Terms of Sale

Held Portraits is a trading name of CSS International Ltd, a company registered in England and Wales (company number 16110027), registered office at 85 Great Portland Street, First Floor, London, W1W 7LT, United Kingdom.

You can reach us at studio@heldportraits.co.uk. We aim to reply within one working day.

In these terms, “we”, “us” and “our” mean CSS International Ltd trading as Held Portraits. “You” means the customer placing an order.

These terms apply to every order placed through heldportraits.co.uk. By placing an order you accept them. They do not affect your statutory rights as a consumer. Nothing in these terms excludes or limits any right you have under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 or any other law that cannot be excluded by agreement.

We may update these terms from time to time. The version published on the site when you place your order is the one that applies to that order.

Held Portraits creates original artwork from a photograph you supply, using a combination of proprietary artistic direction and AI image generation. Your portrait is generated by AI and is not painted, drawn or otherwise made by hand. Unless you order a digital file only, we then produce it as a framed piece, a 308gsm fine-art paper print, a canvas, or a polished acrylic panel, made to order in the UK.

Your portrait is a work of art, not a photographic reproduction. It is an artistic interpretation of your photograph in the style of the edition you choose. Details may be simplified, recomposed or stylised. Colours are interpreted through the edition's palette. The preview you approve before paying shows you exactly the artwork that will be printed. What you approve is what we print.

Screens and print differ. Colours on a backlit display will always look slightly different from pigment on paper. Reasonable variation between the on-screen preview and the printed piece is a characteristic of fine-art printing, not a defect.

By uploading a photograph you confirm that:

• you own the copyright in it, or have the copyright owner's permission to use it for this purpose;
• it does not infringe anyone else's rights (including privacy rights) and is not unlawful, obscene or defamatory; and
• where it shows a private home, you have the right to use an image of that property, or the portrait is for the household concerned.

You keep all rights in your photograph. You grant us a limited licence to store, process and transform it solely to create your preview and portrait, to fulfil your order, and to provide customer support. This includes sharing it with the service providers listed in our Privacy Policy for those purposes only. We will never use your photograph or your finished portrait in our marketing without your separate, explicit permission.

We may decline to produce a portrait from any photograph, for example where it appears to infringe someone's rights, contains people (particularly children) without evident permission, or is unsuitable for artistic reasons. If we decline after you have paid, we will refund you in full.

The flow: upload a photograph, receive a free watermarked preview, choose your edition, size, format and frame, and pay. Your order is an offer to buy. A contract is formed when we email you confirmation of your order.

Before anything is printed, every portrait is individually reviewed by a human for composition and print quality. If our review finds a problem we cannot resolve, we will contact you, and if we cannot put it right, we will cancel the order and refund you in full.

Please check your order carefully before paying, especially the size, frame finish and delivery address. Because production starts promptly, we cannot guarantee changes after confirmation, though if you contact us at studio@heldportraits.co.uk quickly we will do our best (see section 8).

All prices are shown in pounds sterling and include VAT where applicable. UK delivery is included in the price, with no surprises at checkout.

Payment is taken at the time of order, processed securely by Stripe. We never see or store your card details. Your bank statement will show HELD PORTRAITS.

If a pricing error is obvious and unmistakable and could reasonably have been recognised by you as an error, we are not obliged to fulfil the order at the wrong price. We will contact you to cancel or re-confirm at the correct price.

Every piece is made to order by our UK fine-art production partner. Typical timescales:

• Production: 2 to 4 working days from order confirmation.
• Delivery: 2 to 3 working days after dispatch, tracked, to UK addresses.

These are estimates, not guarantees. We will keep you informed by email, including dispatch confirmation with tracking. If your order has not arrived within 14 days of the estimated delivery date, contact us and we will investigate with the carrier, then replace or refund if it is lost.

We currently deliver to United Kingdom addresses only.

Risk in the goods passes to you on delivery. Ownership passes when we have received payment in full.

If a delivery fails because the address you gave was incorrect or incomplete, we may need to charge the cost of producing and sending a replacement.

Printed portraits (framed, print, canvas, acrylic). Your portrait is made to your specification and clearly personalised. It is created from your photograph, for you, and has no value to anyone else. Under regulation 28(1)(b) of the Consumer Contracts (Information, Cancellation and Additional Charges) Regulations 2013, the usual 14-day cancellation right for distance sales does not apply to goods made to the consumer's specification or clearly personalised.

In practice:

• Before production starts, we will cancel and refund in full if you ask us to. Email studio@heldportraits.co.uk as soon as possible. Production usually starts within one working day of your order.
• Once production has started, the order can no longer be cancelled and the 14-day right of withdrawal does not apply.

This does not affect your rights if the portrait is faulty or damaged (section 10), and it does not stop us choosing to help beyond our legal obligations (section 11).

Digital files. A digital file is digital content supplied immediately. By purchasing it, you expressly consent to immediate supply and acknowledge that you thereby lose your 14-day right to cancel under regulation 37 of the 2013 Regulations. If the file is defective, your statutory remedies under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 apply in full.

Gift wrapping and add-ons attached to a personalised order follow the same rules as the order itself.

When you buy the digital file (on its own or as an add-on) we grant you a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive licence for personal, non-commercial use. You may print it, reprint it, frame it, use it on your own cards and personal projects, and share it with family. You may not sell it, license it, use it commercially, offer it for download publicly, or use it to train or fine-tune machine-learning models. If you would like a commercial licence, ask us. We are reasonable.

Under the Consumer Rights Act 2015, everything we supply must be of satisfactory quality, fit for purpose and as described. If it is not, you are entitled to the remedies the Act provides, including repair, replacement or refund. Nothing in these terms reduces those rights.

Arrived damaged? Email us at studio@heldportraits.co.uk within 30 days of delivery with photographs of the damage and the packaging. We will send a replacement at our cost. You will not need to return the damaged piece unless we ask (and if we do, we pay the return costs).

A fault in the print or frame? Same address, same promise: repair, replacement or refund at our cost, as the law provides.

What does not count as a fault: reasonable colour variation between screen and print (section 3), the artistic interpretation you approved in the preview, or wear from hanging in direct sunlight or damp conditions.

Beyond your legal rights: if your portrait arrives and something about the physical piece is not right (a mark, a frame blemish, a printing flaw) tell us within 30 days and we will remake it, without argument. We would rather remake a piece than have something imperfect on your wall.

The Held Portraits name, wordmark, site, edition styles, artistic direction and production process are our intellectual property (or that of our licensors). Copyright in the finished artwork, so far as it subsists, belongs to us. You receive the physical piece you bought and, if purchased, the digital licence in section 9. Your photograph remains yours (section 4).

Nothing in these terms excludes or limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else that cannot lawfully be excluded, including your statutory rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015.

Subject to that: we are responsible for loss or damage you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breach of these terms or our failure to use reasonable care and skill. We are not responsible for loss that was not foreseeable when the contract was made, and because we sell to consumers for personal use, we are not liable for business losses. Our total liability for any order is limited to twice the amount you paid for that order (in addition to any refund of the price itself).

If something genuinely outside our reasonable control (carrier failure, materials shortage, power or infrastructure outage, industrial action, extreme weather) delays production or delivery, we will tell you as soon as we can and complete your order as soon as reasonably possible. If the delay becomes substantial, meaning more than 30 days, you may cancel and receive a full refund, including for personalised items.

Email studio@heldportraits.co.uk with your order number. We will acknowledge within one working day and aim to resolve within 14. If you are not satisfied with our final response, you may pursue the matter through the courts (section 17). We are not currently registered with an alternative dispute resolution scheme.

• If any part of these terms is found unenforceable, the rest remains in force.
• A delay in enforcing these terms is not a waiver of them.
• We may transfer our rights and obligations under these terms to another organisation. Your rights under them are unaffected. You need our written consent to transfer yours (we will not unreasonably refuse).
• The contract is between you and us. No one else has rights under it.

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, and you can bring proceedings in the courts of England and Wales. If you live in Scotland or Northern Ireland, you may also bring proceedings in your local courts, and you keep the benefit of any mandatory consumer protections of the law of the part of the UK where you live.