Levi' How Did S Make A T-Shirt And Jacket A $1 Billion Deal?

In New York, Berlin and Mumbai, young people, young people and elderly people of different races and sexes are wearing Levi 's T-shirts with bat wings. The Cowboy brand can sell a T-shirt every second.

Sam Slegg, 24 years old, was wearing a blue T-shirt with a blue bat wing on his Vitoria line on a Saturday afternoon. He was very eye-catching. He said: "this is a famous brand. It's very cool. I think their marketing is very good. I like this brand very much. Their jeans are good, the quality is very good, and the T-shirt on me is also very good.

This increasingly well-known trademark is the concrete manifestation of Levi Strauss&Co. 's's recovery from the "downturn". The "downturn" is an internal statement, especially in the early twenty-first Century, when consumers abandoned Levi 's and turned to fast fashion brands as their competitors. In 2011, when Chip Bergh took over the post of chief executive, under his leadership, the future of Levi 's was bright, and the revenue in 2018 increased by 14% over the same period last year, reaching US $5 billion 600 million (about 39 billion yuan). In March of this year, Levi 's was listed on the New York stock exchange, valued at $8 billion 100 million (about 56 billion yuan). Although the second quarter earnings per share announced by Levi s earlier this week dropped by 21% to 17 cents per share over the same period last year, this is the result of a short-term impact on the cost of 29 million yuan (about 200 million yuan) related to the growth of listed companies and investment.

The growth of the company was largely due to a reduction in reliance on men's jeans. Men's jeans are the 166 most popular brands in the world. In the past three fiscal years, sales from jeans to T-shirts and jackets doubled, and for the first time in 2018, it exceeded $1 billion (about 7 billion yuan).

Jen Sey, chief marketing officer, said: "our brand recovery has been very strong in the past five or six years. Tops and T-shirts are, in particular, the main source of this trend. The important thing to remember is that it is not as simple as a T-shirt. If you don't really trust this brand, you won't wear a T-shirt with a trademark on your chest.

Now let's talk about how an ordinary T-shirt can help the world's biggest Cowboy brand rejoin.

Make the best use of the bat wing logo.

In 1936, Levi's designed the red "bat wing" logo on the back pocket of 501 Jeans to distinguish it from competitors' similar products. In 1967, the brand appeared on T shirt for the first time. Its popularity has been high and low for many years, and it was no exception in 1990s.

Facts have proved that this is the key to Levi's's recent success, because the two wave of nostalgia and logo craze swept the fashion world in 90s. The Nordic fashion bloggers chose the bat wing T-shirt in 2013 to bring it back to the public view. Since then, the popularity of bats has quickly spread.

Chuck McBride, chief creative officer and founder of Cutwater, an advertising company, said: "walking in the street is the best advertisement to see a group of children wearing a certain brand of clothing."

Levi 's soon caught up with the T-shirt with its brand suddenly rising popularity. Jonathan Cheung, Levi s's design director, said the company had a strategy called "cultural center", that is, to expand its brand through cooperation with popular elements. The latest partners include street corner Supreme, Off-White and Peanuts, Liverpool football club, and the big hot American drama "strange stories".

Cheung said: "this is to continuously promote the cooperation between corporate culture and popular culture. This is the meaning of the brand, and also the meaning of the trademark. We then expanded the logo of the bat wing, making it fun and interesting, so we had bat wing 2, bat wing 3 and so on.

　 Know when to pull back.

The key to Levi 's is to make persistent efforts on the basis of the recent success of bat wing trademark, without increasing market saturation. The story of Burberry logo printing is alarming. The brand was popular around the world in the early twenty-first Century, but it was sold out by the fashionable people and tired by ordinary consumers.

Last year, Burberry CEO Marco Gobbetti hired Riccardo Tiscias as the new creative director of the brand. Tiscias soon released a new logo and signature pattern.

Cheung said that Levi 's tried to avoid over saturation by changing its promotional design regularly, that is to say, it can make small improvements to bat wing and also highlight another element of the brand. The old ones may still be sold online, but the new ones are the main ones.

Quynh Mai, founder and chief executive officer of Moving Image&Content, a digital marketing company, said: "I hope Levi's is smart enough to withdraw in time to reach the critical volume. Once the boundaries are exceeded, they will not be able to control the successes they have achieved, and they will start to reject the trend setters and influencers.

　 Brand must have unique meaning.

Many consumers are willing to advertise Levi 's on their chest because they believe that the brand's values fit their beliefs. A survey conducted by public relations and marketing agency Cone Communications in 2017 showed that this view is particularly prevalent among the younger generation. 90% of the Z generation believed that enterprises had the responsibility to solve environmental and social problems.

"This is not only consistent with certain trends, but also related to the political and social issues that young consumers are really concerned about," said Kayla Marci, a retail analyst at Edited. This is really important, especially for an old brand with a history of over 160 years. "

Levi s has been supporting the cause of progress for decades; in 1992, it terminated its cooperation with the boy scouts of the United States, which banned adult homosexuals from becoming leaders.

Mai said that the cooperation between Levi 's and the United States was profitable for overseas customers because they regarded the Levi' s' in Trump era as "nostalgia for the United States".

Use nostalgia to attract intergenerational people.

Levi's regularly searches for valuable information from its own archives, designs brand new logo designs for T-shirts, from bat wings to double horse leather labels, and then to sportswear, which was re launched at the 2017 2017.

McBride said: "the traditional brand image information designed by the designer is a treasure house. You can choose the really interesting design patterns and incorporate them into the T-shirt style."

The retro retro design represents the return of fashion in 90s - the most profitable ten years for Levi s. This fashion is now popular among young consumers and is still attractive to Levi s's older customers.

McBride said, "the greatness of Levi s brands is that from the moment they are out of favor, you only need to thumb your fingers for several years, and they will become popular again. Sometimes, it is possible to go back to the past and move forward. This is very important because it can not only resonate with new target audiences, but also ignite a little passion in the hearts of consumers who once loved this brand but then lost contact.

Looking forward to the future

In Levi 's, which has 5 stores in 110 countries, 41 stores in Germany, Spain, France, Britain and Italy and their e-commerce websites provide T-shirt printing and customization services, and consumers can also customize personalized products there.

The advent of the printing rod has opened the curtain of Levi 's product customization. Product customization was used by flying cars and rock musicians before. They used their patches, badges and cracks to personalize their jeans and jackets. However, today's customization also reflects consumers' desire for individuality. They can have their own unique T-shirts, such as printing Snoopy designs on Peanuts T-shirts, or printing the names of consumers or cities.

This customization demand is not the trend predicted by Levi s, but future norms and consumer expectations. "In the future, customization will become a new normal," Cheung said. Everything else can be personalized, such as your Netflix subscription, your Instagram subscription and your Amazon subscription.

"We recognize that (personalization) is part of our culture and people always want to decorate Levi 's. We will do a lot of activities like the Colera, and we will pilot the next service in these activities. We will adopt the technology of spray painting, screen printing and hand tie dyeing. You will see more and more of these interactive activities in stores later. "