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Levi Strauss

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14
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2018-08-12
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2018-08-12
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1
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  1. “To the Union's war efforts. In order to obtain and secure good credit with Africa, Between the start of the Civil War in eighteen sixty one and its end in 1865, Levi Strauss shipped $31 million worth of gold in a four-year period. Levi's friends and competitors sent equally large volumes of gold, all of which led Ulysses S. Grant to say, according to legend, that California and its gold helped American Lincoln helped Abraham Lincoln win the war. Okay, so we're almost to the point where we get to the whole main thing he's known for, which is the blue jeans. But this sentence reminded me of an opportunity to throw in one of my favorite quotes that Peter Drucker quote that entrepreneurship is not an art or science to practice. And its description of one sentence is a description of Levi, and it says being a merchant was not just what he did. It was who he was.”

    2018-08-12 · Founders · #33 Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Skipping ahead a little bit. Now he's expanding his investments. He does a bunch of other businesses. His main business forever is Levi Strauss and Company, but he's just very industrious and constantly interested in expanding not only his personal net worth, but I would say the overall GDP of the industry he's operating in. So it said, Levi ended the decade of the 1850s with a preview of his own future, in addition to enjoying continued commercial success, he started to buy stock, snatched up valuable real estate, and expanded his philanthropy and became interested in politics And a few pages later, there's another more loss of sea. In this case, he loses about $2 million.”

    2018-08-12 · Founders · #33 Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “I guess Again, I don't think we're unfortunately going to ever be done with humans being prejudiced against other groups that are not like them. But yeah, it's just so stupid. So he had to deal with that. The way he got around that is obviously, you know, he didn't need the credit because his credit was his own family. And to that end, his family, even though there were separate companies, was kind of vertically integrated.”

    2018-08-12 · Founders · #33 Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “Well, I guess get there. Wholesalers who lost money could not buy more goods if their credit was not top notch. So, of course, in most financial panics, you see this tightening of credit. And it was difficult to collect debts from local customers if they had also been affected by the disaster. Levi Strauss survived and actually prosper because his suppliers were his own brothers. He did not have to worry about saving his credit rating with an eastern jobber. So you're probably familiar with the Dunn and Bradstreet company still exists today. This time it was called something Dun and somebody else. So they would make these reports, they'd collect data and make these reports on the creditworthiness of businesses. And if the business was owned by Jewish people, in the report on the company, they'd have a warning basically that Jewish people were not to be trusted. So just.”

    2018-08-12 · Founders · #33 Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “So now we're going to talk about another headache that he had to deal with. Two headaches. The dangers of shipping by sea and then this prejudice in issuing credit to Jewish people. So let's get some details here. It says the business was increasing too. The California Board of Equalization published a list of the city's personal property assessments in the August edition of the San Francisco evening. It said Levi Strauss was worth $20,000, equivalent to nearly 50,000 half a million dollars today. So he's making a great amount of progress in just a few short years. It says... Okay, so this is actually a huge issue. So he's going to lose about $2 million here in today's money, that is. So in August 1857, he arranges to ship.”

    2018-08-12 · Founders · #33 Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “Merchants had to pay fees to pilots, the harbormaster, and the warfowners. Then, men like Levi had to hand over custom duties, pay for the cost of transporting the shipment from boat to the warehouse, rent on the warehouse itself, and finally an annual city license, which fluctuated according to a merchant's monthly receipts. And even with all these expenses, Levi's business is doing fantastically well. It says in the year 1856, Levi shipped over $200,000 in treasure in New York worth an astonishing $5 million today.”

    2018-08-12 · Founders · #33 Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “San Francisco purveyors such as Levi Strauss. Levi had a scale in his office to weigh the gold dust and figure out its value according to purity and the current rates. Generally, gold dust circulated at seventeen dollars fifty cents an ounce in the early years of Levi's business. After weighing and measuring the dust, he could then use it to pay off all of his customers' miscellaneous bills, depositing the remainder to his account as credit against that customer's future business. In essence, Levi and other merchants acted as bankers for their own customers. So, you know what this made me think of before I get into the inflation caused by the gold rush?”

    2018-08-12 · Founders · #33 Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Okay, so skipping ahead, I've left myself three notes on this. It says the financials, which we're going to get into numbers, which I think is fascinating. History doesn't repeat itself. Human nature does, which we talk about all the time. And this time is not different. So now we're going to, at this point, fast forwarding. He's already built his business. He starts getting shipments from his brother. He sells it and just slowly and steadily just starts building this up little by little. And over the next two years, Levi continued to build his business and fell into a comfortable commercial routine of taking in shipments from his brothers and finding new customers. The following year was busier. This is 1855. And in July, Levi made the first shipment of gold back to New York to fill the coffers of J. Strauss and brother. This is his brother's company that he's getting dry goods from. And to pay for future shipments of dry goods. That month, he sent $10,041, equivalent to nearly”

    2018-08-12 · Founders · #33 Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “So the retailers, hotels, and restaurants would also be on his list. So he just goes, doesn't have any context. He just goes door-to-door. Hey, you're a retailer. I'm a wholesaler. Can I offer you something? Can we build a relationship as simple as that? So started out from very humble beginnings. As you'll see, and I'm going to share, the good thing about this book is one, it's written by an employee of Levi Strauss that was hired as an historian of the company. And so the part I'm not going to include it all in the podcast, but is in the book is there's a great fire in, I think, 1906 that destroyed all of the Levi, a lot of the Levi-Strauss company documents. So she had to go back and spend several years. She traveled to like where he was born, down to South America, all the places that are important to the Levi Strauss story to like recreate and obtain information. And she was also able to find public records of income, like how much money they were sending because a lot of”

    2018-08-12 · Founders · #33 Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “So he arrives in San Francisco. The plan is he's going to found the business. His suppliers are going to be his brothers who are manufacturing stuff in New York. So let's manufacture stuff in New York. We'll ship it to San Francisco. Levi starts a business where he can wholesale and then mark it up and wholesale and start making money. But at the time, he has no contacts in San Francisco. So he has to start his business cold. So he has to wait a few months because like I just described, you could ship something from New York to San Francisco, but it takes a long time. So they ship it out in January. They expect to arrive in May. With this information in hand, knowing that three shiploads of dry goods would start arriving at the end of March, he hit the pavement to find his first customers. The easiest and most efficient way to get started was simply to call in the retailers already established in San Francisco. It lists a bunch of the companies. The company names are not important.”

    2018-08-12 · Founders · #33 Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “You know, people are rushing San Francisco because of the gold rush, and I'm just going to read it because it's funny and it brings a smile to my face. Hundreds of gold-feared sailors abandoned their vessels as soon as they made landfall in San Francisco, staying only long enough to outfit themselves for the trip inland. Wildly entrepreneurs hauled the ships right up to the shoreline, made them secure, and turned them into warehouses and lodgings. I love that. All right, so this is where he starts his business. And I know I left myself as Levi starts his business cold.”

    2018-08-12 · Founders · #33 Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Sometimes waiting days or weeks for another steamer to take them to San Francisco. By the time Levi Strauss landed in Panama around Valentine's Day of 1853, the crossing was a more organized and modernized operation. The Panama Railroad was partially completed across the Isthmus by this time. In addition, the steamship companies put more ships into service, so the men and women who made it to Panama City rarely had to wait more than a day or two for a boat to take them to San Francisco.”

    2018-08-12 · Founders · #33 Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “And it says, if Levi had shown no talent for commerce, if he had succumbed to New York's temptations and spent his nights in dissipation, or if he had decided to take up different line of work, he wouldn't have been right for the job. The fact that they did send the youngest brother on what was known to be a dangerous journey and risky commercial undertaking meant that this much older brothers had complete confidence in his abilities, something I repeat constantly is how lucky we are to be alive in the age of the internet and how it makes building businesses while never easy, way easier, this section is fascinating. All I thought about when I was reading this book, I was like, wow, like I have no reason to ever complain if I have any kind of hardship given what this guy had to go through to do what he's doing. So it said next few pages, it's a play on words, one of my favorite books that I read is Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence Path Dangerous and Strategies. And so...”

    2018-08-12 · Founders · #33 Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “So, the process of getting out of Bavaria was not that simple. It took him, I think, almost two years to finally petition the government. And we get some of Levi's first words on record in a plea for him to emigrate to America. And this is now Levites speaking. And he's about 17 or 18 years old the time. And he says, the favorable news that I've received from my stepbrothers in America has convinced me to follow them. Even though I do not have at this time a specific occupation. But my brothers will take care of that. No members of my family will stay behind. And I love this sentence. I will share the fate that has been assigned to me with them in foreign lands. I thus join my mother in her plea. Now, the book spends a great deal of time talking about how dangerous these voices are.”

    2018-08-12 · Founders · #33 Levi Strauss: The Man Who Gave Blue Jeans to the World · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source