Privacy Policy
1. Introduction
vowels recognizes the importance of protecting the privacy of your personal data. We have instituted strict policies and security measures to protect the information you provide us.
The purpose of this privacy policy is for you, as a customer to learn how vowels handles your personal data and for you to be able to feel secure that the processing is being carried out in accordance with your General Data Protection Regulation and other applicable data protection law. The privacy policy also describes your rights vis-à-vis us and how you can enforce those rights. By purchasing or receiving our products/services, you confirm that you have read and understood the content of this privacy policy.
This privacy policy is aimed towards you as a customer belonging to one or more of the following categories.
— Retail Customers (customers in our stores)
— Retail Customers (customers that shop online)
— Contact persons Supplier, Partner or Company Customer
— Account Holders (customers with an account on our website)
— Recipients of Newsletters
— Website Users
2. Who is responsible for your personal data?
The United States company vowels AB, reg. No. 556719-7818 ("vowels" "We" "Us"), is the controller of your personal data. vowels affiliated companies (including other companies within the vowels group, joint ventures, franchisees and licensees) and selected suppliers may process your personal data on vowels’s behalf and in accordance with vowels' instructions as stated below and are thereby processors of your personal data. You may contact vowels at any time, please find our contact details below.
— Address: 990 Biscayne Blvd, Suit 701, Miami FL 33132
— E-mail: privacy@vowels.com
3. Categories of data processed, purpose and legal basis for processing
3.1 General
Below is a summary of the categories of data that we process, the purposes of processing the data and on what legal basis we are processing your data.
3.2 Retail Customers
If you make a purchase in one of our physical stores we may process your name, e-mail, and purchase history to provide customer service, process returns and give customer advice on any products you have bought. We will only collect the information if this is accepted by you. The legal basis for the processing is a balance of interests where our legitimate interest is to be able to provide customer service on any products you have bought. We will only collect the information if this is accepted by you. The legal basis for the processing is a balance of interests where our legitimate interest is to be able to provide customer service and facilitate the administration of returns, exchanges and complaints.
Your contact details i.e. your name, e-mail address and phone number, may also be processed for direct marketing purposes, namely to keep you informed via e-mail or other messenger services of our products, special events or promotions. The legal basis for the processing is a balance of interests where our legitimate interest is to market our products to existing customers.
3.3 Retail Customers
When you purchase a product online your name, e-mail, phone number and address (including street name, zip code, city and country) are used to process your order. The data is also processed so that vowels can process any returns, exchanges, and complaints as well as communicating with you regarding any questions or comments you may have regarding the product(s). The phone number is collected so that we can send a text message to you when the product(s) have arrived at your pick-up place. The legal basis for the processing is that it is necessary in order for vowels to fulfill its contractual obligations towards you.
Your purchase history is also stored so that vowels can process any returns, exchanges, and complaints as well as communicating with you regarding any questions or comments you may have regarding the product(s). The legal basis for the processing is a balancing of interests where vowels’s legitimate interest is to facilitate the administration of returns, exchanges and complaints.
Your IP-address is stored for every order placed. IP-addresses are used for fraud risk checks. vowels only uses IP-addresses to the extent it is strictly necessary for preventing fraud and the legal basis for the processing is a balancing of interest where vowels’s legal interest is to protect itself from fraud.
vowels Privacy Policy for European Union Countries
Last update: 1/7/2025
VOWELS respects your concerns about the protection of your personal data and recognizes the importance of transparency regarding the use of the personal data we collect about you. VOWELS makes every effort to ensure that you are accurately and transparently informed about the use and protection of your personal data.
Our Personal Data Use Policy has been drawn up in compliance with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), which came into force on May 25, 2018 and harmonizes European law on the protection of customers' and users' personal data.
This Personal Data Protection Policy may evolve according to changes in our practices or changes in regulations.
When do we collect and use your personal data?
We may use your personal data when you purchase our products or use our online services, when you visit our Website, when you participate in surveys, competitions, events or promotions, or when you contact us or when we contact you.
What personal data do we collect and use?
Depending on the circumstances, we may collect and use :
- Your first and last name
- Your e-mail address
- Your postal address
- Your telephone number (landline and/or mobile)
- Your credit card number and other payment information required to purchase our products
- Your country of residence
- Your gender
- Your date of birth
- Your purchase history (what you bought, when, where and how you paid) if we can link your purchase to your account.
- Your billing and delivery addresses
- Information about your online activities from third-party sites that display our advertisements
- Your usernames, comments, questions or reactions entered and sent on social networks
- Your reactions, responses, purchasing preferences or images received as part of surveys
What do we use your personal data for?
We may use your personal data to deliver our products purchased on our Website, to communicate with you, to improve our products and services and to personalize your experience on our Website, to enhance our customer support and to identify and prevent fraud and other criminal activities.
If you have consented through the means offered on our Website we will use your contact details to send you offers, information and updates about our products, services and events. We may use this information and tailor it to your preferences and interests for the legitimate purpose of personalizing your customer profile and thereby enhancing your experience with VOWELS. We may also use your personal data to send you promotional communications, to evaluate our services in order to improve them, to understand your preferences, to offer you more relevant products and services, to deliver content, to show you advertisements corresponding to your interests and to send you personalized communications.
More generally, and in accordance with a legitimate interest, we may use your personal data to conduct statistical analyses in order to better understand your needs and expectations, to learn about our customers' purchasing patterns, trends and behaviors, and to improve our products and services.
Details concerning your personal data and the delivery of your purchases
When you purchase one of our products on our website, you have accepted our General Terms and Conditions of Sale, which form the contractual basis of our relationship. It is within this framework that we may use your personal data to deliver the products you have purchased. You may choose not to provide the information requested. In this case, we may not be able to properly perform our contractual obligations, such as providing your telephone number or e-mail address. In any case, apart from information relating to your means of payment necessary for the purchase of our products, your name and postal address are essential for delivery.
For certain countries where international deliveries are provided by Sagawa, our global e-commerce partner, your personal data will be collected and controlled by Shopify in accordance with the Sagawa Privacy Policy available at https://www.sagawa-exp.co.jp/english/privacy/.
If you purchase an item or gift card and ask us to deliver your purchase to a third party, we will collect the recipient's name, mailing address and e-mail address to send the item or gift card. At your request, we may also use this information to notify the recipient before their gift arrives.
Details concerning the personal data of minors
Please note that our products and services are not intended for children under the age of sixteen and that we do not knowingly collect any data from children under the age of sixteen. If we learn that we have inadvertently received personal data from a customer under the age of sixteen, we will delete this data from our records
Details of personal data used by third-party sites
Our Website may contain links to other websites or offer third-party services that apply their own privacy policies to the collection of other personal data. These websites or services may be operated by companies outside VOWELS. We strongly recommend that you read these policies if you visit any of these websites or use any of these third-party services. We are not responsible for the content of any third-party website or service not affiliated with VOWELS.
With whom do we share your personal data?
We do not sell or otherwise disclose any of your personal data, except as specified below:
We may share your personal data with our VOWELS affiliates.
We may also share your personal data with our Service Providers processing your data on our behalf for the purposes described in this Privacy Policy. For example
• The Transport Company delivering products purchased on our Websites to our customers
• The Company providing technical support and infrastructure to our Websites.
• The company providing a secure payment platform.
If our service providers need to access your personal data, 1) we will choose service providers who respect your privacy and act at all times in compliance with data protection legislation, 2) we will only give them access to the data they need to deliver their services, 3) we will ensure that they only use the data for the purposes set out in the contract we have entered into with them, 4) we will ask them to delete or return any personal data when we stop using their services.
Finally, we may be asked to disclose personal data about you 1) if we are required to do so by law or legal process (such as a court order), 2) in response to a request from the relevant authorities or 3) if we believe that such disclosure is necessary or appropriate to prevent physical harm or financial loss or in connection with an investigation or actual or suspected illegal activity.
Transfer of personal data to the United States (USA)
We will transfer the personal data we collect about you to our affiliates and third-party service providers in the USA.
As of July 10, 2023, the European Commission recognizes that US companies approved under the EU-US Data Protection Shield (“Privacy Shield”) provide an adequate level of data protection. For more information, please visit the page dedicated to the Privacy Shield by the CNIL here.
Our US affiliates and VOWELS Corporation are certified under the EU-US Data Protection Shield (“Privacy Shield”).
How long do we keep your personal data?
We retain the personal data we collect for the duration of our relationship with you, plus a reasonable period to take account of applicable legal retention requirements or limitation periods, or to meet the purposes described above.
If you agree to receive promotional communications, we will retain the information we need to send you such communications for a period of five (5) years after the end of our relationship with you as a customer, or after we collect it from you if you are a potential customer. During this period, it is stored within the EU.
At the end of the retention period, your personal data will be deleted completely or anonymized in order to be used for statistical and analytical purposes in a way that no longer allows you to be identified.
What are your rights regarding your personal data?
You have a right of access, rectification, opposition, limitation of processing, erasure and portability of your personal data, under the conditions set out in the RGPD.
In accordance with the regulations, you will be able to choose at any time to unsubscribe from commercial emails by clicking on the unsubscribe link included in each one, or from your customer account, or by contacting our customer service or data protection officer if the unsubscribe link is not available.
We will apply your preferences from the date you request to unsubscribe. If you withdraw your consent, our use of your personal data on the basis of your consent prior to its withdrawal will not be affected.
In addition, you may request the disclosure, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format, of your personal data that you have provided to us.
If you wish to exercise these rights, please contact our Data Protection Officer. Please include in your request your name, e-mail address, postal address and a copy of your identity card or passport. To preserve the confidentiality of your information, we will ask you to confirm your identity by enclosing a copy of your identity card or passport with your request. If you have authorized a third party to submit an application on your behalf, they will be asked to prove that they have your permission to do so.
If you have an online customer account, you can also access, change or update your information by logging into My Account on our Website and changing your information as you wish.
If you are not satisfied with our response, or if you believe that your personal data protection rights have been violated, you may send a complaint to a data protection authority, including in the Member State of the European Economic Area where you usually reside or work or where the alleged violation of European data protection rules took place.
COOKIES POLICY
This Cookie Policy sets out what you need to know about the cookies and similar technologies we use on our Website and why we use them. It is inseparable from our Privacy Policy.
About Cookies
A cookie is a small text file stored by your browser on the hard disk of your computer, tablet or smartphone when you visit a website such as VOWELS. It contains information about your browsing of the pages on our site, memorizing the pages you have visited, the time you have spent on each page and the contents of your shopping cart.
Cookies do not damage your equipment and cannot be used to identify you personally.
We use cookies to provide you with the best possible experience on our site, facilitate your browsing, optimize our services and improve our products. Cookies enable us to recognize you and thus avoid the hassle of your first connection, in particular by saving the settings and preferences you selected on your first visit, or by storing the products you put in your shopping cart.
Cookies are also used to process statistics and information on Site traffic, in particular to ensure that the Site operates rapidly.
They may take the form of session cookies (meaning that they will be deleted from your computer or computer terminal once you have left the Website) or permanent cookies (meaning that they will remain on your computer or computer terminal until you delete them or they expire). Cookies may be placed on our Website by us or by our service providers, in which case they are referred to as “third-party cookies”.
Some pages of our websites also contain “web beacons” (also known as web beacons and clear GIFs). These are small image files that can be placed on a web page or e-mail to record browsing behavior. These tags can be used, for example, to verify that a promotional e-mail has been read.
The placement and use of these cookies is subject to your consent. Each time you enter our website, you are presented with a window enabling you to exercise your choices and give your consent to their use.
When you give it, your consent is considered valid for up to 13 months, in accordance with the General Data Protection Regulation.
Please note that cookies and web beacons cannot harm your computer or computer terminal.
Cookies used on our websites
The full list of cookies we use on our Websites is available below.
Strictly necessary cookies
These are technical cookies that enable you to browse the site, use its features and save your preferences. These cookies are essential to enable you to browse our website safely and use all its features.
Examples of necessary cookie usage:
- adding an item to your shopping cart
- allow you to access secure areas of the website;
- to remember whether you have accepted the cookies banner on our website;
If you choose to block strictly necessary cookies, we cannot guarantee your security or predict how the Website will function during your visit.
Functionality cookies
These are identification and personalization cookies that memorize your preferences.
These cookies enable us to facilitate your visit and offer you a personalized browsing experience.
The data collected by functionality cookies may be rendered anonymous and will not be linked to any information concerning your use of other websites.
Examples of how functionality cookies are used
- remembering your user name, language or geographical location)
- remembering the products you have placed in your shopping cart
Performance and analysis cookies
These cookies collect general data on how our website is used, enabling us to measure various indicators and generate reports and usage statistics on how visitors use our website. They enable us to improve the user experience and the quality of our Website.
This analysis may be carried out by third parties, in which case they are considered third-party cookies.
Examples of the use of performance and analysis cookies :
- to record the number of visitors to our website;
- identify errors that may occur during your browsing experience;
- to measure the effectiveness of our advertising, for example by checking which websites visitors to the Site came from.
Social networking and advertising cookies
These are advertising or “targeting” cookies. They are used to display ads that may be of interest to you. They limit the number of times you are solicited by an ad, and make it possible to measure the effectiveness of advertising campaigns.
Most of the time, these cookies are placed by third-party advertising agencies, which collect data on your browsing habits in order to display ads that are more relevant to your interests.
If you disable these cookies, you will not receive our targeted advertising on the various websites you visit.
Manage your Cookie Preferences
You can manage cookies by adjusting your browser settings. If you decide to change your settings and disable cookies, you may not be able to take full advantage of all the features of our Website. For example, if you disable or refuse to accept cookies that are strictly necessary, you will not be able to make any purchases on our website.
As soon as you enter our website, you will be able to exercise your choices concerning cookies: acceptance, fine-tuning, refusal.
You can change your cookie settings at any time by clicking on the link at the bottom of each page of our Website.
Contact vowels
If you have any questions about our Privacy Policy or our Cookie Policy, please contact us by post or email at:
VOWELS
Attention: Data Protection Officer
200, boulevard Malesherbes
75017, Paris
Email: DataProtectionOfficer@vowels.net
