Why India is the perfect fit for Levi’s

It is only natural to expect a company looking for legs to clad to turn its attention to places where the number of legs looking to be fashionably clad is growing, along with the purchasing power to fulfill such lifestyle ambitions. But Levi’s views India not just as a market for its clothing but also as a source of managerial and tech talent.

The company is thus harnessing two of India’s innate strengths.

Denim and jeans hark back to European industrial centres of the 19th century: Nims in France, where weavers used blue and white thread as the weft and the warp to produce a unique cloth with two different colours on its two sides; and Genoa in Italy, where they wove a tough twill meant to withstand the strain of hard manual labour by its wearers.

Both came together in the American West, initially during the California Gold Rush, where Levi Strauss, a general merchant, and a tailor called Jacob W Davis started marketing overalls and trousers made of denim, with brass rivets to reinforce stitching at stress points. Workers embraced this newfangled apparel and called it jeans.

Denim jeans remained the clothing of men who performed hard manual labour until the American West was settled and the rough life of the frontiersman became a subject of romantic nostalgia for folk on the east coast. Even in the 1930s, Levi Strauss advertised its jeans as ideal wear for farmers, miners, cowboys and construction workers. But things changed.

Those who aspired to the toughness of the men and women who had conquered the American West embraced jeans as a convenient way of projecting their inner Buffalo Bill without experiencing the dangers and hard lives of those who heeded the advice – ‘go West, young man’. Levi Strauss was the archetypal maker and peddler of jeans, but by the first 11 years of the 20th century, Wrangler and Lee had also made an appearance.

Jeans were considered essential items and so were rationed during World War II, but the demand for such goods exploded when scarcity, like the war, became history. Jeans came to be associated with the rebellion of the 1960s – rock bands and sexual revolution. They’ve remained a symbol of youth chic ever since – even if demand has ebbed and flowed – as plain indigo jeans have made way for various shades, washes and fits.

Amid the pandemic-induced work-from-home culture, jeans and a new breed of clothing called athleisure (a combination of athletic and leisure wear) gained popularity. Levi Strauss bought the brand Beyond Yoga and will sell that brand in India sooner or later.

According to Price Research, Indians who could be labelled ‘middle class’ number about 420 million, with incomes in the range ₹0.5 million to ₹3 million. Those with incomes above ₹3 million a year number just 40 million, while about two-thirds of the population of 1,400 million earn less than ₹40,000 a month.

Now, 40 million is not a large population by Indian standards but is about two-thirds of the population of Italy, 80% of the population of South Korea, and just a few hundred thousand smaller than Spain’s. An income of ₹3 million is, in terms of purchasing power parity, about $130,000 a year. Someone with that kind of income can splurge on quite a few pairs of jeans.

Add to this the ongoing data consumption revolution in India, with smartphone ownership growing, especially among the young, and the demand for jeans can only increase. It does not require riveting marketing savvy to see India’s potential as a market for Levi Strauss, the original riveter of jeans.

That an iconic fashion label sees India as a source of managers and leaders is the icing on the cake, as it burnishes the country’s reputation on this sort of thing. Move over, Big Tech – Big Manufacturing is also mining India for talent.