Privacy Policy

‌Effective Date: September 25, 2026‌

Welcome to www.34elmkitchen.com (referred to as “we”, “us”, or “our” in this policy). We are a dedicated kitchen small tools retailer committed to turning routine kitchen time into warm, pleasant happy moments for every home cook. This Privacy Policy is designed to clearly, transparently explain how we collect, use, store, protect, and manage your personal information when you access, browse, and use our e-commerce platform and all related services, as well as outline the full scope of rights you hold over your personal data.

At 34 Elm Kitchen, we deeply respect the paramount importance of your data privacy. We design all our data processing activities strictly in compliance with the UK General Data Protection Regulation (UK GDPR), the Data Protection Act 2018, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, and all applicable local data protection regulations in the United Kingdom. Our core commitment is to process your personal information only for the legitimate, service-related purposes explicitly stated in this policy, never to misuse or over-collect your data, and to build long-term trusted relationships with all our customers through open, honest data management practices.

1. Data Controller Information

For all personal information processing activities described in this policy, we act as the independent Data Controller. Our full identifiable contact details are as follows:

  • Registered Business Name: 34 Elm Kitchen
  • Office and Physical Contact Address: 34 Elm Drive, Manchester, M32 9AR, United Kingdom
  • Contact Email: [email protected]
  • Contact Telephone Number: +44 161 865 6328

If you have any questions, concerns, or requests related to your personal data or this Privacy Policy at any time, you can reach out to us directly via the contact methods listed above, and we will respond to your inquiry within 7 working days as required by applicable data protection laws.

2. What Personal Information We Collect

We strictly follow the “lawful, fair, transparent, and data minimisation” principle for all information collection activities. We only collect the minimum scope of personal information that is necessary to deliver our kitchen tool products and complete your full shopping experience. We will never collect any unnecessary personal data without your explicit consent. The categories of personal information we may collect include:

2.1 Information You Provide Voluntarily to Us

This refers to all data you actively submit when interacting with our platform:

  1. ‌Account Registration Information‌: When you create a personal “My Account” profile on our website, you may provide your email address, set a secure account password, and optionally submit your full name to personalise your shopping experience. If you choose to sign in via a third-party social media account, we will only access the public profile information you authorise the third party to share with us, such as your display name and avatar, and we will not request any additional non-public data from your third-party account.
  2. ‌Transaction and Fulfilment Information‌: When you place an order for our kitchen products including refrigerator storage boxes, peelers, cutting boards and other kitchen gadgets, you will be required to submit your full consignee name, valid contact telephone number, and accurate delivery address. This information is used exclusively to process your order, arrange logistics distribution, and ensure your purchased items are delivered to you correctly. During the payment process, your full payment card details and financial information are submitted directly to our trusted certified payment service providers; we do not store or access your complete sensitive payment financial data on our own servers at any point.
  3. ‌Correspondence and Support Information‌: When you contact us via our Contact Us page, send us customer service emails, or leave messages for our support team for after-sales inquiries, order issue resolution, or product consultation, we will collect the content of your communication and the contact details you provide to follow up and resolve your query efficiently.

2.2 Information We Automatically Collect When You Use Our Platform

When you browse our website, view product listings, add items to your cart, and navigate through our pages, we automatically collect the following technical and usage information through secure server logs and authorised cookie technologies:

  • Device information: including your device model, operating system version, unique device identifier, and browser type and version
  • Network information: your IP address, network service provider details, and general geolocation data derived from your IP to optimise local currency and delivery region display
  • Interaction records: your browsing history, product search keywords, page click-through records, product collection activities, shopping cart addition and modification records, and time spent on different sections of our website
  • Cookie and similar tracking technology data: we use first-party functional cookies to remember your preferred language, saved cart items, and logged-in account status to improve your browsing convenience. You can fully manage and disable non-essential cookies at any time through your browser settings.

2.3 Information From Legitimate Authorised Third-Party Sources

In strictly limited circumstances, we may receive supplementary information about you from lawful third-party channels, such as address validation service providers that help us confirm the accuracy of your submitted delivery address to prevent delivery failures. We will only merge and process this information under the premise that it fully complies with all applicable data protection regulations.

3. How We Use Your Personal Information

Every use of your personal data follows the “purpose limitation” principle: we will only process your information for the specific, explicit, legal purposes that we have clearly notified you of in this policy, and we will never repurpose your data for any unrelated uses without obtaining your separate explicit consent. The core purposes of our data processing activities are:

  1. ‌Order Fulfilment and Service Delivery‌: We use your transaction information, contact details and delivery information to process your payment, confirm your order details, arrange for product shipment, coordinate with our logistics partners, and provide you with real-time order status updates to ensure you receive your selected kitchen tools smoothly.
  2. ‌Platform Functionality Optimisation and Experience Improvement‌: We analyse automatic collected usage data to understand how customers browse our product categories, identify usability issues on our website, optimise our page layout, improve product display logic, and ensure our platform runs stably across different devices to deliver a more user-friendly shopping experience.
  3. ‌Customer Service and Post-Purchase Support‌: We use your provided contact information and correspondence content to respond to your inquiries, handle your refund and return requests as outlined in our Refund and Returns Policy, resolve product quality issues, and provide you with timely after-sales assistance for the kitchen gadgets you purchased.
  4. ‌Legal Compliance and Security Protection‌: We process your personal data to verify your account identity, prevent fraudulent transaction activities, detect and block unauthorised access attempts to our platform, and fulfil all our legal obligations under applicable UK tax laws, consumer protection regulations, and data protection legislations.
  5. ‌Non-Intrusive Marketing Communication (Only With Your Explicit Consent)‌: If you have actively opted in to receive our marketing updates, we will use your email address to send you notifications about new product arrivals, exclusive limited-time offers, seasonal kitchen tips, and promotional activities for our kitchen tools range. We will never send you unsolicited marketing messages, and you can unsubscribe from all marketing communications at any time with one simple click, at no extra cost to you.

All our data processing activities are supported by at least one valid legal basis as required by UK GDPR, which may include performance of the contract we have with you for your order, our legitimate business interests to improve our platform and prevent fraud, your explicit consent for marketing activities, or compliance with our legal regulatory obligations.

4. Information Sharing and Third-Party Disclosures

We will never sell, rent, or trade your personal information to any unrelated third parties for their own commercial marketing purposes. We only share your necessary personal data with strictly vetted third-party service providers under the following limited scenarios, and all shared data is restricted to the absolute minimum required for the specific service purpose:

  1. ‌Logistics and Fulfilment Partners‌: We will share your consignee name, contact phone number, and delivery address with our trusted courier and warehousing partners, solely for the purpose of delivering your ordered products to the location you specified. Our logistics partners are not authorised to use this shared personal information for any other independent purposes.
  2. ‌Certified Payment Service Processors‌: We work with PCI-DSS compliant payment providers to process your order payments securely. The payment information you submit is transmitted directly to these providers via encrypted channels, and we do not retain your full sensitive payment card details on our systems.
  3. ‌Cloud Service and Platform Operation Suppliers‌: We use reputable cloud hosting service providers to store our website data and customer information, which is hosted within geographies that meet UK GDPR data protection adequacy standards. These suppliers only process your data under our explicit written instructions, and are contractually prohibited from any unauthorised access or use of your personal information.
  4. ‌Regulatory and Law Enforcement Bodies‌: We may disclose your personal information if we are required to do so by binding legal court orders, official requests from UK competent authorities including the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) or Competition and Markets Authority (CMA), to protect our legal rights, the safety of our customers, or comply with our legal regulatory responsibilities.

All third parties we share personal data with are required to sign formal data processing agreements with us, which clearly define their data protection obligations, restrict their use of your data to the agreed limited purposes, and mandate that they implement the same level of strict data security measures that we apply to protect your information.

5. Data Storage and Security Protection Measures

We implement industry-leading technical and organisational security measures to ensure that your personal information is protected against unauthorised access, accidental loss, tampering, or unlawful disclosure:

  • We encrypt all personal data both during transmission and stationary storage using the internationally recognised AES-256 encryption standard, and all data transmitted between your browser and our website is protected via the latest TLS 1.3 secure transmission protocol to prevent interception during transfer.
  • We adopt a strict role-based access control (RBAC) system for all our internal data systems: only a very limited number of authorised staff who need to access your data to process your order or handle your support request are granted access permissions, and all access operations are fully logged and audited on a regular basis.
  • We follow a clear storage limitation principle: we will only retain your personal information for as long as it is strictly necessary to fulfil the purposes we collected it for. For order-related transaction data, we will retain it for the duration required by UK tax and commercial record-keeping regulations (normally 7 years after your order is completed). For your account profile information, we will retain it until you choose to permanently delete your account, after which all your personal data will be completely and irreversibly erased from our active servers within 30 days.
  • We conduct quarterly vulnerability scans, annual third-party independent data security audits, and regular emergency response drills for data security incidents, to continuously verify and upgrade our protection measures against new emerging cyber threats.
  • We adopt a geographically localised storage strategy for all our UK customer personal data, which is stored on servers located within the United Kingdom, to avoid unnecessary cross-border data transfers that may introduce extra privacy risks. If we ever need to transfer your personal data outside of the UK in any exceptional circumstances, we will ensure the transfer is fully compliant with UK GDPR requirements, using official approved mechanisms such as the UK Addendum to Standard Contractual Clauses to guarantee an equivalent level of data protection for your information.

6. Your Data Subject Rights Under UK Law

Under the UK General Data Protection Regulation and the Data Protection Act 2018, you hold a comprehensive set of legally enforceable rights over your personal information. You can exercise any of the following rights at any time completely free of charge, by sending us a request via the contact methods listed in Section 1 of this policy:

  1. ‌Right of Access‌: You have the right to request a complete copy of all the personal information we hold about you, along with a full written explanation of how we process this data, what categories of recipients we have shared it with, the expected data storage duration, and all relevant details of our data processing activities.
  2. ‌Right to Rectification‌: If you find that any of the personal information we hold about you is inaccurate, incomplete, or out of date (for example a changed delivery address or updated contact phone number), you have the right to request that we correct and update this data without unnecessary delay.
  3. ‌Right to Erasure (Right to be Forgotten)‌: You are entitled to request that we permanently delete all your personal information from our systems, under circumstances including when the data is no longer necessary for the original purposes we collected it for, you have withdrawn your previously given consent for processing, or you object to our processing activities and there is no overriding legitimate legal ground for us to continue processing your data.
  4. ‌Right to Restriction of Processing‌: You have the right to request that we temporarily suspend the processing of your personal data, for example during the period when we are verifying the accuracy of your data you have contested, or when we are assessing your objection request to our processing activities.
  5. ‌Right to Data Portability‌: For all personal data that you have actively provided to us based on your consent or for the performance of our order contract, you can request us to provide this data to you in a structured, commonly used, machine-readable format, or request us to directly transfer this data to another nominated data controller where technically feasible.
  6. ‌Right to Object‌: You have the full right to object to our processing of your personal data that is based on our legitimate business interests, at any time. We will cease processing your personal information unless we can demonstrate compelling legitimate grounds for the processing which override your interests, rights and freedoms, or the processing is for the establishment, exercise or defence of legal claims. You also have an unconditional right to object to all direct marketing activities we conduct for you, and we will immediately stop sending you marketing communications once you submit this objection.
  7. ‌Right to Withdraw Consent‌: For any data processing activity that you have previously given your explicit voluntary consent to (such as receiving marketing emails or allowing non-essential cookie usage), you can withdraw your consent at any time. The withdrawal of your consent will not affect the lawfulness of any processing activities we have carried out before your withdrawal request.

When you submit a rights request, we will first verify your identity to ensure that the request is submitted by the legitimate data subject, to protect your account and personal data from unauthorised access. We will respond to your formal rights request within one calendar month from the date we receive your verified request, in line with the requirements of UK data protection law. If for any reason we are unable to fulfil your request, we will provide you with a clear written explanation of the reasons within the same timeline. If you are not satisfied with our response to your request, you also have the right to lodge a complaint directly to the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), the independent supervisory authority for data protection in the United Kingdom.

7. Children’s Privacy Protection

Our e-commerce website and all related services are general audience oriented, and we do not intentionally collect personal information from any individuals under the age of 16. If we become aware that we have collected personal data from a child under the age of 16 without verifiable parental consent, we will take immediate action to delete that information completely from all our servers. If you believe we may have unknowingly collected any personal information from a child, please contact us immediately via our provided contact details, and we will resolve the issue promptly.

8. Third-Party Links

Our website may contain hyperlinks to external third-party websites, such as links to our social media pages or recommended relevant kitchen content platforms, for your convenience. Please note that these external third-party websites operate under their own independent separate privacy policies, which are completely outside of our control. This Privacy Policy only applies to the personal data processing activities conducted on our own www.34elmkitchen.com platform. We strongly recommend that you review and read the privacy policy of every external website you visit after leaving our site, to fully understand their respective data processing rules. We assume no responsibility or liability for the data protection practices of any external third-party websites.

9. Updates to This Privacy Policy

We may occasionally revise and update this Privacy Policy from time to time, to reflect changes in our actual business operation practices, updates to new UK data protection regulatory requirements, or platform function adjustments. When we make material changes to this policy, we will prominently display the updated new version on our website, update the “Effective Date” marked at the top of the policy, and may also send you a prominent notification via email or platform pop-up notice for major significant changes. Your continued use of our website and services after the effective date of the updated Privacy Policy will be regarded as your acknowledgement and agreement to the revised terms of the policy. We encourage you to review this Privacy Policy periodically each time you visit our platform, to stay informed about how we are protecting your personal information.

10. Final Contact Information

If you have any questions, comments, concerns, or requests about any part of this Privacy Policy, or our personal data processing practices at 34 Elm Kitchen, please do not hesitate to get in touch with us at any time:

  • Email: [email protected]
  • Postal Address: 34 Elm Drive, Manchester, M32 9AR, United Kingdom
  • Phone: +44 161 865 6328