How SPANX Retired MOVEit and Hard-Drive Shipping for 2 TB Photoshoots

Spanx invented modern shapewear. The Atlanta company created the category in 2000 with a patented footless pantyhose, and it has since built out into activewear, denim, swimwear, intimates, and hosiery, engineering its way there with bonded fabrics and fiber technology it helped bring to market. The brand now sells in more than 50 countries, through wholesale and direct to consumer.

An apparel brand at that scale runs on imagery, and Spanx produces its own. Shoots run roughly every three weeks, staffed by third-party photography companies, and each one yields more than 200 images plus raw video. The raw files are enormous: individual photo and video files run 50 to 500 GB, and the media from a single shoot totals more than 2 TB. All of it has to travel from the photographers who make it to the Spanx editors and retouchers who finish it.

When Shoot Files Outgrew the Transfer Platform

Spanx ran its file movement on MOVEit, which capped individual files at 100 GB. A cap like that is invisible until the work crosses it, and shoot media crossed it constantly. A single raw video file can run five times the limit. The files the creative operation most needed to move could not go through the transfer platform at all.

So they moved the way files moved before the internet. Media above the cap was copied onto USB drives and hard drives and shipped. Every few weeks, a production workflow the brand depends on came down to physical packages in transit: slow, untracked, and handled by hand at both ends, with editors and the retouching queue waiting on a courier instead of a transfer.

The obvious fixes did not fit, because Spanx does not control the sending end. The people producing the files are outside photography companies working from their own studios, on their own connections, with their own tools. Spanx could not put an appliance in every studio or tune networks it does not own. And the problem was growing, not holding steady: as the creative team moved deeper into video, per-file sizes climbed toward 500 GB and whole-shoot volume pushed past 2 TB. By late 2023 the workaround had stopped being an exception and had become the standard path for every shoot.

What replaced MOVEit had to do was plain. Carry files at the size Spanx actually produces. Accept them from outside companies working on connections and tools Spanx did not control. And hand the media to editors organized, not as a pile to sort. Spanx selected Files.com as that transfer layer.

A Transfer Layer Sized to the Media

Files.com moves individual files up to 5 TB, ten times the largest raw file a Spanx shoot produces, so no file falls back to physical media because of a platform ceiling. Third-party photographers deliver shoot media into Files.com from their own studios. On the Spanx side, the creative team runs its transfers through the Files.com Desktop App and CLI app, clients built to carry moves measured in hundreds of gigabytes rather than a browser tab someone has to babysit.

A Retouching Queue That Files Itself

Alongside the photographers’ direct delivery path, Spanx used Files.com to automate a related creative workflow. Spanx runs its creative production on Creative Force, and files coming out of Creative Force arrive in a retouching queue on Files.com for editors to work.

Spanx built that intake so nobody organizes it by hand. A Files.com Automation creates a folder named for the current date and files each arriving upload into it, so the queue sorts itself chronologically. A folder-level setting separates every submission into its own subfolder, so one batch never commingles with another. Folder-level email notifications tell the team the moment new material lands. An editor opens the queue and finds today’s work in today’s folder, one submission per subfolder, instead of an undifferentiated pile.

Every Shoot Now Moves Electronically

With the Files.com workflow in production, Spanx replaced a transfer path that ran through the mail with one that runs at the size of its media.

• Individual files of 50 to 500 GB and full shoots totaling more than 2 TB move through Files.com in production. Nothing a shoot produces exceeds what the platform will carry.
• Hard drives no longer ship. Shoot media travels electronically on a platform that logs every transfer, instead of as untracked packages copied by hand at both ends.
• The retouching queue organizes itself. Arrivals from Creative Force land in date-named folders, one submission per subfolder, with editors notified on arrival and nobody filing uploads by hand.
• The cadence holds without ceremony: a shoot roughly every three weeks, 200-plus images each, running as routine transfer rather than a recurring shipping exercise.

The compounding change is where the constraint now sits. What limits how fast a shoot reaches editors is no longer a platform cap or a courier schedule. It is the upload capacity of the photographers’ own connections, a network problem rather than a policy problem.

A per-file cap in a transfer platform never stays a technical footnote. Sooner or later it turns into hard drives in the mail.