A Specialty Apparel Retailer Replaces WeTransfer With Files.com Share Links for CAD Drawings and Campaign Imagery

A national specialty retailer of casual apparel, footwear, and accessories sells through stores and a national e-commerce business. Its marketing teams work with outside vendors and collaborators, while its construction and store-build team works with the vendors who build its stores.

Both functions produce the same operational reality: large files that have to reach people outside the company. Marketing shares campaign image sets with outside vendors and collaborators. The construction and store-build team sends CAD drawings to vendors. And across a company of thousands of employees, ordinary work keeps producing files too big for email. The retailer runs on file exchange with outsiders, and for years that exchange ran on a consumer tool.

The retailer replaced WeTransfer with a governed Files.com channel that puts link restrictions, retention, and authentication in IT's hands and asks nothing of the vendor.

A Consumer Tool Carrying Company Files

Before Files.com, external transfers at the retailer went through WeTransfer. It moved the files. What it did not give the IT infrastructure and network operations team was a channel of its own to run.

Once a file left through a consumer tool, the controls around it belonged to the sender's account, not to the company. The retailer wanted the opposite: one sanctioned channel where IT sets the rules once, for everyone, and every file that leaves the company leaves through it.

Blocking the Channel Was Never an Option

The demand behind the tool was legitimate. Vendors need the files: a contractor can't build a store without the drawings, and a collaborator can't produce a campaign without the imagery. Files too big for email have to go somewhere, so the replacement had to be a channel staff would choose.

IT's requirement was a replacement, not a ban. It had to carry files far past email's limits, reach vendors who would never hold accounts on the retailer's systems, and put link, retention, and authentication controls in IT's hands instead of each sender's. And it had to be easy enough that staff would choose it. The retailer selected Files.com to be that channel.

One Sanctioned Channel, With IT in Control

The network operations team runs a hosted Files.com site as a sanctioned path for external file exchange, with IT managing its users and policies.

Reaching an outside vendor asks nothing of the vendor. Staff send files through Files.com Share Links: the recipient gets a web page and downloads in the browser, with no account to create and no software to install. Because both sides connect out to the hosted platform, nothing on the retailer's own network has to change to reach a new vendor.

Governance rides on the channel instead of depending on each sender. Share-link restrictions put controls around what staff send. Files.com lifecycle rules retire files on the schedule IT chose, so a file shared for a project doesn't outlive it. Two-factor authentication is enforced on every account, IT provisions the users itself, and the network operations team administers the site as a team.

The Sanctioned Channel Is the One Staff Ask For

With Files.com in place, the retailer replaced a consumer tool with a governed channel staff actually use.

Demand keeps compounding. IT fields a rising volume of requests from across the business for access to the channel, which means the sanctioned path is now the one staff ask to be on.

The Governed Path Won by Being the Better One

Today, when marketing has an image set for a collaborator or the store-build team has drawings for a contractor, sending it is a link on a channel IT runs, not a consumer tool outside its control.

The retailer never had to choose between blocking consumer file sharing and living with it. Files.com gave staff a channel easier than the consumer tool, and gave IT the controls it wanted on every file that leaves. The rising requests for access are the proof: when the governed path is also the convenient one, nobody has to be forced onto it.