Levi Strauss & Co. - Fashion Company Profile

Company Profile

The company sells jeans, casual pants, tops, jackets and footwear in more than 100 countries through its own stores and website and through retail partners. Recent portfolio moves include the 2024 announcement that the Denizen brand would be phased out and a 2025 agreement to sell the Dockers business. The long chronology - the two-horse patch of 1886, the lot numbers, the Smithsonian years and the later notes - is kept in full on the history page.

The chronology's first entries belong to the founding generation. In 1853 Levi Strauss arrives in San Francisco and opens a wholesale dry goods business selling clothing, blankets and handkerchiefs to small general stores throughout the American West. In 1872 Jacob Davis, a Reno, Nevada tailor, writes describing his process to rivet pocket corners on men's pants to make them stronger, suggesting a joint patent; Levi agrees, and on May 20, 1873, the patent - number 139,121 - is granted. The profile is careful about the invention's limits: we did not invent the cut or fit of the waist overalls; what we did was take traditional men's work pants and rivet them, creating the new category of workwear we today call blue jeans. The 501's own denim was 9 oz. XX blue denim from the Amoskeag Mill in Manchester, New Hampshire, sewn in San Francisco.