A History of Marketing / Episode 41

This week, I’m joined by Tracey Panek, the corporate historian for Levi Strauss & Co, a company that embraces its past as an active part of its marketing strategy.

Tracey’s role sits directly within the marketing department. Among her many tasks is to mine Levi’s archives for authentic stories. “Authenticity” may be a buzzword we hear often, but Levi’s backs it up with primary sources, including patents, artifacts recovered from shipwrecks, and of course, jeans… lots and lots of jeans.

Tracey walks us through the brand’s evolution from a dry goods wholesaler serving miners in the California Gold Rush to a globally recognized icon of American culture.

This episode is a great case study in how a company can embrace its heritage without getting stuck in the past.

Here is what you’ll learn in this episode:

* The Patent to Trademark Pivot: How Levi’s transitioned from relying on the functional patent of the copper rivet (1873) to building brand equity through the “Two Horse” trademark once the patent expired.

* The “Picks and Shovels” Reality: Why Levi Strauss was originally an importer/wholesaler, and how a customer letter led to the invention of jeans.

* Cultural Chameleons: How the brand navigated the shift from John Wayne conservatives to the “dangerous” denim of the 1950s and the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s.

* Campaign Spotlights: The stories behind the sales-doubling “Launderette” ad of the 80s and the Walt Whitman-inspired “Go Forth” campaign.

Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts

Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, who volunteers to review and edit transcripts for accuracy and clarity.

Bridging History and Marketing at Levi’s

Andrew Mitrak: Tracey Panek, welcome to A History of Marketing.

Tracey Panek: Thank you for having me.

Andrew Mitrak: I thought I’d start by asking you about the connection between history and marketing at Levi Strauss & Co. You’re a corporate historian. What is your relationship to other marketers at the company?

Tracey Panek: Well, I’m actually part of the marketing department, so it’s a very close relationship. It’s actually a really great place to be because I can see what projects are coming up and what I can tie into that we can use and provide resources from the archives to. So, it’s a great spot to be in.

Andrew Mitrak: One of my research sources for prepping for this interview was a book called Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World, written by Lynn Downey. I saw that Lynn worked as a historian at Levi’s. Was she your predecessor? Did she help build this history department, and what did this history department look like when you took it over?

Tracey Panek: Lynn was my predecessor. She worked at the company for almost 25 years. She was hired in 1989 to establish the archives. Her great contribution was to help start to tell the stories, was to help try to clear up myths about Levi in particular, but other stories that had been told that weren’t really accurate. She also scoured the world in search of pieces to add to the collection, to build the collection. So when I joined in 2014 at her retirement, there was a great collection in place.

But one of the things that was missing is it was a very manual collection. And what I mean by that is it was not digital. If you wanted to use the collection, you had to come in person. There was the need to bring the collection into the 21st century. So I started in mid-year 2014. By the end of the year, we were doing the first photoshoot—we now do this annually—but we were photographing all of the vintage pieces on site. That has been the beginning of a much more digital collection. So we have the physical collection and the digital collection, adding new and exciting pieces along the way.

Andrew Mitrak: If she was hired back in 1989, there is sort of a self-awareness about Levi’s place in history, that they know that they’re a historic brand and that for over 35 years now, they’ve embraced their place in history and kind of leaned into themselves as a historic brand.

Tracey Panek: Yeah, definitely. Being able to have the archives and have the resources to come up with authentic stories. Today we use that word in marketing, and for me, what it means is that they’ve got to be accurate. They’ve got to be based on primary sources as much as we can, and having the collection allows us to do that.

The Early Life and Resilience of Levi Strauss

Andrew Mitrak: I want to ask you about the life of Levi Strauss, because reading his story, I just felt grateful to be alive today. He fled and escaped Bavaria because of antisemitic laws. The trip across the Atlantic was super dangerous and it seemed miserable. Then once he got to the East Coast, he then traveled through Panama to get to California, and that was really dangerous as well. Do you think these hardships helped shape his character and made him and his company more resilient?

Tracey Panek: Well, you’re very right in describing a lot of the hardships that he went through. He was the youngest son in a Jewish family. There were very few opportunities for him to work or to marry with all the restrictions and pogroms that they had. So his father dies when he’s still very young, he’s 15 or 16, and he and his mother and two older sisters decide that they’ll make their way to America. They looked with hopefulness and kind of an American spirit that today we look back on and we call the American Dream. And I think there was a bit of adventurousness and wanting to make a name for himself and his family.

He definitely went through a lot, even changing his name when he arrives in America. He was lucky to have a couple of older brothers and they help him to learn about what will be his business, dry goods in the wholesale side of it. So absolutely. One of the stories I love to tell to describe how tough he was and how resilient he was—because you went through a lot and you just had to get up and move on—is 1857. Four years after Levi sets up his company. He’s only been in San Francisco a few years but has managed to be very successful. So successful that by 1857, he decides to send an amount of treasure—I want to say it’s like close to $80,000 in gold.

But you can imagine, in 1857, it is worth a lot. And he’s going to send it back to New York where his family is and where Wall Street still is, it’s still the financial capital of the United States. He sends it by steamship down the Pacific down to Panama. It is then loaded onto a train, goes to the Atlantic side because of course there’s no canal at that time, and then another steamship, the treasure rooms are the contents are deposited into another ship and they head up to New York. But off of the coast of the Carolinas, the ship hits a storm and it sinks to the bottom of the ocean floor. And all of that treasure is lost.

It’s a huge amount of money. And Levi just has to continue on and not dwell on it. Although I think it’s rather telling that in some of the invoices not long after that date, there is little notes: “Are you insured? Are you insured?” It’s a great story of resilience. I actually bid on and won a piece of that ship. The ship is called the SS Central America, “Ship of Gold” is what it’s referred to as because it’s this Gold Rush era ship. And we have in the archives now a piece of the copper hull plate that’s on display and that is a perfect example of what you point out. You had to be hardy. You had to get up and move on when you’re faced with obstacles and you had to be resilient.

Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. That was one of the stories in the book that stood out to me. Like, oh my gosh, this shipwreck and he’s sending a decent chunk of his fortune back. And also like 400-something people die. It’s a really horrible tragedy, all this money lost, but also these people lost. And it kind of also speaks to just the hardships of operating a business at that time, making it to California and the West Coast in the first place, and that that was just how commerce was done, is how things were sent back and forth. Anybody who is coming to the West Coast, they’re making this perilous journey where they can sink, they can get horrible diseases.

Tracey Panek: I’ll just mention one more thing about those early years. The other great story about Levi is a year after he arrives in the city, a...

Tracey Panek: Levi's Corporate Historian on Building a Timeless Brand