Privacy Policy

1. Who we are

This site is operated by Safestyle Holdings Pty Ltd, trading as SafeStyle. We are the organisation responsible for the personal information described in this policy — the APP entity under Australian law and the agency under New Zealand law.

Our head office address is for correspondence. It is not a deliveries or returns address — please contact us before sending anything.

2. Which privacy law applies to you

This one site serves customers in two countries, so two sets of rules are relevant.

• If you are in Australia, the Privacy Act 1988 (Cth) and the thirteen Australian Privacy Principles apply to how we handle your personal information.
• If you are in New Zealand, the Privacy Act 2020 and its thirteen Information Privacy Principles apply. They apply to us even though we are an Australian company, because we carry on business in New Zealand.
• If both could apply, or you are somewhere else entirely, we apply whichever standard gives you more protection and handle your information according to this policy either way.

Wherever this policy uses the phrase personal information, read it as covering both “personal information” in the Australian and New Zealand sense.

3. What this policy covers

This policy covers this wholesale trade site and the account applications, orders, invoices, payments and enquiries handled through it.

It does not cover:

• Our consumer stores at safestyle.com.au and safestyle.co.nz. They use a different set of tools and publish their own privacy policy, which is longer than this one because those sites carry analytics and advertising technology that this site does not.
• Our prescription trade site, which has its own policy because it handles prescription and vision information that this site does not touch.
• Your own business. Once eyewear is on your shelves, what you collect from your customers is governed by your privacy policy, not ours.

4. The information we collect

This is a business-to-business site, so most of what we hold is information about a business and about people in their work capacity. Not every category below will apply to you — someone browsing the catalogue gives us far less than someone applying for an account.

If a field is optional and you would rather not answer it, leave it out and tell us — we will work around it where the account allows.

We do not collect sensitive information on this site. We have no reason to ask about your health, background or beliefs, and we do not.

5. Account applications and credit

Opening a wholesale account on credit terms is the one part of this site that needs personal information about individuals rather than a business, so it is worth setting out plainly.

What we ask for and why

Which questions you see depends on your business structure. A company gives us its registered and trading names, ABN and ACN. A sole trader gives us their full name and date of birth. A partnership gives us the same for each partner. A trust gives us the trust and trustee names and their registration numbers. We ask for names and dates of birth because they are what identifies a real person reliably enough to verify the business and to assess credit — names alone are not unique.

Verifying your ABN

As you type an ABN we check it against the Australian Business Register and compare the registered name with the name you entered, so a typo is caught while you are still on the form. The ABR is a public register operated by the Australian Taxation Office.

Credit assessment

If your application proceeds, we will email you a trade credit application through CreditorWatch’s ApplyEasy service, sent from sales@safestyle.com.au. That application is where the credit side of the process actually happens, and it carries its own consents and disclosures — please read them before you sign.

A trade credit assessment can involve a credit reporting body obtaining and disclosing credit information about the business and about any individual who gives a personal guarantee. In Australia, credit reporting is separately regulated under Part IIIA of the Privacy Act 1988 and the Privacy (Credit Reporting) Code, which give you specific additional rights — including the right to access your credit report, to have it corrected, and to ask a credit reporting body not to use your information for pre-screening or while you are the victim of fraud. Credit assessment for New Zealand accounts may involve a New Zealand credit reporting body on comparable terms.

If we say no

If we decline an application we will tell you, and you can ask us why. If the decision was based on information from a credit reporting body we will tell you that, and tell you which body, so you can get your own copy of the report and correct it if it is wrong.

6. Why we use your information

We use personal information to:

• Assess and open trade accounts, verify who we are dealing with, and set credit terms.
• Give the right people access to the right pricing, catalogue, assets, orders and invoices.
• Take, pick, pack, dispatch and deliver orders, and handle backorders.
• Take payment, issue invoices, statements and credits, and follow up amounts owing.
• Answer enquiries and handle warranty claims, faults and returns.
• Support your store with point-of-sale material, display stands and merchandising.
• Keep the site secure and available, and investigate faults, misuse and fraud.
• Meet our legal obligations, including tax, financial record-keeping, consumer guarantees and product safety.
• Send you trade updates about products, ranges and stock, where you have asked for them or where they relate to an account you administer.

We do not use personal information for advertising, profiling or audience building, and we do not combine it with data bought from third parties.

7. Who we share it with

We disclose personal information only where it is needed to run this site and service your account. Each provider below is bound by contract to use the information only for the service they provide to us.

We may also disclose personal information to our professional advisers, to debt recovery agents where an account is in default, and where we are required or permitted to by law — for example in response to a court order or a lawful request from a regulator, or to protect someone’s safety. If SafeStyle is ever sold or restructured, account records may transfer to the buyer, who would be bound to handle them under a policy no less protective than this one.

8. Sending information overseas

As the table above shows, some of our providers are outside Australia and New Zealand — mainly in the United States and the European Union. Using them means your information may be stored or processed overseas.

Before we engage a provider that will hold personal information we take reasonable steps to satisfy ourselves that it will be handled to a standard comparable to the one the law requires of us, and we put contractual protections in place to that effect. If you are in New Zealand, this is the disclosure required by Information Privacy Principle 12. If you are in Australia, it is the disclosure required by Australian Privacy Principle 8.

New Zealand customers should also note that SafeStyle is an Australian company, so your information will be held in Australia as a matter of course.

9. Cookies and tracking

This site sets only the cookies it needs to let you through the site password, keep you signed in, hold your cart and complete a payment, plus a small number of local browser settings that remember your preferences. There is no Google Analytics, no tag manager, no advertising pixel, no session recording and no heat mapping on this site, which is why you are not asked to accept cookies when you arrive.

Our Cookie Policy has the detail.

10. Marketing

We may send trade updates — new products, range and stock changes, price lists and point-of-sale material — to the contacts nominated on a trade account, because that is information those people need to do their job. Every message includes a way to unsubscribe, and you can also ask us to stop at any time by emailing enquiries@safestyle.com.au. We will act on the request promptly.

Unsubscribing from marketing does not stop transactional messages you need, such as order confirmations, dispatch notices, invoices and statements.

11. Automated decisions

Parts of this site check things automatically — whether an ABN is valid, whether a product is in stock for your account, whether an invoice has been paid. None of these is a decision about you.

Decisions that matter, including whether to open an account and on what credit terms, are made by our people. We do not make decisions about you by wholly automated means that have legal or similarly significant effects.

12. Keeping information secure

We take reasonable steps to protect personal information from misuse, loss, and unauthorised access, modification or disclosure. In practice that means the site is served only over encrypted connections; sign-in sessions are short-lived and their cookies cannot be read by scripts in the page; access to accounts and orders inside SafeStyle is restricted to staff who need it for their role; card details are handled entirely by our payment provider on its own pages; and our systems sit behind a network that filters attack and bot traffic.

No system is perfectly secure, so we also plan for failure. If a data breach occurs that is likely to cause you serious harm, we will notify you and the relevant regulator as the law requires. If you think your sign-in has been compromised, or you have received something from us that looks wrong, please tell us straight away.

13. How long we keep it

We keep personal information only as long as we need it for the purpose we collected it for, or as long as the law requires — whichever is longer. As a guide:

• Order, invoice and payment records are kept for at least seven years, because tax and financial record-keeping law requires it.
• Account application and credit records are kept for the life of the account and for a period afterwards, so we can answer questions about the terms we granted and meet our obligations under credit law.
• Account and contact details are kept while the account is active, and for a period afterwards in case it is reopened.
• Enquiries are kept for as long as needed to deal with them and to understand a later related enquiry.

When information is no longer needed we destroy it or de-identify it. If you would like to know how long we hold a particular record, ask us and we will tell you.

14. Your rights

Under both Australian and New Zealand law you can:

• Ask what we hold and get a copy of it. We will confirm whether we hold personal information about you and give you access to it.
• Ask us to correct it. If something is wrong, out of date, incomplete or misleading, tell us and we will fix it. If we disagree, you can ask us to attach a statement of the correction you sought.
• Ask us to delete it, where we no longer need it and no law requires us to keep it.
• Opt out of marketing, at any time.
• Deal with us without identifying yourself, where that is lawful and practicable — for example browsing the catalogue or asking a general question.
• Exercise your credit reporting rights, as described in section 5.
• Complain, to us and then to a regulator. See section 15.

How to make a request

Email enquiries@safestyle.com.au or write to the postal address in section 1, and tell us what you are after. Requests are free. We will need to verify who you are before releasing anything — not to make life difficult, but because handing your information to the wrong person would be a far worse outcome. We only use what you give us for verification to verify you.

We aim to respond quickly and in any case within the time the law allows — 30 days in Australia and 20 working days in New Zealand. If we need longer we will tell you why. If we refuse a request, we will explain our reasons and how to challenge the decision.

15. Complaints

If you think we have mishandled your personal information, please tell us first — email enquiries@safestyle.com.au with the details. We will acknowledge your complaint, look into it properly, and write back with what we found and what we intend to do about it.

If you are not satisfied with our response, you can take it to the regulator:

• In Australia — the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, at oaic.gov.au or 1300 363 992.
• In New Zealand — the Office of the Privacy Commissioner, at privacy.org.nz or 0800 803 909.

16. Children

This is a trade site for businesses and their staff. It is not intended for children, and we do not knowingly collect personal information from anyone under 16. If you believe a child has given us information, contact us and we will delete it.

17. Changes to this policy

We update this page when what we do with personal information changes, and we revise the date at the top when we do. If a change is significant — a new category of information, a new disclosure, or a new purpose — we will tell account holders directly rather than relying on you to notice. Where a change needs your consent, we will ask for it before the change affects you.

18. Contact us

For anything about this policy, or about the information we hold on you, get in touch and we will be glad to help.