Creator Terms — Fashion Brand Finder

0. Read this first: this is a forward document

Nothing on the creator side of Fashion Brand Finder is built. There is no creator_profiles table, no application flow, no reach display, no collaboration object, no payout. What exists today is a role name (user_roles.role_type = 'creator') and a verification table that has a CREATOR subject type nobody has ever written to.

So these terms are not yet in force and must not be published as if they were. They exist for two reasons:

1. To fix the commitments before the feature is designed, because a few of them (the age floor, the two verification axes, the evidence grade on every reach figure, the disclosure rule) are cheap to build in and expensive to retrofit.
2. To make it obvious which parts still need a lawyer and an accountant — and to make sure that happens before engineering, not after the first payout.

Everything below is written in the present tense because that is how it will read when it is published. Where a clause describes something that does not exist yet, it says so.

The rest of the platform is governed by the terms of use and the privacy policy. These creator terms sit on top of those and cover only the creator role. What you may say about a brand is governed by the content and claims policy; how a report about your content is handled is in the notice and action policy.

1. Who we are

M8 Media by Manuel Bucher, Kaffeestrasse 6C, 8180 Bülach, Switzerland (CHE-203.493.947) — "FBF", "we".

Contact: hello@fashionbrandfinder.com

2. What FBF is, and is not, in a creator relationship

FBF is a directory of fashion brands and the shops that carry them. The creator side adds a place where brands and shops can find creators, and where a creator can be introduced to a brand.

Three things follow, and they shape everything else in this document:

• A collaboration is a contract between you and the brand, not between you and us. We introduce, we host the profile, and we provide the tools around the deal. We are not your agent, not your employer, and not a party to what you agree with a brand. If the brand does not pay you, that is a claim you have against the brand.
• We never take money from consumers. A consumer who uses a discount code buys on the brand's own storefront, under the brand's terms. Money reaches FBF only as an invoice we send to a brand afterwards.
• We are a hosting service. What you put on your profile is your content, published by you. We do not check it before it goes up, beyond the entry review described in §4.

3. Who can be a creator

You can apply if:

• you have an FBF account and are at least 16. (An ordinary FBF account is available from 13; the creator floor is higher, and higher again — 18 — for anything that creates an obligation. §6 explains why.);
• you have at least one public account on a platform we support, which is really yours;
• your content is your own, or you have the rights to it (§8);
• you have not previously had a creator profile removed by us for a serious breach.

We can decline an application, and we do not have to give a business reason. We will tell you the factual reason where one exists — "the post you submitted was not public", not a score.

We do not promise a review time. There is no automated screening and no review team. At the moment the reviewer is one person. If we ever state a turnaround, it will be because we can meet it.

4. The two things we check, and why they are never one badge

There are two entirely separate questions about a creator, and we keep them separate on purpose:

We will never merge these into a single "verified" tick. A badge that could mean either thing means neither, and a brand paying against it is being misled.

Ownership proof is deliberately manual. The automated version — a server fetching your profile page to find the code — does not exist, because Instagram and TikTok profile pages cannot be fetched server-side without partner access, and scraping them breaches those platforms' terms. We would rather be slow than describe a check we do not perform.

5. Reach figures always carry a grade and a date

None of this is built. There is no creator profile and no reach display, so nothing below describes something you can see today. It is written now because it is the commitment that is cheapest to build in and most expensive to retrofit.

Every follower count, engagement rate and audience split shown on your profile will be displayed with:

• an evidence grade — where the number came from (you told us / we read it from a connected platform / a person at FBF confirmed it), and
• an as-of date — when it was last established.

A self-reported number is labelled a self-reported number, to you and to every brand. We will not present a figure you typed in as if we measured it.

You must keep your figures honest and current. Deliberately inflating reach, or buying followers or engagement, is a breach of these terms and grounds for removal under §11.

6. Age: 16 to take part, 18 for anything that creates an obligation

This is the sharpest line in the document.

Why gifted product counts. Free clothes in exchange for a post are not a present. They are payment in kind for a service, and in Switzerland and in most EU states they are taxable income at their value, and they may attract social-security treatment. Treating them as "just a gift" is the single most common mistake in creator work, and we will not build a flow that encourages it.

Why 18 and not 16. Under ZGB Art 19 a minor with capacity of judgement still needs their legal representative's consent to take on obligations. A collaboration is an obligation: deliverables, deadlines, exclusivity. If a 16-year-old accepts one without that consent, the brand cannot enforce it — which is bad for the brand, and worse for the minor, who has committed to something under commercial pressure with no protection. Rather than build a parental-consent flow and a per-country patchwork, we set a clean 18.

If you turn 18 while holding a profile, the 18+ functions open then. We do not ask for identity documents; we go by the date of birth on your account, and we will act on any credible indication that it is false.

7. Disclosure — the one rule with no exceptions

If a brand gave you anything for a post, the post has to say so. Money, product, discount, a fee, a commission-bearing code, a trip, or a service. In plain words, in the post itself, visible without tapping "more".

This is not our house rule. Swiss UWG Art 3(1)(b) makes a commercial communication that hides its commercial nature unfair competition, and the EU Unfair Commercial Practices Directive treats undisclosed paid editorial content as unfair per se. Platform rules (Instagram, TikTok, YouTube) add their own tooling on top; use it as well, but a platform toggle alone is not a substitute for saying it.

We surface the relationship too. Where FBF knows you were compensated by a brand — because the collaboration or the commission-bearing code went through FBF — we label that relationship on the FBF surfaces where the two of you appear together. You cannot switch that label off, and neither can the brand. It is not a penalty; it is the same rule we apply to ourselves for paid placement, which is sold as clearly labelled fixed time slots and never targeted at a person.

We do not police your posts on other platforms and we do not have the staff to try. But if we are told, or we see, that you are running undisclosed paid content, that is a breach of §7 and we will act under §11.

8. Your content, and what you let us do with it

Your content stays yours. Nothing here transfers ownership, and we do not claim any right in your work beyond what running the service needs.

You grant FBF a non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free licence to host, store, reproduce, resize, cache, translate and display the content you put on your creator profile — your bio, photos, portfolio items, links, and the reach figures you supply — for the purpose of operating and promoting Fashion Brand Finder.

The limits matter more than the grant:

• It lasts while your profile is up, plus up to 90 days for backups and caches to expire. Remove a portfolio item and we stop showing it.
• It is not sublicensable to brands. A brand who sees your work on FBF gets no right to use it. If a brand wants to repost or run your content as advertising, that is a separate agreement between you and them, and it should say for how long, on what channels, and for how much.
• It does not cover using your face, your name or your work in FBF's own marketing at all — paid or unpaid — without asking you first. The licence above is for running the creator directory: showing your profile to brands and to people using FBF. An advertisement, a press piece, a pitch deck or an app-store screenshot is a different thing and we ask every time.
• If we ever add machine translation, it will keep the original, label the translation as machine-made, and let you correct or switch it off. There is no translation feature today.
• You keep moral rights. We will not present your work as someone else's.

You promise the content is yours to post, that you have any needed consent from people appearing in it, and that it does not infringe anyone's rights. If a third party complains about your content, we handle it under our notice and action policy, which says how a report is made, what we do with it, and what you are told. See also §11.

9. Money — mostly deferred, deliberately

Today there is nothing to pay out. Commission billing to brands is unbuilt, and a creator revenue share sits behind it.

When it exists, these will hold:

• FBF pays a creator only out of commission FBF has itself collected from the brand. We do not advance money against a claimed sale.
• A commission-bearing code is only ever issued to a creator who is 18+.
• A sale that is refunded is not a sale. Fashion return rates run 20–40%, so any share is calculated after a return window, and it can be reversed by a correcting entry if the order comes back.
• Every figure you can be paid on is shown to you with the evidence behind it, in the same spirit as §5. Where FBF is relying on a brand's own report rather than an order feed, we say so — and FBF's own limits on what it can check are in the commission terms §12. We will not describe a brand's self-report to you as something FBF verified.
• Audience data you give us is other people's personal data. If you supply audience demographics from a platform's insights, you are the one deciding to share it and we hold it because you gave it to us. We show a brand only what §13 allows, and we delete it with your profile.

10. What we ask of you

• Do not buy followers, engagement, or installs, and do not use another person's account.
• Do not submit content you did not make, or a post that is not public, as proof.
• Disclose (§7).
• Do not post content that is illegal, hateful, or sexualises minors — this is grounds for immediate removal and, where the law requires it, a report.
• Do not misrepresent a brand, its products, or its sustainability credentials. FBF is strict about environmental claims on its own surfaces; the same applies to what you say about a brand while using FBF's tools.
• Keep your account secure, and tell us straight away if you think someone else has got into it. You are responsible for what is done through your account where you allowed it or were careless about it — not for what someone does after breaking in, once you have told us.
• What you say about a brand's materials, production or environmental credentials is governed by the content and claims policy. The same rules that stop a brand saying "eco" with nothing behind it stop you repeating it.

11. Ending it, and what happens if we end it

You can leave at any time. Ask us and your creator profile comes down. (There will be a control for this in your profile settings; until there is, it is an email to us and we do it within a month.) Collaborations you already accepted with a brand survive — you owe the brand what you agreed, and the brand owes you.

We can suspend or remove a creator profile where you materially breach these terms, or where the law requires it. When we do:

• We tell you, in writing: what we did; whether the ground is the law or a specific rule in these terms, and which one; how wide it goes and how long it lasts; whether any automated tool was involved in the decision (today: never); and what you can do about it, including that you can go to court. We describe the basis for the decision. Where the basis is someone else's report, we do not hand you their identity or their words.
• You can challenge it by writing to hello@fashionbrandfinder.com, and it is looked at again by a person, with your response in front of them. FBF is one person today, so we cannot promise a different person; we can promise a real second look, and we will not pretend to more.
• Before we suspend or remove anything except in an emergency or where the law requires immediate action, we tell you what we intend to do and why, and give you a fair chance to fix it or reply.
• Removal is not permanent unless we say so at the time, with the reason. Where the problem is fixable, fix it and reapply.
• Anything already earned and collected is still yours. We do not use removal to avoid paying.

We can also discontinue the creator programme entirely, with 30 days' notice, honouring anything already collected and anything already earned but not yet paid.

12. What we do not promise

We do not promise that any brand will contact you, that you will earn anything, that your profile will be seen by any number of people, or that the service will be uninterrupted. A creator profile is a place to be found; it is not a guarantee of work.

13. Your data

What we collect from creators, why, and how long we keep it is in the Privacy Policy. Two points specific to this role:

• Your private identity details (legal name, date of birth, phone, and later anything a payout requires) are held separately from your public creator profile and are never shown to a brand or a shop, at any subscription tier.
• A creator profile is not public. It is visible to you, to verified brands and shops on the platform, and to FBF staff. It is not visible to consumers or to search engines.

14. Changes to these terms

We will post a new version, dated. If a change reduces what you get, adds an obligation, changes anything about money, or changes how either of us can end this, we email you at least 30 days before it takes effect — we do not decide for ourselves whether it "matters". You can close your creator profile before it takes effect. Earlier versions are kept so you can see what changed.

How you accept these terms. You accept them by ticking the box when you apply for a creator profile. We record which version you accepted and when, and you can ask us for a copy of the exact wording at any time. (Neither the tick box nor the record exists yet — they have to be built before anyone can apply.)

If you are a consumer, you may have a legal right to withdraw from this agreement within 14 days of accepting it, without giving a reason. Whether it applies to a free creator profile is being confirmed, and the withdrawal instructions and form will be here before applications open. In the meantime, §11 lets you leave whenever you want, which is not the same right but has the same effect.

15. Law and venue

Swiss law governs.

If you are a business — you invoice for your work, you are registered as self-employed — the place of jurisdiction is Bülach, Switzerland.

If you are a consumer, which most creators starting out will be, none of that binds you. You can sue us where you live, we will sue you where you live, and the law where you live still protects you whatever this section says. That is true in Switzerland (a consumer cannot sign away the court where they live in advance) and in the EU and EEA, and we are not going to draft around it.

Language. These terms are in English. If we publish a translation and you read and accepted that translation, the translation is the version that applies to you.