Text 1. The Levi’s Story

Task: Read the texts and answer the questions.

Levi’s make the most famous and popular trousers in the world. They are made strong cotton which originally came from Nimes in France. ‘De Nimes’ became denim.

Levi Strauss was a German immigrant who arrived in San Francisco in 1853. First, he made tents for gold prospectors. Then, he started to make trousers from the same material. In 1873, Levi’s dyed the trousers blue. Levi’s headquarters today is still in San Francisco and, in 1993, they sold 50 million pairs of their ‘501’ blue jeans.

The company was not always successful. In the 1980s, they had problems but they changed management and, in 1985, Bob Haas became President of the company. With large investment in marketing and advertising, Levi’s relaunched the original 501 jeans. The campaign was a huge success. In Great Britain the advertising was so successful that sales of 501 jeans rose by 800%!

Today, about 16,000,000 pairs of 501 jeans are sold in Western Europe and they are all made factories in Scotland and France. More than half of Levi’s profits come from export.

The factory in France employs about 540 people who produce 18,000 pairs of jeans per day. With thirty-five factories in the US, Levi’s is major employer, particularly in the South. Unfortunately, because Levi’s are such a popular product there are many ‘pirate’ copies made also. In 1993, for example, police throughout the world found 2,000,000 fake pairs of Levi’s jeans.

In the future, Levi’s hope that more companies will allow casual dress so that sales will rise as office employees start to wear jeans to work.

1. What was Live Strauss’s firs job in America?

2. Where are the company’s headquarters today?

3. Why did sales rise in the 1980s?

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