Urban Outfitters

Urban Outfitters Bucks Spam Trend with Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway.™

MAKING SPAM UNFASHIONABLE Urban Outfitters, Inc. (NASDAQ: URBN) is a rapidly growing Philadelphia-based lifestyle consumer product company comprising three divisions and brands—Anthropologie, Free People and Urban Outfitters. Founded in 1970, the company has realized tremendous growth over the past several years, expanding store locations throughout the U.S., Canada and Europe and may soon be relocating its corporate headquarters to the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Urban Outfitters has also achieved significant financial success with annual sales revenue rising from $209.9 million to nearly $600 million between 1999 and the present.

In June of 2004, Urban Outfitters undertook the considerable task of selecting an enterprise antispam solution. According to Jason Breslau, technical service manager at Urban Outfitters, the company's 500 email users were receiving an ever-increasing amount of spam in their inboxes. “IT was receiving a growing number complaints about spam. For some callers the amount of spam in their inbox each morning was upwards of 150 messages. It was clear we needed to implement a solution quickly,” said Breslau.

In addition to providing superior spam protection, Breslau and his team also needed to ensure that their new anti-spam solution would be easy to maintain and allow the greatest flexibility for the IT staff. The company wanted to ensure that their end-users had a user-friendly solution allowed them to set their own safe and block criteria, which in turn removed the burden of administering safe- and block-lists from the IT department. “We needed a solution that would provide ease of administration for both IT and the end-user. Simply put, we didn't want to take on the task of administering 500 inboxes,” said Breslau.

FREEDOM AND FLEXIBILITY
Not having had an anti-spam solution previously, Breslau and his team established baseline requirements for testing proposed solutions. According to Breslau, IT's need to minimize the burden of administration by enabling end-user control over email preferences, coupled with the need for a consolidated solution, led Urban Outfitters to focus its search on enterprise anti-spam appliances“We'd had positive experiences using appliance-based solutions for our firewall and SSL needs, and knew that in terms of an anti-spam solution we wanted to avoid the added burden of maintaining an additional operating system with our anti-spam solution. We absolutely needed a solution we could plug in and not worry about,” said Breslau.

One of the main challenges for Urban Outfitters lay in the size and mobility of its IT staff. “We're a very small IT staff overseeing a highly distributed enterprise and, in many instances, we are monitoring the network and applications from outside our offices,” said Breslau. “We needed to find a solution that we could monitor and adjust remotely. For that reason, Web-based administration capabilities were at the top of our 'must have' list.”

With the criteria for Urban Outfitter's antispam solution clearly demarcated, Breslau and his team began analyzing appliance offerings. The tests were “trial by fire,” with each solution evaluated individually under the full weight of Urban Outfitters' live e-mail stream. According to Breslau, he and his team would test each product for a short period of time and then turn off the test subject to see where they stood before testing a competing product.

In all, Breslau and his team tested four products in addition to Proofpoint, including offerings from CipherTrust and Mail Marshall. Using Proofpoint, Urban Outfitters determined that approximately 50% of the company's more than 10,000 daily inbound messages were spam. According to Breslau, Proofpoint was the only solution that met all three of Urban Outfitters' major criteria: an appliance solution with Web-based administration and individually configurable end-user controls.

As soon as the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway was deployed, there was an immediate impact on the volume of spam affecting Urban Outfitters. “With Proofpoint there was an instant 'wow' effect. Our end-users immediately noticed that they were not getting any spam. In fact, IT received the most inbound calls about spam when the Proofpoint solution was turned off,” said Breslau. Additionally, Urban Outfitters' end users had the ability to configure their own safe- and block-lists and received personalized digests of quarantined spam, making Proofpoint the most flexible and hands-off for the company's IT department.

A NEW STYLE SOLUTION
Following Proofpoint's overwhelming success during Urban Outfitters' intensive comparative test, Breslau and his team moved into full production in October of 2004. Since rolling out the Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway, Urban Outfitters continues to report superior spam blocking statistics with more than 99% accuracy. Breslau and his team consistently receive positive feedback from end-users.

“Our end-users love the Proopoint Messaging Security Gateway, and noticed an immediate impact on the amount of spam they received day to day,” said Breslau. “From the perspective of IT we couldn't be happier. The Proofpoint Messaging Security Gateway is truly a 'hands off' product. It does everything we expected—it's low maintenance, highly accurate and gives us the added benefit of gateway virus protection. We couldn't ask for more.”

ABOUT URBAN OUTFITTERS, INC.
Urban Outfitters, Inc. (NASDAQ:URBN), is an innovative specialty retailer and wholesaler offering a variety of lifestyle merchandise to highly defined customer niches through 75 Urban Retail stores in the United States, Canada, and Europe; an Urban catalog and web site (www.urbanoutfitters. com); more than 65 Anthropologie stores in the United States; an Anthropologie catalog and web site (www.anthropologie.com); and Free People, the Company's wholesale division, which sells its product to approximately 1,100 specialty stores, department stores and catalogs, as well as through two Free People stores and web site (www. freepeople.com). The wholesale division sells its products under two labels: Free People and bdg.