A TRADITION IN DENIM
The first opportunity to use this thinking came to us almost out of the blue. It began with an email late one afternoon from a friend who said a Levi’s executive was passing through New York on his way back to San Francisco. He wanted to meet with firms he wasn’t already familiar with because he was looking for help solving a problem with the brand. My friend kindly made an introduction, and two hours later, Erik Joule walked through the door.
Erik is the kind of leader who lights up a room. His energy and joie de vivre are contagious. Within minutes, we felt as though we were old friends.
He said Levi’s had missed a major opportunity by not participating in the “premium denim boom,” and it was now suffering both reputational and financial challenges. The premium denim boom had occurred when a number of high-fashion brands entered the market and began selling $200-plus pairs of jeans. During that time, Levi’s had maintained its traditional price point of around $39, and as a result, its jeans had acquired a low-end reputation and were considered less chic and no longer fashionable. The company was experiencing a significant sales slump.
We had been involved in a similar conversation not too long before with Absolut Vodka, whose management felt the company had missed out on the “premium vodka boom.” Apparently this premium boom was a phenomenon in a number of sectors. In the 1980s, Absolut was a top-shelf vodka. But in the 1990s, competitive vodka brands such as Grey Goose and Ketel One came onto the market with a more premium-priced product. Absolut, like Levi’s, had stuck to its price point and dropped to a midtier status, losing market share to the new entrants. Ultimately Absolut found a way out of this by creating its own specialty, limited-edition lines such as Absolut Brooklyn, created in partnership with Spike Lee, and premium-crafted versions such as Absolut Elyx, which was sourced and distilled in a manner designed to compete with other premium vodkas.
Levi’s needed a strategy to help it overcome a similar challenge. Like Absolut, they had slipped to the middle tier of its market after having led it for a long time and even though there had been no changes in its products’ quality or distribution.
Erik told us that Levi’s had hired Wieden + Kennedy, a well-known and successful advertising agency, to help rejuvenate the brand. It was working on a new campaign that was being kept top secret, but he let us in on it. The campaign, which would later be known as “Go forth,” was being shot by a famous fashion photographer, and it would draw on inspirational imagery and language from well-known American authors such as Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac. It would depict a new era of American nostalgia, and it was sure to capture attention.
Erik repeated this: “It’s going to capture attention, but attention isn’t going to change our business on its own.” He wanted our help in turning that attention into action. Our job was to make sure that once they had people’s attention, there would be something to act upon and a real reason to care about the brand.
This is the sort of integrated, complex challenge we love to solve, and we first began by focusing on the brand as we knew it. The company made denim and sold jeans (primarily) at a modest price point. They had once been the jeans of Marlon Brando and Steve McQueen and later the jeans of rock stars from the Rolling Stones to the Ramones. But somehow the company had lost its grip.
We asked what had come before Brando and Jagger. Levi’s had begun making jeans in 1853. What had the company stood for then, and what was its origin story? Our research had begun.
It’s fairly common knowledge that Levi Strauss & Company started out as a brand of pioneers. The men who had set out for the gold hiding in the uncharted lands of California during the famous Gold Rush of 1849 were known as the 49ers, and they had taken a big gamble, often risking life or death, to try to strike it rich. Those tough men needed tough jeans, and that’s what Levi Strauss produced. They had reinforced stitches and held up during hard work. Over the coming decades, Levi’s rugged jeans continued to be a staple of the hardscrabble masses. Factory workers, laborers, farmers, and all manner of builders and fixers wore Levi’s as they headed out to work. They were the jeans that helped build America.
We had to tell the story in a way that would ignite a newfound interest in the hearts and minds of new consumers and (hopefully) would bring back some customers the brand had lost along the way.
PANNING FOR GOLD
We asked ourselves, “Who are our modern-day pioneers?” After all, we’re not settling the West anymore, and many hard-labor jobs have since been shipped overseas. We wanted to find people who were embodying that spirit of progress and hard work and pull them into a new conversation, one that celebrated their sense of craft, of making things, of the integrity that comes from doing that kind of work well.
After a few weeks of development, we had created a program we called Levi’s Workshops and sent it off to Erik and his team. We admitted that what we were giving them was “only 75 percent of the plan.” The rest would have to be left open to serendipity. We knew we were going into the unknown, like the gold panners of the nineteenth century, and similarly we knew something about what we’d find but not everything. Like any good prospector, we knew to leave room for the unexpected. After all, you never know where you might strike it rich.
A few days later, Erik let us know that the Levi’s Workshops had been discussed internally and the team was interested in moving forward. We were a go!
Together, our two teams became one unit. It didn’t take long for us to develop a working and speaking lingo, a kind of shorthand. When we said “pioneer,” we weren’t thinking of a grizzled old prospector chewing tobacco and swilling whiskey, we were imagining today’s artists, craftspeople, designers, teachers, and builders. When we said, “Go forth,” we knew we were looking for the spirit of adventure and discovery we wanted people to feel when they interacted with the brand. This shared language was built upon the origins of the brand, yet it was contemporized and translated for today. It drew our own teams closer together and became contagious throughout Levi’s organization.
Within months we were ready to open our first Levi’s Workshop in the heart of San Francisco’s Mission District, which was chosen because the neighborhood was thriving with diversity and craft. It felt like a pioneer town for new ideas. Upstart businesses were opening alongside neighborhood strongholds, living and working together with the same spirit inside each of them.
The project had a small-scale urban renewal vibe. We were able to rent an abandoned laundromat on Valencia Street for a dollar because the building’s owner knew how much money we would have to invest just to revive the space and make it usable. Our COO, Jeff, still says we overpaid.
We wanted every Levi’s Workshop to house the equipment needed to perform a specific type of craft, and our goal was to encourage people to come off the street and join trained craftspeople who could help them roll up their sleeves and make something. They didn’t need any prior experience; they just needed the will to “Go forth” and try something new—to be a pioneer, to take a risk and see where it might lead.
We centered that first workshop around San Francisco’s long history of printmaking and brought in vintage printing presses. We had letterpress and screen-printing stations. We had poster-making classes and T-shirts you could screen with anything you’d like. Soon we had people lining up to try their hand at all of the amazing tools, and more important, we had people waking up to the idea that they could try something new without being self-conscious about failing.
Scattered among the printmaking materials were a few select pieces of Levi’s product. Selling jeans wasn’t the workshop’s primary purpose, but we wanted people to know that everything was being brought to them, free of charge, by Levi’s. We also filled the space with interesting programming that was designed to engage with different communities around San Francisco.
The programming was built on collaborations with “pioneers” from the Bay Area. Right down the street from us, the writer Dave Eggers had opened
his first whimsical tutoring location (themed as a pirate shop), where volunteers taught kids the value of creative writing. We partnered with them and paired the kids’ writing with artists who created original artwork for their stories. The kids got to watch the books being printed in the shop, and they were dazzled as they flipped through a book that had come to life from their story.
We brought in Alice Waters, a pioneer of California cuisine, and designed a beautiful letterpress harvest calendar that supported the work of her charity, the Edible Schoolyard Project. She hosted a small dinner in the space and signed copies for us to sell at auction, with the proceeds benefiting her cause as well as the Levi Strauss Foundation, the company’s charitable organization.
Not only did each project bring into the workshop a compelling pioneer to help create programming, but every piece of programming was designed to reach different subcultures and niche audiences in the Bay Area with authenticity. These new traditions we were creating for the brand were building on Levi’s legacy of engaging with powerful subcultures. From gold-panning pioneers to punks on the Bowery, Levi’s has always been the uniform of the brave and status quo challenging. We built programming for the literary community, musicians, foodies, inner-city youths, and more. If you were willing to “Go forth” and try something different, we wanted you to know that Levi’s was with you.
One of the collaborators we worked with helped fulfill a childhood dream of mine: making my own baseball cards. Growing up, I had collected the cards of all my favorite players. I’d memorize their stats, storing their on-field successes in my memory to be recited later around the lunch table with my friends. But for the workshops we decided to celebrate a different side of the sport. We collaborated with the San Francisco Giants and Topps, an iconic baseball card manufacturer, to design and print a set of cards that praised the off-field accomplishments of San Francisco’s athletes. The cards honored the charities they had started and the communities where they volunteered. We made those on-field heroes even larger than life, showing that they were doing more than just winning on the field, that they were branching off from their day jobs to create positive change in their communities. That culminated in a Levi’s Night at AT&T Park, the Giants’ home field, where cards were handed out to every ticket holder. It was a magical thing to witness.
As the workshop began to take off, we realized that we were creating a new sense of purpose. The Levi’s executives were coming into the space and seeing how electrified people were, and that excitement was contagious. The brand was on people’s lips again. People understood what it meant to “Go forth” and do something brave and different. A connection to the brand’s most indigenous roots was breathing new life into it. We might not have been resettling the West, but we were on a new frontier.
As our time at the print workshop was coming to a close, our clients called to approve us to do another one. The Levi’s Workshop was going to New York!
A few months later, we were up and running in downtown Manhattan, this time focused on photography. New York’s long tradition with this art form gave us a fantastic palette from which to paint our collaborations. We had photojournalists and fashion photographers join arms with other collaborators to follow the work we had done in San Francisco. At the same time, we continued to hold true to our tradition of serendipity. And we weren’t disappointed.
One day, Michael Stipe from the band R.E.M. came into the photo workshop. He had just been walking past and was curious. He poked his head inside and asked what was going on. One of our staffers explained what the shop was, and Stipe asked if he could do a photo shoot in the space. Our staff was quick to say yes, and we were even able to work with his request to do a shoot right then. Thankfully, in the early days of building the workshops we had prepared ourselves to be opportunistic should something like this occur. We had “planned for serendipity,” the best we could, eager to capitalize on whatever opportunities might come our way.
Before we knew it, Stipe was on Twitter calling for volunteers to get involved. Within an hour, there was a line of people wrapped around the building who had heeded Stipe’s call. He saw more than two hundred people and picked fifty to stay to do a series of time-lapse portraits set to music he had already recorded. At some point in the night, he bought pizzas for everyone who’d stayed to make the crazy project happen. The next morning the video was live on R.E.M.’s website and was being talked about in the news as the latest project to come out of the famed Levi’s Workshop.
“Pioneers” were lining up to “go forth.” It was exciting to see this brand’s origin story come alive in this new and modern way. The project finished its New York run, and we headed off to Los Angeles, where naturally, the theme was filmmaking. Again traditions were played back to the community. We had events that celebrated local “pioneers,” charitable programs that gave back to the local community, a constant celebration of craft that permeated our four-month stay at the workshop’s home at the Museum of Contemporary Art, offering a variety of classes, activities, and programs.
At the end of 2011, Levi’s chief marketing officer, Doug Sweeny, held an all-hands meeting of the internal and external partners involved in the brand. We had spent a wild year building the program, but we were only a slice of the “Go forth” pie. There were tons of digital campaigns as well as big mass-media advertising that was running everywhere to drive attention toward the brand. When he started by saying the brand was back, the room erupted in applause. It was something all of us had worked hard to hear, and together we were responsible for the success.
A few minutes later, he put up a slide with the Levi’s Workshops logo. I got the chills, and I had no idea what he was going to say about our work. I knew we had delivered what the client wanted, and in some ways, we had even exceeded its expectations. But it was still a nerve-racking moment. He said the Levi’s Workshops had helped the brand come back to its roots and celebrate everything the business had been built upon. He said the Levi’s Workshops weren’t just something the brand “did” that year but something the brand “does.” But the biggest surprise for me was when he announced plans to roll out workshops in major international markets in the following year.
Levi’s Workshops went up in Mumbai, Paris, Rio, and other markets where the brand needed to connect to the local community and tell the story of its roots. The program did something special: through actions, not words, it showed people where the brand came from and where it was going. But it also delivered major business results. We tracked billions of earned media impressions, marketing-speak for eyeballs on the brand. Levi’s was back in the cultural consciousness in a big way with coverage in virtually every major news outlet. Sales were up, too. Though it would be difficult for us to take all the credit for that, there was undoubtedly a knock-on effect from all of our work helping to drive new sales for the brand.
Our work with Levi’s showed us the value of looking back to a brand’s indigenous roots and bringing thoughtful inspiration and wisdom into the present. Admittedly not every company has a brand that is more than a hundred years old, but every business does have an origin story.
CONNECTING WITH YOUR ORIGIN STORY
If your company’s founder is still alive, find a way to connect with him or her. Understand why he or she started the business in the first place. What was the point? You might be surprised to hear that this person has a different story than the one you were told in your HR orientation. But the origins of your business don’t have to stop there. Use this as an opportunity to question convention and challenge the language and the traditions you see your organization using. Make sure that they are actually true to the company’s legacy and are being used in the right way. So much of maintaining an empathic connection to our past involves its stewardship in the present. Sometimes things can get a little muddy.
I’ve observed so many companies that have gotten lost in their own jargon—bandying about staid buzzwords such as “innovation” and “disruption” alongside id
iosyncratic acronyms that have meaning to only a few people in the company. One day I looked out our window and saw a truck outside that actually said, “Innovation in Ice.” Are you kidding me? I thought. It’s frozen water. It’s been frozen water forever. What are you innovating?
CANONIZING THE RIGHT THINGS
Sometimes companies fail to capture the real parts of their origins and the wrong things get carried forward. I remember being taught that lesson in a business course I took in college. The case focused on a multinational company that had a policy of issuing checks only every other Tuesday. The company was engaged in thousands of daily transactions, and that policy was causing them to run up outrageous sums in late-payment fees. The policy had been used in the business from its beginnings, and it had been accepted unquestioningly for decades. But finally an outside consultant was brought in to look at all aspects of the business and discovered that in the company’s early days, they had a part-time bookkeeper who worked only every other Tuesday. That little detail had solidified into an unchecked and dysfunctional policy that was hurting the daily operations of a global company.
Instead of being trapped in this sort of rut, ask yourself what you can do to change the lexicon or ingrained behaviors that are keeping you, your team, or your company from growing and align it back to the origins of the brand. Not everything is canon, and sometimes the wrong things are treated with reverence. To truly connect with the roots of our brands and businesses, it is important to scrutinize and determine what is core—the most essential—to who we are and what we do.
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