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Levi Strauss & Co. is a privately held clothing company known worldwide for its Levi's brand of denim jeans. It was founded in 1853 when Levi Strauss came to San Francisco, California to open a west coast branch of his brothers' New York dry goods business. more...

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Although the company began producing denim overalls in the 1870s, modern jeans were not produced until the 1920s. The company briefly experimented (in the 1970s) with employee ownership and a public stock listing, but remains owned and controlled by descendants and relatives of Levi Strauss' four nephews.

Organization

Levi Strauss & Co. is a worldwide corporation organized into three geographic divisions:

Levi Strauss, North Americas (LSNA), based in the San Francisco headquarters; Levi Strauss Europe (LSE), based in Brussels; Asia Pacific Division (APD), based in Singapore;

The company employs a staff of approximately 8,850 people worldwide, and owns and develops three major brands:

Levi's: (

Dockers: (

Levi Strauss Signature: (

History

One of Levi's customers was Jacob Davis, a tailor who frequently purchased bolts of cloth from Levi Strauss & Co.'s wholesale house. After one of Jacob's costumers kept purchasing cloth to reinforce torn pants, he had an idea to use copper rivets to reinforce the points of strain, such as on the pocket corners and at the base of the button fly. Jacobs did not have the required money to purchase a patent, so he wrote to Levi suggesting that they both go into business together. After Levi accepted Jacobs' offer, on May 20, 1874, the two men received patent #139,121 from the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The "patented rivet" would later be incorporated into the company's jean design (and into later advertising lore). Contrary to an advertising campaign suggesting that Levi Strauss sold his first jeans to gold miners during the California Gold Rush (which peaked in 1849), manufacture of denim overalls only began in the 1870s. Modern jeans began to appear in the 1920s.

By the 1990s, the brand was facing competition from other brands and cheaper products from overseas, and began accelerating the pace of its U.S. factory closures and its use of offshore subcontracting agreements. In 1991, Levi Strauss was embarrassed by a scandal involving six subsidiary factories on the Northern Mariana Islands, a U.S. commonwealth, where some 3% of Levi's jeans with the "Made in the U.S.A." label were sewn by imported Chinese laborers under what the U.S. Department of Labor called "slavelike" conditions. Cited for sub-minimal wages, seven-day work week schedules with twelve-hour shifts, poor living conditions and other indignities, the Tan family, Levi Strauss' Marianas subcontractor, would pay what was then the largest fines in U.S. labor history, distributing more than $9 million in restitution to some 1200 employees. (See also Tan Holdings Corporation.) Levi Strauss claimed no knowledge of the offenses, severed ties to the Tan family, and instituted labor reforms and inspection practices in its offshore facilities.

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