Tilly's Replaces WeTransfer With Files.com to Send CAD Drawings and Campaign Imagery Without Opening Its Firewall

Tilly's is a specialty retailer of casual apparel, footwear, and accessories for teens and young adults, sold 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 roughly 5,000 employees, ordinary work keeps producing files too big for email. Tilly's runs on file exchange with outsiders, and for years that exchange ran on a consumer tool.

Tilly's replaced WeTransfer with a governed Files.com channel that let staff send those files to vendors without opening the corporate firewall.

Oversized Files Went Out Through a Hole in the Firewall

Before Files.com, external transfers at Tilly's went through WeTransfer. It moved the files, but making a consumer sharing tool work inside a corporate network took workarounds, and one of them was opening the corporate firewall. The IT infrastructure and network operations team treated that as a significant security exposure: a hole in the perimeter, kept open so that image sets and drawings could reach vendors.

The exposure didn't end at the perimeter. Once a file left through WeTransfer, IT had no say in what happened next. There were no restrictions on the links staff created and no lifecycle or retention control over the files behind them. Every external transfer was two problems at once: an open firewall question and an ungoverned data trail.

Blocking the Channel Was Never an Option

What kept the arrangement alive was that the demand behind it was legitimate. Vendors genuinely needed the files: a contractor can't build a store without the drawings, and a collaborator can't produce a campaign without the imagery. Staff had already routed around email once to get oversized files out, so blocking WeTransfer would only have pushed them to the next workaround.

IT's real 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 Tilly's systems, run without touching the perimeter, and put link and retention controls in IT's hands instead of each sender's. And it had to be easy enough that staff would choose it. Tilly's 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, the exchange never requires opening Tilly's own firewall.

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 together rather than through any one person's login.

The Files Still Move and the Firewall Stays Closed

With Files.com in place, Tilly's replaced a consumer tool and the workarounds it demanded 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: not a firewall change, and not a consumer tool nobody controls.

That is the lesson worth carrying away. Tilly's never had to choose between blocking consumer file sharing and living with its exposure. Files.com gave staff a channel easier than the workarounds they had built, and gave IT the control those workarounds never had. The rising requests for access are the proof: when the governed path is also the convenient one, nobody has to be forced onto it.