Terms and conditions

Who you are buying from

Everything on this site is sold by the trading entity — the registered company name, its company number, and the country it is registered in, trading as House of Rubyj, at the registered office address.

This is the single most important thing on the page and it has to be right, because it decides everything below it: which country’s consumer law applies to your purchase, who is responsible if something goes wrong, whether import duty is charged and to whom, and where you would take a complaint. Our workshop is in Kumaon, in Uttarakhand, India. Whether the company that takes your money is Indian, British, or one of each is a decision with real consequences for you, and until it is settled this section is deliberately blank rather than reassuring.

You can reach us at the contact email address and we answer in how long — say two working days if that is true and three if it is not. Our VAT position is registered with number X, or not registered — say which.

How an order is made

Placing an order is you offering to buy. Nothing is agreed until we send you a dispatch confirmation, and the contract is formed at that moment, not when you pay and not when you receive the automatic order acknowledgement. We say this because it is how we can decline an order without having already sold you something we cannot deliver.

We may decline an order if the piece has already gone, if we cannot deliver to where you are, if a price was wrong, or if we are not able to authorise your payment. If we decline after taking payment we refund it in full, to the same card or account, and we will tell you why.

Prices, taxes and duties

Prices are shown in the store currency — set this in WooCommerce and this site follows it everywhere, including the Impact ledger and include whether UK VAT is included, excluded, or not applicable. Delivery is charged separately and shown before you pay.

If your order crosses a border, import duty and local taxes may be charged when it arrives, by your own customs authority rather than by us. Those charges are yours to pay and we have no way of knowing them in advance or of refunding them. Where we can tell you what to expect for a country we do, on the shipping page.

Every piece is made by hand and we occasionally get a price wrong. If the error is obvious and you could reasonably have spotted it, we are not obliged to sell at the wrong price; we will contact you, and you can pay the right price or cancel for a full refund.

What “handmade” means for what arrives

Every piece is cross-stitched by one woman, by hand, on hand-woven cloth. Two cushions in the same design will not be identical, and neither will match a photograph exactly. The weave carries slubs, the linen takes dye slightly differently between bolts, and the stitch tension is a person’s rather than a machine’s.

None of that is a fault, and we will not treat it as one. What is a fault is a dropped or crossed stitch, a seam that has not held, colour that has run, a hole, or a piece that is materially not what the page described. Those we put right — see below — and the difference matters enough that we would rather set it out here than argue about it later.

Delivery

Delivery times, costs and destinations are set out on the shipping page, which is part of these terms. In summary: pieces travel by road to Delhi and then by air, and we quote the honest current range from dispatch rather than an optimistic one.

Risk in the goods passes to you when they are delivered to the address you gave us, or to a neighbour or safe place you have asked the carrier to use. If nobody is there and the parcel goes back, we will re-send it once; after that we will ask you to cover the postage, because it is a real cost and it is not one the maker should absorb.

If we have not delivered within thirty days of the contract, or by any date we have specifically promised, you can treat the contract as at an end and get all your money back.

Changing your mind

If you are a consumer in the UK or the EU, you have a legal right to cancel a distance purchase within fourteen days of receiving it, for any reason at all, including simply not liking it. You do not have to give us a reason and we will not ask for one.

Tell us within those fourteen days — an email to the contact email address is enough, and there is a cancellation form at the end of this page if you prefer one. Then send the piece back within fourteen days of telling us. We refund the full price and the standard outbound delivery cost within fourteen days of getting the goods back, or of you proving you have sent them, whichever is sooner.

• Return postage is yours to pay unless the piece was faulty or not what was described. We are sorry about this; from India the sums are not small, which is why we would rather you asked us anything at all before ordering.
• If you have chosen a faster delivery than our standard one, we refund the standard cost rather than what you paid for the upgrade.
• Please send it back in a condition you would be content to receive. We can reduce a refund to reflect handling beyond what you would have done in a shop — but “unfolded, looked at properly, and folded again” is exactly what a shop is for.

This right does not apply to pieces made or personalised to your specification — a commission, a size we cut for your table, initials worked into a corner. Those are made once, for you, and cannot go back into stock. We will always say clearly, before you commit, when an order falls into this category.

If something is wrong with it

Separately from changing your mind, and never instead of it, you have rights under the Consumer Rights Act 2015 if goods are faulty, not as described, or not fit for a purpose you told us about. In short: within thirty days of delivery you can reject the piece and have your money back; after that, and for up to six months, we get one chance to repair or replace it before a refund is due; and we pay the return postage in every one of those cases.

Send us a photograph first if you can. Nine times in ten we can tell from the photograph whether it is a fault or a feature of hand weaving, and it saves the piece a journey.

Cancelling before it ships

If you change your mind before the parcel has left us, tell us and we will cancel it and refund you in full, with no fourteen-day mechanics involved. A commission that has already been started is different: we will tell you honestly what stage it is at and what it has cost so far, because the woman working on it has already worked on it.

Designs, photographs and words

The charts, the motifs, the photographs and the writing on this site belong to us or to the people who made them, and they are not free to reuse commercially. Buying a piece buys you the piece.

Two deliberate exceptions. Photograph what you have bought, in your own home, and put it wherever you like — that is not a use we would ever object to. And if you are a teacher, a craft group, or a woman who wants to learn the stitch, write to us: the traditional Kumaoni motifs are not ours to own in the first place, and we will send you the charts.

Where our responsibility ends

We are responsible for loss you suffer that is a foreseeable result of our breaking these terms or failing to use reasonable care. We are not responsible for loss that was not foreseeable, or for business losses — these are goods for a home, and we sell them to people rather than to companies.

Nothing here limits our liability for death or personal injury caused by our negligence, for fraud, or for anything else the law does not permit us to limit. If any part of these terms turns out to be unenforceable, the rest of them stand.

Things outside anybody’s control

We work at six thousand feet in the Himalayas. Roads close in the monsoon, power goes, and in winter a village can be cut off for days. If something like that delays an order we will tell you as soon as we know, and you can wait or cancel for a full refund — your choice, not ours. We will not pretend a landslide is a courier delay.

Complaints

Write to the contact email address and a person will read it. If we cannot resolve it between us, name the alternative dispute resolution scheme you belong to, if any — and if you belong to none, say so, because saying nothing is the one option the law does not allow.

The law that applies

These terms are governed by the law of England and Wales, or of India, or of wherever the trading entity sits — this follows from the first section and cannot be chosen independently of it. If you are a consumer, you keep the protection of the mandatory consumer law of the country you live in, whatever this paragraph says. That is not us being generous; it is how the rules work, and pretending otherwise is a common trick we would rather not copy.

Changes

We may update these terms. The version that applies to your order is the one published when you placed it, and we keep the old ones. This page was last updated on date.

Cancellation form

You do not have to use this — any clear statement will do — but here it is if it is easier. Send it to the contact email address.