Word: levi
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...name Levi has long been to jeans what Xerox is to copiers and Scotch to tape. After all, Levi Strauss invented denim jeans, and the San Francisco business he founded in 1853 created an industry. Even during the designer-jean < craze, no-nonsense Levi held on to its spot as the top jeans manufacturer. The company now controls about 24% of a $6 billion annual market...
Soon, however, Levi will be in a serious shoot-out for supremacy in jeans. Last week VF, the manufacturer of Lee jeans, which account for an estimated 14% of U.S. sales, announced a plan to merge with Blue Bell. Its Wrangler and Rustler brands hold some 10% of the market. The new company will thus command roughly the same market share as Levi...
...Italy, former Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, a Socialist, created a capitalist renaissance that appears likely to last. During the three-year rule of Craxi, whose government fell last month, the country's mood had changed. Says Arrigo Levi, one of the country's best-known journalists: "There is a new belief in market forces, in private enterprise, in the value of work itself, and that has been accompanied by a crumbling away of the idea that the state owes you a living...
Everyone everywhere can drink Coke (almost $3 billion in foreign sales) and wear Levi's ($600 million) and watch Little House on the Prairie (broadcast in 110 countries). The lingua franca dispersion of English is both a cause and an effect of pop's global reach, but American pop commodities are also successful abroad because they work. Blue jeans are well designed and rugged. Most Hollywood filmmaking is technically impeccable. "American TV is extraordinarily beguiling to the Poles," says Sociologist Jeffrey Goldfarb, who lived in Warsaw for 18 months, "for the technical quality alone...
Exporters of pop pander to foreign stereotypes of Americans. "The Japanese have very firm ideas about what they think we should be," says Jim Chriss, marketing vice-president of Levi Strauss International. Real Americans, in other words, are cowboys and sexpots and raucous young hunks--Steve McQueen, Marilyn Monroe, Montgomery Clift. It seems that Europeans and Japanese are especially fond of the American icons that provided their first pop jolt 20 or 30 or 40 years ago--pop that now has patina. The French intelligentsia still swoons for American movies of the '40s and '50s. Levi's is using images...