How tech helped Levi’s ride the ‘baggy jeans’ trend
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. Levi Strauss knew baggy jeans were a big deal, but its data infrastructure helped the company understand the depth of the trend and move quickly to meet demand. Levi Strauss & Co., making jeans since the 1850s, intuitively knew the baggy fit would catch on with younger shoppers, new to its dungarees.
But it took technology to help the company see the roomier fit also would catch on with everyone else. “There’s also a whole lot of people that used to wear a 501, and they love their 501s," Levi’s Chief Digital Officer Jason Gowans said of the company’s classic straight-leg jeans. “But they’re also now leaning into our wider-leg fits.
That was something that was at least a little bit of a surprise to us." In 2020, Levi’s signed a deal with Google Cloud and began gathering data points from purchases, web-browsing, retail partner sales and its loyalty program into a Google database, and running daily machine-learning algorithms designed to identify and predict purchase trends, said Gowans. For the first time, he said, Levi’s was able to continuously pull together data from 110 countries and 50,000 points of distribution—only 1,100 of which were Levi’s own stores. Levi’s, which has a global wholesale business, had previously struggled to bring all its data under one tent.
Purchase data—a major piece of the profile—was spread across a range of different retail partners of varying sizes and technical capabilities. Getting numbers from big department stores was straightforward enough, but from a smaller retailer in Indonesia might be difficult, Gowans said. Google helped Levi’s automate the collection of data from those retailers, as well as checking when the information wasn’t arriving on
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