Marc Jacobs Replaced an SFTP Workaround With a Retail Integration Backbone on Files.com

Marc Jacobs is the American luxury fashion house of LVMH Fashion Group. From New York, the brand sells ready-to-wear, handbags, leather goods, footwear, eyewear, and fragrance in 60 countries, through more than 130 of its own mainline stores, wholesale accounts at major department stores, and e-commerce.

An omnichannel operation of that shape runs on files. Orders from the e-commerce platform have to reach the warehouse. Sales, inventory movements, and shipping notices have to move between stores, the ERP, and logistics partners as far away as Japan and China. Every one of those handoffs is a file crossing between systems, and many of those systems belong to somebody else.

Partner Exchange Held Together by a Rename Convention

In 2021, those exchanges ran on infrastructure Marc Jacobs built and operated itself. Files moved to and from partners through separate SFTP client tooling pointed at the company's own SFTP servers. The safeguards were hand-built too. To keep a downstream system from picking up a half-written file, the team wrote every file under a temporary name and renamed it to its real filename only once the write finished. Exchanges still required manual intervention, and every integration or automated sync between Marc Jacobs' systems and a partner's was something the team had to assemble on its own.

The cost was not any single transfer. It was that correctness depended on a convention people had to implement and maintain, and that every new partner or system connection was another custom build. That held together at the scale it started at. It could not carry an integration estate heading toward point-of-sale, ERP, e-commerce, warehouse, and international logistics flows in EDI and CSV, some of them delivered every few minutes.

A Replacement That Had to Keep Commercial Data Off AWS

Replacing the plumbing meant choosing a platform, and one requirement came from the top of the group: LVMH recommended against hosting commercial data on AWS.

The rest of the requirements were the old setup's failures, restated. The replacement had to pull and push files to partner servers natively, with no separate client in the middle. It had to treat a partially written file as not yet arrived, so nobody had to maintain a naming trick. It had to connect a mixed set of endpoints, from partner SFTP servers to the company's own systems. And it had to satisfy the group's hosting constraint.

Marc Jacobs selected Files.com to be that sync layer. Because Files.com mounts Azure Blob Storage containers as native folders, the company's commercial data could live in Azure, which cleared the group's objection.

What was bought for partner exchange became the route every retail integration takes.

Sync Jobs Instead of an SFTP Client

Files.com remote server sync took over the work the client tooling had done. Server-to-server folder syncs, running in push mode, move files between Marc Jacobs' folders and partner endpoints on the schedule each flow needs. Files.com treats a file as arrived only once it is completely written, so the temporary-file rename convention had nothing left to protect against. Both the convention and the client tooling were retired.

The rollout was deliberate. A separate test site validated each partner's SFTP integration before anything touched production. Partner sync jobs ran clean for about two weeks before the first live flow: e-commerce data exchange with a partner in Japan. Within a month of going live, a warehouse was delivering roughly 1,200 small files an hour into the platform over SFTP.

The Partner Layer Became the Retail Integration Backbone

The same pattern—an outbound remote-server connection plus a folder sync—extended to system-to-system flows inside the business. Salesforce Commerce Cloud orders hop through Files.com to the warehouse. Point-of-sale systems, the ERP, and Azure Blob Storage endpoints exchange EDI and CSV transactions over the same connections, with retail data delivered at frequencies down to every few minutes. POS transaction types are split across separate connections, each mapped to a functional folder of its own, so a failing flow can be traced and fixed without touching the rest.

The file handling around those flows runs in the platform rather than in code. Files.com Automations move files on arrival or on a schedule, so one rule covers a whole class of files. The company's integration tools, Talend and MuleSoft, also drive the Files.com REST API. When Marc Jacobs implemented its Microsoft Dynamics 365 ERP, the integrations were built on Files.com from the start.

The Existing Pattern Absorbed the Growth

With the sync layer carrying the whole estate, the pattern kept absorbing growth.

• Filtering and file handling that would otherwise be custom code run as platform configuration, so a new flow is a rule, not a development project.
• Daily API calls grew from 120,000 to 208,000 in a single year, with monthly transfer volume up almost 6X, and call volume climbed again through 2025.
• Outbound remote-server connections went from 14 to 34 across the company's two sites in the most recent year. Each new connection is a system or partner reached through the existing pattern, not a new build.
• When Azure and AWS each suffered provider outages, Marc Jacobs' integration flows kept running.

“We get away from a lot of coding by having a tool that can handle files smartly.”

In the Middle of Every Exchange

Today, nobody at Marc Jacobs maintains a rename convention, and nobody hand-assembles the plumbing to connect the next system or partner. An integration is an outbound connection, a folder, and a sync job Files.com already knows how to run. The part of the operation that used to be the fragile part is now the part its leadership describes as the center.

“We go in the middle of all the exchanges that we have.”

Marc Jacobs did not set out to buy an integration platform. In 2021 it bought a way to stop running an SFTP client and a naming trick. The years since have shown those to be the same purchase: a sync layer that handles files correctly on its own turned out to be the layer a 60-country retail operation could route every integration through.