Terms of Service

Whimbel is run by Eva Barel as a sole trader (Einzelunternehmen) based in Germany. When these Terms say “we”, “us” or “Whimbel”, that is who we mean. “You” is the person ordering from us.

We are a small business under § 19 UStG (German VAT Act). Our prices therefore contain no VAT, and none is added at checkout. Our full legal notice is on the Impressum page.

By using Whimbel at whimbel.com, you agree to these Terms of Service and confirm that you have read our Privacy Policy, which explains what we do with your data. The Privacy Policy is information for you, not something you sign. If you do not agree with these Terms, please do not use our services. You must be at least 18 years old, or the age of majority where you live, to order from Whimbel. If your book features a child, section 16 sets out what you are confirming.

Whimbel turns the stories and photos you share into a personalised illustrated book. You first receive a digital preview — the complete book, every page illustrated — which you can then order as a printed hardcover. We create the illustrations and story text with the help of artificial-intelligence tools, working from what you give us. The illustrations are artistic interpretations of your photos, not photographic likenesses, and every book is one of a kind.

To use certain features, you must create an account. Please keep your login details to yourself, give us accurate information and keep it up to date.

If someone else uses your account, you are responsible for it only where you made that possible — for example by sharing your password or storing it carelessly. You are not responsible for use of your account that happens despite reasonable care on your part. Tell us as soon as you think someone else has got in and we will help you secure it.

Ordering from Whimbel works in three steps:

• •Create. You tell us your story, add your photos and make your choices for the book.
• •Review. Before you pay, you see a summary of your order, the price — for a printed hardcover, including the delivery fee for the country you chose, if there is one — and these Terms. You can go back to any earlier step and change or correct what you entered, the delivery country included. Nothing is final until you pay.
• •Pay. You place the order with the payment button and pay through Stripe, our payment provider. For the digital preview, creation starts right after payment. Once your preview is ready, you can order the printed hardcover in the same way.

Placing the order is your offer to buy. The contract is concluded when your payment has been successfully charged; we confirm it straight away by email. If a payment fails, no contract comes into being.

The contract language is English. We store the text of the contract and send you the essentials of your order — what you bought, the price and your order number — in the order confirmation email. These Terms are available on this page at any time, where you can save or print them, and your orders are listed in your account.

• •Digital preview: 7,99 $ — the complete digital book, every page illustrated.
• •Printed hardcover: 44,99 $. If you have already paid for the preview of that same book, the hardcover costs 36,99 $ instead — so the two together come to 44,98 $.
• •Shipping the printed hardcover: free to the countries listed as free on our shipping page — the US, Canada, the UK and most of Europe. To every other country we deliver to, there is a delivery fee. It depends on the country the book goes to and is charged in the same currency as the book; like our prices, it is the same number in each currency. The fee for your country is shown on the order page and again at checkout, before you pay, and it is part of the total you pay.
• •Redoing a page: every book comes with free redos. Once those are used up, a further redo of a single page costs 1,00 $.

Prices are charged in US dollars, euros or pounds sterling, depending on the country you order from. The amount is the same in each currency; we do not apply an exchange-rate conversion. The currency and total shown at checkout are the ones that apply to your order. Payments are processed securely through Stripe. We can change our prices at any time, but never for an order you have already placed: the price shown at checkout is the price of that order.

If you were invited by a friend

A friend who invites you can give you 10,00 $ off your first printed hardcover. Once that order is paid, your friend receives a 10,00 $ credit, which they can put towards a hardcover order of their own. One invitation discount and one credit may be used per order, they cannot be exchanged for cash, and if the invited friend's order is refunded the credit that came from it is cancelled. The invitation discount and the credit come off the price of the book, not the delivery fee.

All prices are final prices. Because we are a small business under § 19 UStG, no VAT is charged or shown, and none is added at checkout. For a printed hardcover, what you pay us is the price of the book plus the delivery fee for your country, where there is one. A discount code, including a code for a free book, applies to the book and not to the delivery fee: where shipping is not free, the fee is still paid at checkout. Import charges that the destination country may levy are not part of our price (section 10).

If you are a consumer — that is, you are ordering for private purposes and not for a business — you have the following right of withdrawal.

Right of withdrawal

You have the right to withdraw from this contract within 14 days without giving any reason. The withdrawal period is 14 days from the day the contract is concluded.

To exercise the right of withdrawal, you must inform us (Whimbel – Eva Barel, c/o COCENTER, Koppoldstr. 1, 86551 Aichach, Germany, support@whimbel.com) of your decision to withdraw from this contract by an unambiguous statement (for example a letter sent by post or an email). You can also withdraw online using the form at whimbel.com/withdraw, which you will find as “Withdraw from contract” in the footer of every page of this website, signed in or not. If you use it we will immediately email you a confirmation of receipt stating what you withdrew from and the date and time we received it. You may use the model withdrawal form in section 8, but it is not obligatory. To meet the withdrawal deadline, it is sufficient for you to send your communication concerning your exercise of the right of withdrawal before the withdrawal period has expired.

Effects of withdrawal

If you withdraw from this contract, we shall reimburse to you all payments received from you, including the costs of delivery (with the exception of the supplementary costs resulting from your choice of a type of delivery other than the least expensive type of standard delivery offered by us), without undue delay and in any event not later than 14 days from the day on which we are informed about your decision to withdraw from this contract. We will carry out such reimbursement using the same means of payment as you used for the initial transaction, unless you have expressly agreed otherwise; in any event, you will not incur any fees as a result of such reimbursement.

When there is no right of withdrawal

In plain words, this is how the right of withdrawal applies to what we sell:

• •The printed hardcover is made to your specification and clearly personalised — it is your family, your story and your photos. For goods like this the law provides no right of withdrawal (§ 312g (2) no. 1 BGB). Our voluntary refund policy in section 9 still applies.
• •The digital preview is digital content that is not delivered on a physical medium. We begin creating it immediately after your payment goes through, so your right of withdrawal ends at that moment: at checkout you expressly ask us to start right away and acknowledge that you lose the right of withdrawal once creation begins (§ 356 (6) BGB). There is no waiting period — please be sure before you pay. The box you tick reads: “I agree to Whimbel's Terms of Service and expressly request that Whimbel starts creating my illustrated preview right away. I understand that I lose my 14-day right of withdrawal once creation has begun (§ 356 (6) BGB).” We confirm this in your order confirmation email.

If you want to withdraw from the contract, you can fill in this form and send it back to us. You don't have to use it — any clear statement will do.

To: Whimbel – Eva Barel, c/o COCENTER, Koppoldstr. 1, 86551 Aichach, Germany, support@whimbel.com

I/We (*) hereby give notice that I/We (*) withdraw from my/our (*) contract for the purchase of the following goods (*) / for the provision of the following service (*):

Ordered on (*) / received on (*):

Name of consumer(s):

Address of consumer(s):

Signature of consumer(s) (only if this form is sent on paper):

Date:

(*) Delete as appropriate.

Beyond your statutory rights — the right of withdrawal in section 7 and the warranty in section 11 — we offer the following refund policy voluntarily. It comes in addition to your legal rights and never restricts them.

• •Digital previews: if the preview doesn't meet your expectations, we'll help put it right or refund the preview fee.
• •Printed books: you can cancel a hardcover order for a full refund until we hand it to the printer — and never earlier than 24 hours after you place it. So an email that reaches us within 24 hours of your order is always in time, and after that you can still cancel for as long as the book has not gone to the printer. Write to support@whimbel.com and we will tell you straight away where your order stands.
• •Damaged books: we replace any book that arrives damaged, at no cost to you.
• •Refunds go back to the original payment method within 5-10 business days.

Your digital preview is in your account within 24 hours of your payment, and usually within minutes.

Your printed hardcover is delivered at the latest within the number of business days (Monday to Friday) below, counted from the day you place your order. Printing and binding are included in that time. The number depends on the country the book goes to:

• •10 business days: the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, Switzerland, Denmark, Sweden, Poland and Czechia.
• •15 business days: the United States, Canada, France, Italy, Spain, Ireland, Portugal, Finland, Norway, Iceland, Liechtenstein, Greece, Cyprus, Malta, Bulgaria, Romania, Croatia, Slovenia, Slovakia, Hungary, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, the Isle of Man, Jersey, Guernsey, Monaco, Australia and New Zealand.
• •25 business days: every other country we deliver to, except Ukraine and Belarus.
• •30 business days: Ukraine and Belarus.

The last of those business days is the latest delivery date for your order. Our shipping page also shows the usual delivery time for each country; that is an estimate, and the numbers above are what we promise. What delivery costs is set out in section 6.

If we miss that date, you can set us a reasonable extra period in writing; if it passes and your book still has not arrived, you can cancel the order and we will refund everything you paid.

If you are a consumer, the risk of loss or damage passes to you when the book is handed over to you, or to a person you have named to receive it. If your book arrives damaged, tell us and we'll replace it (see section 9).

Where we deliver. We deliver to the countries listed on our shipping page, and only to those. That page also names the places we cannot deliver to yet — among them a number of overseas territories and islands, destinations under international sanctions, and a few countries where delivery needs details our checkout cannot collect. You choose the country before you pay, and the checkout then accepts a delivery address in that country only.

Parcel shops. In some countries — at the moment Denmark, Sweden and Norway — the carrier's standard delivery is to a parcel shop or locker near your address, where you collect the book, rather than to your door. The shipping page shows where this applies.

Customs and import charges. If your book crosses a customs border on its way to you, the country it is delivered to may charge import duty or import tax when it arrives. Those charges are set by that country, not by us. They are not part of our price and are not paid to us; where they arise, the recipient pays them on delivery. The shipping page tells you whether they may apply to your country.

If what you receive is defective, you have the statutory warranty rights: for the printed book under §§ 434 ff. BGB, and for the digital preview under §§ 327 ff. BGB. For consumers these rights last two years from delivery.

For the printed book, the choice is yours: you decide whether we put the copy right or send you a new one (§ 439 BGB). For the digital preview the law leaves the means of putting it right to us (§ 327l BGB) — we will make good the fault in the way that fixes it soonest. If putting it right fails either way, you can reduce the price or cancel the contract, and claim damages where the law provides for it.

The illustrations are artistic interpretations of your photos and stories, not photographic likenesses, and every copy is unique to you — that is the character of the product. A missing page, a printing fault or a damaged book is a defect, and we will put it right.

We are liable without limit for damage caused intentionally or by gross negligence, for injury to life, body or health, under the German Product Liability Act (Produkthaftungsgesetz), and wherever we have given a guarantee or fraudulently concealed a defect.

For slight negligence we are liable only if we breach an essential contractual duty — a duty whose fulfilment makes the proper performance of the contract possible in the first place and on whose fulfilment you may regularly rely (Kardinalpflicht). In that case our liability is limited to the damage that is foreseeable and typical for this kind of contract.

Beyond that, our liability is excluded. This applies equally to our employees, representatives and agents.

By uploading photos and sharing stories, you give Whimbel a limited, non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to use them for one purpose only: making your book. That licence covers:

• •Sending your photos and your words to the outside services that write the story text and draw the illustrations (section 17)
• •Finding the faces in a group photo so the right person becomes the right character, and comparing each finished illustration with the drawn portrait of that character (section 18)
• •Storing your photos, your story and your finished pages in private storage while your book and your account exist

You keep full ownership of everything you upload. This licence ends when you delete the content, the book or your account. We do not use your content to train models, and we do not use it to make anything other than your book.

The copy we print and send you belongs to you (§ 903 BGB). You can keep it, give it away, lend it, donate it or sell it on — once we have sold you that copy, we have no say in what happens to it (§ 17 (2) UrhG). The same goes for reading it aloud at home, photographing a page for family or taking it to a friend's house.

What stays with us is the right to make further copies. So please do not print or have printed further copies of the illustrations or the story to sell, and do not use the files we give you as part of a commercial product or service — on merchandise, in an app, or as stock artwork. If you want to do something along those lines, write to us; we are easy to talk to.

The Whimbel brand, logo and website design remain our property.

You may not use our service to:

• •Upload content that you do not have the right to use
• •Upload photos of a child who is not yours, unless you have the permission of that child's parent or legal guardian
• •Create content that is harmful, abusive, or inappropriate for children
• •Attempt to reverse-engineer or copy our technology
• •Make and sell further copies of the illustrations or the story, or build the files we give you into a commercial product or service — your own printed copy is yours to keep, give away, lend or sell (section 14)

If someone brings a claim against us because you uploaded content you had no right to use — for instance a photo of a person whose consent you did not have, or material protected by someone else's copyright — and you are at fault, you will compensate us for the resulting damage and our reasonable costs of defence. We will tell you about any such claim promptly and give you the chance to respond. Where you are not at fault, you owe us nothing under this section.

Whimbel is made for parents and legal guardians. When you give us a child's photos, name or details, you confirm one thing: that you are that child's parent or legal guardian, or that you have their parent or guardian's permission to use them for this book. That is the whole of what you are promising us here.

Some of the services that help make your book are in the United States, so photos and text are sent there. Those transfers rest on the EU-US Data Privacy Framework or on standard contractual clauses approved by the European Commission — see section 19 and our Privacy Policy, which set out what goes where and why.

We do not collect anything directly from children: the account, the ordering and every choice about the book are made by an adult. You can delete a photo, a whole book or your account whenever you want, and everything in it goes with it (section 21) — the one wait is a printed book we are still making or posting to you: we can delete that one once it has arrived, or sooner if you write to us.

We make your book with the help of artificial-intelligence tools that we do not run ourselves. Your photos and your words therefore go to outside services. Here is who gets what, and where they are:

• •The service that writes the story: it receives the memories and details you tell us, and returns your story text. United States, under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework or standard contractual clauses.
• •The services that draw the illustrations: they receive your photos and your story, and return the artwork; they also look over a finished page before it goes into your book. United States, under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework or standard contractual clauses.
• •The service that finds faces in group photos: it receives a group photo you upload, only to find where the faces are in it, so that the right person becomes the right character. United States, under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework or standard contractual clauses. Section 18 says what it does and what is kept.
• •The service that compares faces: it receives illustrations only, never your photos, and compares the drawn faces with each other so that a person looks like themselves from page to page. United States, under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework or standard contractual clauses. Section 18 says what it does and what is kept.
• •Payment, hosting, email and printing: the service that takes your payment, the ones that host our site and database, the one that sends our emails, and the printer that makes and posts your book. They receive only what their job needs — the printer, for instance, gets your book files and your delivery address. The book files include the photos that are printed in the book (the photo on the opening page and any memory photos you added), because the printer has to print them; photos you uploaded only so a person could be drawn do not go to the printer.

We do not name these companies here so that the list cannot go quietly out of date. Ask us at support@whimbel.com and we will send you the current named list, with the country and the safeguard for each one. Everything travels over encrypted connections.

The services that help make your book do not use your photos or your text to train their models. That is how they are set up to work for us and it is a condition of our using them; it is not a promise we can make on their behalf.

Work made this way is not perfect every time. An illustration can come out wrong, and when it does you can have the page redone (section 6) or tell us and we will sort it out. We cannot promise that every single illustration will be flawless.

Two things happen with the faces in the photos you give us, and you should know about both. When you upload a group photo, we find where the faces are in it so that you can tell us which face belongs to which character. Finding a face tells us where it is in the picture, not who it is. And when a page has been drawn, we compare the faces on it with the drawn portrait of that character we made first, so the same child does not turn into somebody else on page nine.

That face-matching is between illustrations only. The face in your original photo is never measured and never run through face-matching. The AI services that draw the book (section 17) do look at your photos, the way an illustrator would, to draw each person and to check that a drawing shows the right person. That is looking, not measuring: no faceprint comes out of it.

Why we may do this: because without it we cannot make the book you ordered. It is necessary to perform our contract with you (Art. 6 (1) (b) GDPR). We are not asking you to agree to it separately, and there is no version of the book that is made without it. For the other people in your photos, who have no contract with us, the basis is the legitimate interest, yours and ours, in making the book you ordered (Art. 6 (1) (f) GDPR); the Privacy Policy explains how we weighed it against theirs.

What we keep, plainly:

• •The cropped picture of each person we find in a group photo is saved alongside your other photos, in private storage, because the character is drawn from it. It stays there until you delete the book or your account.
• •When we compare a finished page with a character's drawn portrait, the resulting similarity score is stored with that page's record. It is a number, not a picture of a face, and it goes when the book goes.
• •No face template and no faceprint is created or kept. We do not build a face database, we do not have a way to recognise anyone from a photo they did not give us, and we never use faces to identify people outside the book they belong to.

Faces are seen only by us and by the services in section 17 that need them to do their part. We do not sell, rent or trade them, we do not hand them to anyone else except where the law obliges us to, and everything travels over encrypted connections.

You stay in control. Delete a photo, delete the book, or delete your account, and the crops and scores go with it (section 21). Write to support@whimbel.com and we will do it for you.

Some places, Illinois among them (740 ILCS 14), expect a business to say in writing what it does with faces. This section is that statement.

Whimbel is operated from Germany. Some of the service providers that help us make your book are located in the United States, so parts of your data — including photos — are transferred to and processed in the United States.

For EEA/UK/Swiss users:

• •Transfers to service providers certified under the EU-US Data Privacy Framework (DPF) are made pursuant to the European Commission's adequacy decision of July 10, 2023
• •Transfers to providers not certified under the DPF are made pursuant to Standard Contractual Clauses (SCCs) approved by the European Commission
• •You can ask us for a copy of the safeguard that applies, or for the current named list of the services we use, at support@whimbel.com

Data-protection law in the United States is not the same as in the EEA, the UK or Switzerland. That is exactly what those safeguards are for: they carry your rights with the data. We do not ask you to consent to the transfer and your permission is not what makes it lawful — the safeguards above are, together with the fact that the transfer is necessary to make the book you ordered.

Depending on your location, you may have the following rights regarding your personal data:

For EEA/UK residents (GDPR):

• •Legal basis: we process your data to perform our contract with you (Article 6 (1) (b) GDPR). That covers making the book, and it covers finding faces in group photos and comparing illustrations, because the book cannot be made without them (section 18). For the other people who appear in your book, the basis is our legitimate interest and yours in making it (Article 6 (1) (f) GDPR), and for sensitive details, such as health or religion, your explicit consent (Article 9 (2) (a) GDPR), as the Privacy Policy explains
• •Right to access, rectify, erase, restrict, port, and object to the processing of your personal data
• •Right to withdraw consent where we actually rely on consent — our marketing emails, for example — at any time, without affecting what was lawfully done before
• •Right to lodge a complaint with your local supervisory authority

For California residents (CCPA/CPRA):

• •Right to know what personal information we collect, use, and disclose
• •Right to delete your personal information
• •Right to opt-out of the sale or sharing of personal information (we do not sell personal information)
• •Right to limit use of sensitive personal information, including the photos and the face crops described in section 18
• •Right to non-discrimination for exercising your privacy rights

For Illinois residents (BIPA):

• •Section 18 says what we do with faces, what is kept, for how long, and who sees it

To exercise any of these rights, write to us at support@whimbel.com. We will answer within 30 days, or sooner where the law says so.

• •While your account exists: we keep your photos, your story and your finished books in private storage, so that you can come back to them and order another copy
• •Faces: the cropped reference pictures live with your other photos and go when the book or the account goes; the similarity scores sit with the page record and go with it (section 18)
• •If you delete a book: its pages, illustrations, story text and the reference crops that belong to it are deleted
• •If you delete your account: we delete everything we hold about you — your account, your photos, your books, your illustrations. It is a real deletion, not a hidden flag on a row we keep
• •The exceptions are three, and there are no others. The first is the booking record of what you bought and paid; the second is a withdrawal you declared; the third is a printed book still on its way to you
• •Exception one — the booking record of what you bought and paid — order number, amounts, dates, payment reference and the delivery address on the invoice — which German tax law makes us keep for 8 years (§ 147 AO, § 14b UStG). When you delete your account we do not delete it; we cut your name, your email address and the link to your account out of it, so what is left is an accounting document with no photos, no story and no way back to you
• •Exception two — a withdrawal you declared to us, which is the record that it reached us and when. It stays for the same 8 years as the order records it relates to, and is then deleted
• •Exception three — a printed book still being made or still on its way to you. We keep the delivery name, address, phone number and email address on that one order, and the print file the printer collects, so the parcel can still reach you. Everything else about that book goes with the rest

These Terms and every contract between you and us are governed by the law of the Federal Republic of Germany. The United Nations Convention on Contracts for the International Sale of Goods (CISG) does not apply.

If you are a consumer, this choice of law does not take away the protection of the mandatory consumer-protection rules of the country where you usually live. Where those rules are more favourable to you, they still apply.

The place of jurisdiction is the one provided by law. If you are a consumer, you can bring proceedings in the courts of your country of residence, and proceedings against you may only be brought there.

The European Commission's platform for online dispute resolution has been discontinued. We are neither willing nor obliged to take part in dispute resolution proceedings before a consumer arbitration board (§ 36 VSBG). If something goes wrong, please write to us first — we would much rather solve it together.

Your order is governed by the version of these Terms that was shown to you at checkout when you placed it. That version does not change afterwards, whatever we later put on this page — so nothing you have already bought can be re-written under you.

We do update the Terms from time to time for future orders. If you have an account, we will email you about a change at least 14 days before it applies to new orders, so you can read it and decide. Not replying is not agreement to anything: a change only ever binds the orders you place after it takes effect. The current version is always on this page, where you can save or print it.

For questions about these Terms, email us at support@whimbel.com.