Last updated: 11 October 2026

This policy explains how Oakmasters Ltd collects, uses and protects your personal information when you visit www.oak-beams.com ("the Site"), use our online design tools, ask us for a quotation or buy from us.

1. Who we are

Oakmasters Ltd, trading as Oakmasters Frames Direct ("we", "us", "our"), is the controller of your personal information. We are registered in England and Wales under company number 03892478, and our registered office is The Lodge, Greentree Lane, Partridge Green, West Sussex, RH13 8EU.

If you have any questions about this policy or your information, please email us at oak@oak-beams.com.

2. The information we collect

Information you give us. When you use our Truss Designer or Porch Designer, send an enquiry, request a quotation, place an order or contact us, we collect:

• your name, email address and phone number;
• your billing and delivery address, and the address or postcode of your building site;
• details of your design and project, including any notes, photographs or drawings you send us;
• your order and payment history (card payments are handled by our payment provider, and we do not see or store your full card details); and
• any correspondence between us.

If you are an architect, designer or builder, we may also receive information about you from your client, or about your client from you.

Information collected automatically. When you visit the Site, we and our service providers collect information about your device and how you use the Site, such as your IP address, browser type, the pages you view and how you arrived at the Site. Some of this is collected through cookies and similar technologies, as explained in section 8.

Information from others. We may receive information about you from our advertising partners (for example, which advert you responded to) and from delivery companies about the delivery of your order.

3. How we use your information

Under UK data protection law, we must have a lawful basis for each way we use your information. These are:

What we do	Our lawful basis
Respond to your enquiry and prepare a quotation from your design	Taking steps at your request before entering into a contract
Process, design, manufacture and deliver your order, and provide aftercare	Performing our contract with you
Keep accounting and tax records	Complying with our legal obligations
Follow up a quotation we have sent you	Our legitimate interests in winning your business
Send you news and offers by email	Your consent, or for existing customers, our legitimate interests in telling you about similar products (you can opt out at any time)
Use analytics and advertising cookies, and show you our adverts on other sites	Your consent, given through our cookie banner
Keep the Site secure and prevent fraud	Our legitimate interests in protecting our business and customers
Improve the Site, our design tools and our service	Our legitimate interests in running and developing our business
Deal with legal claims	Our legitimate interests in defending our rights

Where we rely on legitimate interests, we have considered your rights and expectations, and you can object at any time (see section 7).

Automated decisions. We do not make decisions about you based solely on automated processing that have a legal or similarly significant effect on you. Our design tools calculate an indicative design and price from the options you choose, but every quotation is reviewed by our team. Our payment provider uses automated checks to help prevent fraud.

4. Who we share your information with

We do not sell your personal information. We share it only where needed, with:

• Our design and engineering contractors, such as freelance frame designers and structural engineers, who help design your frame. If we introduce you to a designer who carries out design work for you directly, they will also be responsible for your information under their own terms.
• Our service providers, who process information on our behalf and only on our instructions. These include Shopify (our online store, payments and website hosting), our email, file storage and project management systems, our accounting software, our AI tools (see section 5), our IT and website support, and our marketing agency.
• Delivery and installation partners, so they can deliver or install your order.
• Advertising partners, such as Google, Meta (Facebook and Instagram) and LinkedIn, where you have consented to advertising cookies. These partners may combine this with other information they hold about you, under their own privacy policies.
• Our professional advisers, such as our accountant, lawyers and insurers.
• Authorities and others, where we are required to by law, or to protect our rights, our customers or others.

5. Our use of AI tools

We use AI tools, including Claude by Anthropic, to help us prepare quotations and draft replies to enquiries. The AI works from the details you send us. A member of our team checks every quotation and message before it is sent, and no decision about you is made by AI alone. Our AI provider processes your information on our behalf and does not use it to train its models.

6. International transfers

Some of our service providers process information outside the UK, including in the European Economic Area, the United States and Canada. Where we transfer your information outside the UK, we make sure it is protected by one of the safeguards recognised by UK law: the country has been found by the UK government to provide adequate protection; the recipient is certified under the UK Extension to the EU-US Data Privacy Framework; or we use contracts approved by the Information Commissioner's Office. You can ask us for more information about these safeguards.

7. Your rights

Under UK data protection law, you have the right to:

• ask for a copy of the personal information we hold about you;
• ask us to correct information that is wrong or incomplete;
• ask us to delete your information, or restrict how we use it, in certain circumstances;
• object to us using your information on the basis of our legitimate interests, and to direct marketing at any time;
• ask us to transfer information you have given us to you or another organisation, in certain circumstances; and
• withdraw your consent at any time, where we rely on it (this does not affect anything we did before you withdrew it).

To use any of these rights, email us at oak@oak-beams.com. We will respond within one month. There is usually no charge.

8. Cookies

Cookies are small files stored on your device when you visit a website. We use cookies that are necessary for the Site to work, such as those that run your basket and checkout. With your consent, we also use preference, analytics and marketing cookies, including those set by our advertising partners.

When you first visit the Site, our cookie banner lets you accept or decline non-essential cookies, or choose which categories to allow. You can change your choice at any time using the cookie settings icon on the Site, where you can also see the full list of cookies we use. You can also block or delete cookies in your browser settings, although parts of the Site may then not work properly.

9. How long we keep your information

We keep your information only for as long as we need it:

• Enquiries and quotations that do not lead to an order: up to 6 years from our last contact with you.
• Orders and invoices: 6 years from the end of the financial year in which the order was completed, to meet tax and accounting rules.
• Design drawings and specifications for frames we have made: up to 15 years after completion, so that we can deal with any questions or claims about the structure.
• Marketing preferences: until you unsubscribe, after which we keep a record of your opt out so that we do not contact you again.

After these periods, we securely delete or anonymise your information.

10. Keeping your information secure

We use appropriate technical and organisational measures to protect your information, and we require our service providers to do the same. Access to your information is limited to people who need it.

11. Marketing

We will only send you marketing emails if you have agreed to receive them or, if you are an existing customer, about products similar to those you have bought from us. Every marketing email includes a link to unsubscribe, or you can email us at any time.

12. Children

The Site is not intended for anyone under 18, and we do not knowingly collect information from children.

13. Changes to this policy

We may update this policy from time to time. The latest version will always be on this page, with the date it was last updated.

14. Contact and complaints

If you have a question or complaint about how we handle your information, please contact us first:

Oakmasters Ltd, The Lodge, Greentree Lane, Partridge Green, West Sussex, RH13 8EU
Email: oak@oak-beams.com

You also have the right to complain to the Information Commissioner's Office, the UK data protection regulator, at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or on 0303 123 1113.