The company was twenty years old that spring. The product was one day old.
This is the fourteenth profile in The Brand That…, a series about American brands that taught the country a habit, became the word for the thing itself, and outlived the world that made them. We tell their stories plainly and with respect — what they made, what it cost, and what they still are.
The Founding: A Dry-Goods Merchant and a Reno Tailor
Loeb Strauss came ashore at San Francisco in 1853, twenty-four years old, born in Buttenheim in Bavaria, six years in New York learning his half-brothers’ trade. He had anglicized his name to Levi around 1850.
He was no tailor. He never made a pair of pants in his life.
He sold dry goods wholesale to the small general stores opening across the West. Those stores outfitted the miners. Strauss outfitted the stores. He did it for nineteen years — the same span in which Otis was teaching cities to grow upward (The Brand That Made the City Rise).
In Reno a tailor named Jacob Davis, born Jacob Youphes in Riga, made tents and horse blankets from cotton duck bought from Levi Strauss & Co. He fastened the blanket straps with copper rivets.
Late in 1870 a woman came into his shop and asked for work pants for her husband, a big man, and asked that they hold together. Davis looked at the rivets on his table. He put them at the corners of the pockets and at the base of the fly.
Within eighteen months he had sold two hundred pairs at three dollars each and other tailors were copying him. He wanted a patent and could not afford the sixty-eight dollars. So in 1872 he wrote to the man who sold him his cloth. The letter survives in transcription, spelled the way Davis talked: “the secret of them Pents is the Rivits.” Pay the fee, he offered, and take half of everything.
Strauss paid. On May 20, 1873, Patent No. 139,121 issued. The inventor of record was Jacob Davis alone; the rights went to Davis and to Levi Strauss & Company — the firm, not the man. Davis moved west to run the factory and ran it until he died in 1908.
The company was twenty years old that spring. The product was one day old.
The Rise: How a Lot Number Became the Word for the Thing
They were called waist overalls. Nobody called them jeans until the 1950s, and the first ones came in brown cotton duck as well as blue denim.
The patent ran seventeen years. In 1890 it entered the public domain, the copies arrived, and Levi’s began assigning lot numbers to tell the real thing from the imitation. The riveted waist overall was given 501.
Nobody knows why. The reason burned with nearly everything else the company knew about itself in the San Francisco fire of 1906. The most famous number in American clothing began as a defensive product code, assigned the year the monopoly ran out, for reasons that no longer exist anywhere.
What the copyists could not take were the marks. In 1886 came the leather patch showing two horses failing to pull a pair of overalls apart — an argument about strength made in a picture, for men who could not read a label. In 1936 came the small red tab, added because the copies had learned to imitate the denim and the stitching.
Then the war came, and the rationing of metal and thread. Levi’s stripped the crotch rivet from the 501, the watch-pocket rivets, the back cinch. The double arc of stitching across the pockets was ruled purely decorative — thread spent on nothing but appearance — and ordered off the garment. So the company had its sewing machine operators paint the two arcs onto every pair by hand, so the jeans would still look like Levi’s while obeying the law. Painted thread. It fooled nobody up close and did not have to. By then the mark was the product.
Brooks Brothers dressed the Republic from the collar down (The Brand That Dressed the Republic). Levi’s dressed it from the boots up. It dropped wholesaling entirely in 1948, passed a billion dollars in sales in 1974, and reached $7.1 billion in fiscal 1996 — a year in which it booked more revenue than Nike.
That was the top. It has never been seen again.
The Turn: The Company Borrows Against Itself
Levi Strauss never married and had no children. He died in 1902 and left the business to four Stern nephews. The company was publicly traded from 1971 to 1985 and is again today, but control has never once left the founder’s family in 173 years. That is the spine of the story, and it is where the trouble starts.
In July 1985 the family took it private at fifty dollars a share, roughly $1.6 billion. In February 1996 they did it again and larger, buying out the last outside holders at $265 a share on about $3.3 billion in bank borrowings.
Then watch what the borrowing did. Interest expense went from $145 million in fiscal 1996 to $212 million the next year and never came back down. Capital spending went the other way — $210 million in 1996, $28 million by fiscal 2000. An 87 percent collapse in four years.
That June the company announced the Global Success Sharing Plan. Every eligible employee worldwide would share a payout — as much as $758 million — if Levi’s hit cumulative earnings targets by the end of fiscal 2001. It booked the expense as it went, $344 million over three years.
It missed, and not narrowly. The plan paid nothing at all below $5 billion in cumulative earnings, and by 1999 management concluded the floor was out of reach. The accrual was reversed back into reported income. There had never been a segregated fund; payment was to come from general corporate money. Nobody was paid — not hourly, not salaried, not management, not executives.
Meanwhile the brand was losing the country. One tracker put Levi’s share of American men’s jeans at 48.2 percent in 1990 and 26.2 percent by 1997.
The Reckoning: What the Court Record Says
Weeks before the announcement, a Levi’s vice president visited the San Antonio floor and told the workers their jobs were secure and the closing rumors were untrue. On Tuesday the supervisors were briefed at a downtown hotel. At 7:30 the next morning, January 17, 1990, the roughly 1,100 workers — 92 percent Latina, 86 percent women — were called to the middle of the plant and told. They stayed on the payroll until April 16 but stopped coming in as soon as the work on hand ran out. Both accounts of that closing are true. The company gave ninety days’ notice of the last paycheck and almost none of the last day at the machines.
The women organized instead of going home. They called it Fuerza Unida. They picketed, boycotted, and held hunger strikes, one for twenty-one days outside the San Francisco headquarters. They sued in April 1990, lost on summary judgment in 1992, and lost the appeal in 1993.
The opinion is worth reading, because Levi’s won it by conceding what the workers said. The company acknowledged that it closed the plant because of high costs, and that those costs included high workers’ compensation costs — the cost of the people hurt on its own floor. The court held the concession immaterial. An employer closing an entire plant fires the injured and the uninjured alike, and equal discharge is not discrimination. Closing all of it is what made it lawful.
The record carries the rest. Levi’s chose San Antonio over cutting back its Caribbean operations, where it owed no pension expense. The closure stopped 369 of about 1,100 workers from fully vesting. And the executive who made the decision swore it was made “without regard to costs associated with pension, workers’ compensation, or other employee benefits” — hard to square with what his own company’s brief conceded. The court found none of it sufficient to prove specific intent, a demanding standard. It never found the motive innocent. It found the workers could not prove it guilty.
Then it happened everywhere: eleven plants in 1997, eleven more in 1999, six in 2002, and on January 8, 2004, the last two in America, both in San Antonio. What the workers got fell as the company weakened. By the severance costs Levi’s booked, the 1997 and 1999 closures ran about $51,000 a worker; by 2002 roughly $25,000; by the last round about $20,000. For the 1990 cohort there is no figure at all.
Here is what does not get rescued. In fiscal 2002, the year six American plants closed, the plan for the workers paid nothing and the plan for the chief executive paid $22.5 million. Much of that was a hiring inducement rather than a performance reward, which is true and does not change the arithmetic. And the plants had been starved for years before anyone announced anything. A company that borrows $3.3 billion to buy out its own shareholders and then cuts plant investment by 87 percent has already decided something about those plants. The announcements came later.
What Endures: The Vault That Holds What the Fire Left
Levi’s went public again in 2019, the family still holding control through a second class of stock. Fiscal 2025 revenue was $6.28 billion, which sounds close to the $7.1 billion of 1996 and is not: in constant dollars the peak was roughly twice what the company earns now. Nearly everything is made under contract across some thirty-two countries. One company-operated plant is left anywhere on earth, in Cape Town, and Levi’s leases it.
What it holds instead is a fireproof vault about the size of a large refrigerator, on Battery Street in San Francisco. The archivists date the oldest pairs by their rivets and their mill marks, because the paper that would have dated them is ash. They cannot say why 501 means 501. They cannot say what the two arcs on the pocket were meant to represent — the company defends them in federal court and its own historian says nobody knows what they were for, which makes the vault an evidence locker as much as a reliquary. A tailor’s fix for a woodcutter’s wife became a patent, the patent became a lot number, and the lot number outlived the mills, the factories, the people who sewed in them, and the company’s memory of its own reasons.
The pants are still made.
Somebody still makes them.
They still fade to the shape of whoever wears them.
Levi’s riveted the American body, and that is worth remembering.
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Why Levi’s? A Reno tailor’s rivet became a patent, the patent became a lot number, and the lot number became one of the few product codes on earth that people say out loud. What kept the name alive after the patent expired, the factories closed, and the records burned was never the pants alone — it was a set of marks the company could defend, on a garment that ages into the person wearing it.
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Charles Cranston Jett is an author, civic educator, and Professional Certified Coach based in Chicago. A graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy (Class of 1964) and Harvard Business School, he served aboard nuclear submarines during the Cold War. He is the author of six books, including Super Nuke!, hosts four podcasts, and writes across his Critical Skills Blog platform on history, leadership, and the health of the American republic. In his writing he uses AI tools for research, editing, and occasional image creation; the arguments, the voice, and the final judgment are his. He and his wife, Dr. Nancy Church, live at Water Tower Residences, where they co-host the Chicago Salons.
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