The History of Levi Strauss & Co

On May 20, 1873, the United States patent office granted patent number 139,121 for a humble invention: reinforcing the pocket corners of work pants with copper rivets. That improvement, described in dull technical language, actually marked the birth of the blue jean, the garment that, a century and a half later, half the planet wears.

Behind that patent are two Jewish immigrants, a gold rush, and an unlikely partnership between a cloth merchant and a tailor who had a brilliant idea but no money to patent it.

A Bavarian in the Gold Rush

Levi Strauss was born Löb Strauss on February 26, 1829, in Buttenheim, Bavaria, into a Jewish family. He emigrated to the United States as a young man and, in 1853, arrived in San Francisco to open a branch of his family's wholesale dry-goods business, just as the California Gold Rush filled the region with miners who needed everything. His company, eventually named Levi Strauss & Co., sold clothing, blankets, and notions to general stores all across the West.

Jacob Davis and the rivets

The real inventor of the rivet was Jacob Davis, a tailor of Latvian origin working in Reno, Nevada, who bought cloth from Levi Strauss & Co. Around December 1870, a customer asked him for sturdier work pants; Davis reinforced the pocket corners and the base of the fly with copper rivets, the points where the fabric tore. Demand exploded.

In 1872, Davis wrote to Strauss proposing they patent the process together, asking him to fund the roughly 68 dollars the application cost. His letter, with the spelling of the era, has gone down in history.

The secret of them Pents is the Rivits that I put in those Pockets and I found the demand so large that I cannot make them up fast enough.

The birth of the 501

With the 1873 patent they began making copper-riveted denim pants, then called waist overalls. Davis moved to San Francisco to oversee production. The original model was known as XX, after the term for the highest-quality denim; the iconic lot number 501 was assigned in 1890, when lot numbers were introduced.

Over the decades came the elements we recognize instantly today:

• In 1886 the Two Horse leather patch appeared, showing two horses trying to pull a pair of pants apart to demonstrate their strength.
• The arcuate stitching on the back pocket dates to the original 1873 design.
• In 1936 the red Tab was sewn onto the right back pocket to distinguish Levi's from imitators.

An inheritance with no children

Levi Strauss never married and had no children. He died on September 26, 1902, at the age of 73, and left the business to his four nephews, of the Stern family. From that line descends the Haas family, which came to lead the company starting in 1928 and remains the controlling shareholder to this day.

From public to family control and back

The word overalls was replaced by jeans in advertising around 1960, following the teenagers who already used the term. In 1971, Levi Strauss & Co. became a public company for the first time, notably including a statement of its values in the offering prospectus.

In 1985, the Haas family completed a leveraged buyout of around 1.6 billion dollars, the largest in the fashion industry at the time, led with financier Warren Hellman, and took the company private again. After 34 years off the market, Levi's returned to public trading in March 2019 with an offering on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker LEVI, raising about 623 million dollars, while the family retained control.

The most universal garment

In fiscal year 2024, Levi Strauss & Co. reported net revenues of around 6.36 billion dollars. The 501 remains the flagship product, and the brand is sold in more than 110 countries. Few products have achieved what the jean has: born as work clothing for miners and ending up as a symbol of youth, rebellion, and casual elegance all at once.

The lesson for any business is that the most durable innovation isn't always the most sophisticated. A copper rivet, well placed at the point of greatest wear, solved a real problem and gave rise to one of the best-selling garments in history. Sometimes genius lies in the detail no one else bothered to reinforce.

The takeaway: solving an everyday problem elegantly can be worth more than any grand invention.

Sources

• Levi Strauss & Co. — https://www.levistrauss.com/2013/03/14/the-story-of-levi-strauss/
• History.com — https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/may-20/levi-strauss-and-jacob-davis-receive-patent-for-blue-jeans
• Britannica Money — https://www.britannica.com/money/Levi-Strauss-and-Co
• CNBC — https://www.cnbc.com/2019/03/24/remembering-warren-hellman-who-led-levis-buyout-in-1985.html
• Hagley Museum & Library — https://www.hagley.org/research/news/hagley-vault/date-1873-levi-strauss-1829-1902-and-jacob-w-davis-1831-1908-made-fashion