Levi Strauss & Co.

The Mission of Levi Strauss & Co. is to sustain responsible commercial success as a global marketing company of branded apparel. We must balance goals of superior profitability and return on investment, leadership market positions, and superior products and service. We will conduct our business ethically and demonstrate leadership in satisfying our responsibilities to our communities and to society. Our work environment will be safe and productive and characterized by fair treatment, teamwork, open communications, personal accountability and opportunities for growth and development. Levi Strauss & Co., the world's largest brand-name apparel manufacturer, gave the world blue jeans and grew enormously rich on this piece of U.S. culture. Indeed, around the world the name of the company's founder has grown to be synonymous with the pants he invented: Levi's. Levi Strauss markets apparel in more than 60 countries, and it has 53 production facilities and 32 customer service centers in 49 countries. The company operates wholly owned businesses in most European countries, in South Africa, Australia, Japan, Hong Kong, India, The Philippines, Malaysia, New Zealand, South Korea, Taiwan, Brazil and Argentina, and operates through joint ventures and licensing agreements in a host of other countries. Besides its well-known Levi's brand products, the company markets clothing and accessories under the brand names Dockers, Britannia, and Slates. While Levi Strauss was still traveling about the hills of the South, his older sister's husband, David Stern, established a dry-goods store in San Francisco, California, in the wake of the 1849 California gold rush, and the company that would come to bear Levi Strauss's name dates its beginning to this 1850 founding. Three years later, Strauss made the arduous sea journey around Cape Horn to join his brother-in-law. San Francisco at the time was a booming frontier town, and the opportunity was ripe for a well-run business to flourish. Strauss and Stern set up their small store near the waterfront, where they could easily receive shipments of goods from the Strauss brothers back east. Jeans, which would become the staple of the family business, were invented when Levi Strauss, noting the need for rugged pants for miners, had a tailor sew pants from some sturdy brown canvas he had brought with him on his journey. Once the supply of canvas was exhausted, Strauss turned to a thick fabric made in the French town of Nimes, known as serge de Nimes, which would be shortened to denim. The denim pants, dyed with indigo to make them blue, sold quickly, and the business of Levi Strauss & Co. expanded rapidly, moving three times to new and expanded quarters in the next 13 years. 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. In 1872 the proprietors of Levi Strauss & Co. received a letter from Jacob Davis, a tailor in Nevada, offering them a half interest in the patent on a technique he had invented for strengthening the seams of pants by fastening them with rivets. In return, they would pay the cost of obtaining the patent. The cost was negligible, and Strauss and his brother-in-law quickly took the tailor up on his offer. The following year, the company was granted a patent on the use of rivets to secure pocket seams, and also on the double-arc stitching found on the back pockets of its pants. At first, the company had the pants sewn by tailors working individually at home, in the same way that the Strauss brothers in New York manufactured goods. Soon, however, the demand for the new pants became too great, despite the economic depression that had struck California in 1873, and the company collected its stitchers under one roof, in a small factory on Fremont Street, which was managed by Davis, the tailor from Nevada. Such remarkable success brought envious competitors, and Levi Strauss & Co. f