Levi Strauss & Co. history

In 1863, Levi renamed his company “Levi Strauss & Co.”

In 1866 the company moved to a luxurious new location on Battery Street, only to have the building cracked from roof to foundation in an earthquake two years later.

Around 1872, Levi received a letter from one of his customers, Jacob Davis, a Reno, Nevada tailor.

After Strauss accepted Davis's offer, on May 20, 1873, the two men received United States Patent 139,121 from the United States Patent and Trademark Office.

Such remarkable success brought envious competitors, and Levi Strauss & Co. filed its first lawsuit for patent infringement against two other makers of riveted clothing in January 1874.

In 1875, Levi and two associates purchased the Mission and Pacific Woolen Mills.

In 1877 the Levi Strauss & Co. factory expanded, and the notable features of Levi's pants--the dark blue denim, the rivets, the stitching, the guarantee of quality--became further standardized.

In 1879 the same pair were sold at 99 cents, they looked like any early Levi jean, waistband, crotch rivet, a cinch and suspender buttons.

The firm also continued to sell other dry goods, chalking up sales of $2.4 million in 1880, and it prospered throughout the 1880s.

In 1890 — the year that the XX waist overall was given the lot number “501®” — Levi and his nephews officially incorporated the company.

In 1897 Levi provided the funds for twenty-eight scholarships at the University of California, Berkeley, all of which are still in place today.

In 1907 a financial panic, which started in New York and crept westward, caused a slowdown in business, and the company began to streamline the merchandise it sold, relying more and more on its own products.

In 1912 the company introduced its first innovative product in decades, Koveralls, playsuits for children designed by Simon Davis, the son of tailor Jacob Davis, who had followed his father into the business.

Company profits fell by one-third in 1920.

The company began attaching belt loops to its basic denim pants in 1922, in addition to the traditional suspender buttons.

By 1929, 70 percent of the firm's profit derived from its sale of jeans.

By 1930 the company's profits had vanished, and it posted a loss on sales that had fallen one-sixth.

In 1934, Lady Levi’s® – also called Lot 701 – were created, giving women the same freedom offered to men in a style that was designed just for them.

In 1935 Levi Strauss & Co. employees joined the United Garment Workers with management's acquiescence, thereby averting a strike and ending the virtual union boycott of Levi Strauss & Co.'s products.

To capitalize on its growing brand identification, the company added the trademarked red "Levi's" tab to the back pocket of its pants in 1936, the first label to be placed on the outside of a piece of clothing.

By 1939 the Levi Strauss & Co. blue denim "waist overall" had just begun to be popular outside the world of blue-collar workers.

The company’s most spectacular growth occurred after 1946, when it decided to abandon wholesaling and concentrate on manufacturing clothing under its own label.

By 1948 company profits for the first time topped $1 million on sales of four million pairs of pants.

In 1954 the company branched out from denim to the sportswear business, launching Lighter Blues, a line of casual slacks for men.

In 1959 the company introduced "Orange, Lemon and Lime," pants in six bold colors, which were a short-lived hit.

Also in 1960, the company introduced pre-shrunk denim jeans, in an effort to overcome the objections of eastern customers, who were uncomfortable with shrinking pants.

In 1963 stretch denim and corduroy Levi's joined the fold.

In 1964, after an arduous and expensive process of development, Levi Strauss & Co. introduced Sta-Prest permanent-press pants.

By 1968 the company had grown to become one of the six largest clothing manufacturers in the United States, with sales nearing $200 million.

In 1971 Levi Strauss & Co.'s long-standing status as a wholly family- and employee-owned enterprise came to an end, when the company sold stock to the public for the first time.

The company's phenomenal growth caught up with it in 1973, when its European division found itself with huge supplies of jeans in an outmoded style--straight-legged, as opposed to flared, or bell-bottomed--with more of the same on order.

Despite the sobering demonstration in Europe of the company's fallibility, by 1974 sales of Levi Strauss & Co. products had reached $1 billion.

The company reached an agreement with the government in 1977 in which it did not admit wrongdoing, but gave up suggested pricing, retaining the freedom not to sell to certain retailers.

Sales doubled in just four years, to hit $2 billion in 1979.

Profits continued to plummet in 1982, and the company shut down nine plants, eliminating 2,000 jobs.

Foreign operations accounted for only 23 percent of sales in 1984.

In 1985 the Haas family, along with other descendants of Levi Strauss, staged a leveraged buyout that returned the company to private ownership.

The activist group Fuerza Unida (United Force) 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.

In 1991 an investigation revealed that some products that Levi Strauss had represented as made in the United States were actually manufactured in the Northern Mariana Islands (a United States commonwealth) by Chinese labourers working in illegal sweatshop conditions.

By 1992, foreign sales represented close to 40 percent of the company's revenues, and over 50 percent of profits.

The flagship store in Manhattan opened across the street from Bloomingdale's in 1993.

Sales of Dockers alone came to $1 billion by 1994, and Dockers represented almost 30 percent of Levi's domestic sales.

The next two years each added a hundred million also, until by 1995 the company earned over $700 million.

The company took on multibillion-dollar debt in February 1996 to help finance a series of leveraged stock buyouts among family members.

The annual sales of the brand increased in 1997 to reach $7.1 billion.

In 2001 the ‘Nevada’ was put up for sale on eBay.

By the end of 2003, the closure of Levi's last US factory in San Antonio ended 150 years of jeans made in the United States.

Levi Strauss attempted to sell the Dockers division in 2004 to relieve part of the company's $2.6 billion outstanding debt.

The case centred on the "arcuate design on two pockets at the back of jeans", which has been protected in China since its registration there in 2005.

By 2007, Levi Strauss was again profitable after declining sales in nine of the previous ten years.

In 2010, the company partnered with Filson, an outdoor-goods manufacturer in Seattle, to produce a high-end line of jackets and workwear.

Despite these moves, sales stagnated, and in 2011 Levi Strauss hired Chip Bergh as CEO. He was credited with turning the company around as he instituted various changes, such as modernizing its e-commerce division and expanding overseas markets.

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.

In 2016, the company reported revenues of $4.6 billion.

In 2017, Levi Strauss & Co. released a "smart jacket", an apparel they developed in partnership with Google.

In March 2019 Levi Strauss went public again, and its IPO raised more than $620 million.

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