton t-shirt that displays "GOTS" next to its name is telling every visitor that its whole range is certified. That is a misleading claim under UWG Art 3(1)(b) even though every individual word is true.

3.6 Claims FBF will not host at all

• Anything about a named competitor that disparages it. FBF is not the venue.
• Health or medical claims about garments ("prevents skin conditions", "antibacterial protection") — these fall under separate product rules FBF has no ability to assess.
• Claims about other brands' or shops' practices. Say what you do.
• Claims a brand knows to be contested by a regulator or a court, while that is unresolved.

4. Provenance: who checked, and how hard

This section is in force for certificates as of 2026-07-25. It was written before it was built, so that brands could see the standard coming and FBF could be held to building it. It now describes what the product actually does.

What changed: a certificate used to be a plain tag with nothing behind it — no source, no scope, no expiry — shown to consumers unlabelled, next to attribute tags FBF wrote itself. Certificates now live in their own record with a mandatory scope, a validity period and a provenance tier, displayed in their own block with the tier stated in words.

What is in force, precisely:

• Every published certificate carries a tier, a scope and a validity period. The database refuses to publish one without them, and a brand cannot set its own tier — that is a database trigger, not a rule in a form.
• self_declared claims appear on the brand's own page, labelled as the brand's statement, and — as of the founder decision of 2026-07-29 — they now also feed search and the directory counts. The brand adds its own certificates and they go live; FBF does not verify them. The label is the guardrail: every self-declared certificate is shown as "Stated by the brand. FBF has not checked this.", so the brand makes the claim and FBF is not vouching for it. [LAWYER] — this reverses the position §5.1 argued below; the reasoning there is retained as the risk this decision accepts, not deleted.
• A new certification scheme that is not yet in FBF's list is requested by the brand and approved (or edited) by FBF before it becomes selectable by anyone — FBF curates the vocabulary of schemes, not the truth of any brand's holding of one.
• Expiry is checked when the page is read, so an expired certificate leaves the search facets by itself. It stays visible on the brand page, marked expired.

What is not yet in force, stated so this section is not read as a description of more than exists:

• The restricted set beyond certificates. value tags — including sustainable — are still plain tags with no provenance, which is the gap §5.1 describes in its second bullet.
• The document upload for document_reviewed. The tier works, but the document has to reach private storage by another route first; there is no upload path in the product.
• Automatic notice on expiry. Nothing is written to a brand when its certificate lapses. That is deliberate while the [LAWYER] question in §3.5 is open.
• The existing corpus. Every certificate FBF held was an unsourced tag, so all of them are now unpublished drafts awaiting a reviewer. None is currently displayed to anyone.

Every restricted-set claim on FBF carries a provenance tier. The tier is not decoration — it decides how the claim is displayed, whether it feeds search facets, and whether FBF stands behind it.

Four rules govern the tiers:

A brand can never set its own tier. Anything a brand writes is self_declared, always, including through a direct API call. This has to be enforced in the database — a trigger resetting any brand-originated write back to self_declared — and not only in the portal form, because a policy that lives in a form is not a control. That trigger exists. It clamps rather than refuses: a write asking for a tier the writer may not set is silently recorded as self_declared, with the higher tier's evidence fields discarded, so the lie becomes impossible rather than merely rejected.

Seeded brands are the honest problem. FBF's directory is built by seeding brands from public research (D9), and those brands have declared nothing. Labelling their claims self_declared is simply false and it is FBF's least defensible position. A seeded brand's values or certificate claims are either researched_by_fbf with a live public source, or they are not published at all until the brand claims its page. There is no third option.

Tiers do not upgrade by silence. A brand replying "yes that's correct" to an email does not move a claim to document_reviewed. Only a document does.

Tiers expire downward. When a certificate's validity period ends, the claim drops out of the verified tiers and out of the search facets. It does not silently keep ranking.

5. FBF's own outputs

This is the half of the policy that binds FBF rather than brands.

5.1 Facet labels are FBF's claims, not the brand's

⚠ FOUNDER DECISION 2026-07-29 — [LAWYER], READ FIRST. The founder has decided that a brand's own self-declared certificates DO now feed search facets and directory counts (migration 20260721910000), against the position this section argues. The decision: "we are not the police on certificates — the brand adds them and verifies them themselves." The guardrail kept is the per-claim label "Stated by the brand. FBF has not checked this." The analysis below is retained deliberately as the exposure that decision accepts — it is not a description of current behaviour for certificates. It still governs the value vocabulary (sustainable etc.), which remains FBF's own word and is NOT covered by the certificate decision. Counsel should weigh whether a directory count that aggregates self-declared with verified needs to expose the split.

A per-claim "stated by the brand" marker does not cure a facet label that is FBF's own word.

When the app ships a filter chip reading "Sustainable" and sorts brands into it, FBF is the one saying those brands are sustainable. It is FBF's commercial communication, in FBF's voice, on FBF's surface. It does not matter who typed the underlying tag. Under UWG Art 3(1)(b) and under Directive 2024/825's ban on generic environmental claims, that chip is a claim FBF has to be able to defend — and "a brand ticked a box" is not a defence.

The consequence, and it is a design constraint rather than a disclaimer:

• A facet label must describe an attribute, not award a virtue. "Certified: GOTS" is a factual grouping. "Sustainable" is a verdict. FBF may ship the first.
• The seeded value vocabulary needs the same review as the certificates. sustainable, recycle, slow-fashion and animals are currently free-text tags any brand editor can attach, rendered as FBF-branded chips. sustainable in particular is a generic environmental claim in FBF's own words and cannot survive in that form.
• FBF must not rank by a facet whose label it cannot substantiate. Ranking is a stronger assertion than listing.

5.2 transparency_score must be renamed

transparency_score counts how many of ten profile fields a brand has filled in. That is all it does. It is a form-completeness percentage.

Displayed under the word transparency on a sustainability directory, it is a sustainability label with no certification scheme behind it — exactly what Directive 2024/825 prohibits — and it is misleading under UWG regardless, because a reader will understand "87% transparency" as a statement about how open that brand is about its supply chain. It is not. A brand that fills in ten fields with nothing of substance scores 100%.

Required: rename it everywhere to what it measures — profile completeness.

The public web already renders it correctly as "% profile complete". The word survives in the brand portal's state banner, in the admin brand table, in the database column name, and in the shared package. Renaming the display string is not sufficient while the column, the API and the internal UI still call it transparency, because that is what leaks into sales decks and support replies.

5.3 No FBF sustainability rating

FBF does not issue, and must not issue, any aggregated sustainability rating, grade, score or ranking of its own — until there is a published, defensible methodology reviewed by someone qualified. A composite number is the single most reproduced thing a directory produces and the hardest to defend when it is wrong.

5.4 The commission firewall

Money must never influence a CLAIM, a score, or a facet. It has a bounded, disclosed effect on ranking, and no effect on anything presented as being about substance.

This changed on 2026-07-25. The previous version said money must never influence a ranking either; that is no longer true and the advertising terms B3 set out the parameters and the cap in full.

What has NOT changed, and is the part that matters here: a brand's subscription tier, a paid placement booking and any commission rate have no effect on profile-completeness scoring, on the values and certificate facets, on whether a claim is substantiated, or on which brands FBF features editorially. A commission-paying brand appearing in a "values" row on the strength of an FBF score is a greenwashing exposure the commission model itself creates, and that firewall stands.

The distinction is deliberate and it is the whole of FBF's position: money can affect the order in which honest information is shown. It cannot affect what that information says, or whether FBF vouches for it. A paid brand ranks higher; it does not become "certified", it does not gain a value tag, and its claims are checked to exactly the same standard as everyone else's.

The honest position on how strong that firewall is: part of it is built into the system and part of it is a rule FBF keeps. The substance side is built in — profile completeness, the facets and the claim tiers are computed from things with no connection to billing, so money cannot reach them without a deliberate change. The trending order is likewise unbought. On the ranking side, money reaches the order by design now, and what is built in is the limit: the boost is capped in the ranking function itself, so relevance cannot be overridden however much a brand pays. Editorial selection and the hero remain human choices, protected by this policy and nothing else. Saying otherwise would be the kind of claim this policy exists to stop.

Paid placement is also sold as fixed time slots at a flat rate, and where such a slot appears above a list it is labelled. A brand whose ranking is boosted is labelled Promoted wherever it appears. The full rules, including the disclosure gaps FBF has not closed yet, are in the advertising terms and disclosure policy.

FBF never takes money from consumers. Purchases happen on the brand's own storefront under the brand's own terms.

6. How claims are shown

The rules for the interface, so they cannot be lost in a redesign:

1. A claim and its provenance travel together. The label sits with the claim, in the same block, at readable size. A footer disclaimer does not cure a prominent specific claim — Swiss and EU practice agree on this and it is the mistake most platforms make.
2. Unverified means unverified in words, not in a colour. A grey chip is not a disclosure. The text says who stated it.
3. Verified badges name what was verified. FBF's existing "verified" state means ownership of the listing was proven — that the person editing the page controls the brand. It says nothing about any claim on the page, and the interface must not let those two meanings blur into each other. This is the most likely accidental misrepresentation in the whole product.
4. Expiry is visible on any claim that has one, and an expired claim is shown as expired rather than removed — a certificate that lapsed in March is a different fact from one that never existed.
5. Content a brand paid to publish is labelled as advertising. Brand-authored news and blog posts that a subscription tier unlocks are commercial communications. Carrying the brand's name is not enough — that says who wrote it, not that it is advertising. Today only the name is shown, which is why brand-authored posts are not enabled. See the advertising terms Part B.

What actually renders today, so this section is not read as a description of the product: certificates have their own block on a brand page, each with its scope, its provenance in a full sentence, and its expiry. They are no longer chips beside the brand's values, which is what used to make "Sustainable" and "GOTS" look like the same kind of statement — the single most misleading thing in the interface, and the first thing §4 fixed.

Values are still plain chips with no provenance of their own. That is the remaining half of this problem and it is described in §5.1.

7. When a claim is challenged

Anyone can tell FBF that something published here is wrong: a consumer, a competitor, an NGO, a journalist, or the brand itself. Write to hello@fashionbrandfinder.com with the brand, the claim and why you think it is wrong.

What happens then:

1. We look at it. A person reads the report.
2. We ask the brand. The brand is told what has been reported and is given the chance to substantiate the claim or correct it.
3. We act on the claim, not the brand. Most outcomes are the removal or correction of a single claim, not action against the profile.
4. We record the decision and tell the reporter and the brand what it was, with reasons.

FBF hosts content that brands and shops publish, which makes it a hosting service under the EU Digital Services Act. Arts 16–18 apply to FBF regardless of its size: a mechanism to notify illegal content, a statement of reasons to the affected party for every restriction, and information about redress. Art 13's requirement to designate a legal representative in the EU has no small-business exemption either. Arts 20–28 (internal complaint handling, out-of-court dispute settlement, trusted flaggers) do not apply while FBF is a micro or small enterprise under Art 19.

8. What happens when this policy is broken

Proportionate, and in this order:

1. We ask. The claim is queried with the brand, and the brand is given a reasonable time — normally 14 days — to substantiate it, correct it, or remove it.
2. We correct or remove the claim, and tell the brand why.
3. For repeated breaches, the brand loses the ability to attach claims in the restricted set while the rest of the profile stays live. (Not yet available: FBF cannot currently restrict one feature. Until it can, this step does not exist and step 4 is not used as a substitute for it.)
4. For a certification a brand asserts while knowing it does not hold it, the page is suspended. That is a deliberate act, not a mistake, and it is the only case where a whole page comes down over a claim.

Every step comes with a written reason. If the brand pays us and we suspend the page, the fee is suspended too — see the merchant agreement §10 and the notice and action policy §6. A brand can challenge any of this under §7, and there is no charge for doing so.

9. What FBF does not promise

FBF does not audit brands. FBF does not visit factories.

Every certificate on FBF now carries its own label saying who checked it, and anything not labelled document_reviewed or registry_verified is something FBF has not inspected directly. researched_by_fbf means a person here found the claim in a public source and confirmed it against that source — not that FBF saw a certificate or audited anything. self_declared means nobody here checked at all, and the brand page says so in those words.

Values are not yet labelled this way. A value tag on a brand page carries no provenance, so it should be read as unchecked. Closing that is the remaining half of §5.1.

That is a limit on FBF's role, not a disclaimer that transfers responsibility for FBF's own words. The facet labels, the scores and the rankings in §5 are FBF's, and FBF is answerable for them.

10. Governing law

This policy is not itself a contract. It becomes binding through the agreements that incorporate it — the merchant agreement and the creator terms — and it is governed by the law and the courts named in whichever of those applies to you. Where FBF offers its service to consumers or businesses in the EU, EU consumer and platform rules apply to that offering in addition — in particular the UCPD as amended by the Omnibus Directive, Directive 2024/825 from late September 2026, and the DSA. Nothing here removes a consumer's mandatory rights under the law of their own country of residence.

11. Changes

We publish a new version here, dated. Where a change materially affects what a brand may publish or how it is treated, we give at least 30 days' notice by email to the address a brand has verified with us, and a brand that does not want the change can end its agreement before it takes effect at no cost. Earlier versions are kept, so a brand can see which version applied when.

12. Who publishes this policy, and how to reach us

M8 Media by Manuel Bucher, Kaffeestrasse 6C, 8180 Bülach, Switzerland (CHE-203.493.947). Write to hello@fashionbrandfinder.com. Full details are in the imprint.