The History of Levi’s

Levi Strauss started the business at the 90 Sacramento Street address in San Francisco. Jacob Davis, a Latvian Jewish immigrant, was a Reno, Nevada tailor who frequently purchased bolts of cloth made from denim from Levi Strauss & Co.’s wholesale house. Contrary to an advertising campaign suggesting that Levi Strauss sold his first jeans to gold miners during the California Gold Rush, the manufacturing of denim overalls only began in the 1870s.

From the early 1960s through the mid-1970s, Levi Strauss experienced significant growth in its business as the more casual look of the 1960s and 1970s ushered in the “Blue jeans craze” and served as a catalyst for the brand. Levi Strauss attempted to sell the Dockers division in 2004 to relieve part of the company’s $2.6 billion outstanding debt. In 1991, Levi Strauss became implicated in a scandal involving pants made in the Northern Mariana Islands: some 3% of Levi’s jeans sold annually with the Made in the USA label were shown [by whom?] to have been made by Chinese laborers under what the United States Department of Labor called “Slave like” conditions.

The activist group Fuerza Unida formed following the January 1990 closure of a plant in San Antonio, Texas, in which 1,150 seamstresses, some of whom had worked for Levi Strauss for decades, saw their jobs exported to Costa Rica. During the mid- and late-1990s, Furze Unhide picketed the Levi Strauss headquarters in San Francisco and staged hunger strikes and sit-ins in protest at the company’s labor policies. Shares in Levi Strauss stock are not publicly traded; the firm as of 2016[update] is owned almost entirely by indirect descendants and collateral relatives of Levi Strauss, whose four nephews inherited the San Francisco dry-goods firm after their uncle’s death in 1902.The corporation’s bonds are traded publicly, as are shares of the company’s Japanese affiliate, Levi Strauss Japan K.K. In June 1996, the company offered to pay its workers an unusual dividend of up to $750 million in six years’ time, having halted an employee-stock plan at the time of the internal family buyout.

In 2002, Levi Strauss began a close business collaboration with Walmart, producing a special line of “Signature” jeans and other clothes for exclusive sale in Walmart stores until 2006.On May 8, 2013, the NFL’s San Francisco 49ers announced that Levi Strauss & Co. had purchased the naming rights to their new stadium in Santa Clara, California. As of 2016[update], Levi Strauss Signature jeans sell are sold in 110 countries. After two years of collaboration, the result was a denim jacket set at $350. Levi’s has been worn by people from all walks of life, from miners to Nobel Prize recipients including Albert Einstein himself, whose famous leather jacket was made by Levi Strauss & Co in the 30’s and has recently been sold at auction house Christies for £110,500.Levi Strauss & Co. is a worldwide corporation organized into three geographic divisions: Levi Strauss Americas, headquartered in San Francisco; Levi Strauss Europe, based in Brussels; and Levi Strauss Asia Pacific, Middle East and Africa, based in Singapore.