Tag: Levi Strauss

OM in the News: Levi’s Move to Sustainability

Levi’s first tier of its supply chain, such as this supplier facility in Mexico, will see a new sustainability drive.

Levi Strauss is launching an effort to slash the environmental impact of the factories world-wide that make its apparel, reports The Wall Street Journal (Aug. 1, 2018). By 2025, the denim brand wants to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 40% in its supply chain, a sprawling set of 580 third-party factories and mills in 39 countries. The company will start by implementing energy-efficiency programs at 60 of the factories and mills that represent the biggest share of both production volume and carbon footprint.

Many of those factories also produce apparel for other retailers, and Levi’s wants to set an example for its peers. “We want to have an outsize impact beyond our own footprint,” says Levi’s VP-Sustainability. Across many industries, support has been growing for broader, collective efforts to address sustainability in supply chains. Common standards across supplier networks are more likely to stick than varying targets for different vendors. (The British research journal Nature says apparel production is “one of the world’s most polluting industries,” producing about 1.2 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide annually).

As part of the new sustainability push, Levi is also committing to use 100% renewable energy and reduce emissions by 90% in its own facilities. But changing practices at its supplier factories will have more of an impact. Stand.earth, an environmental group that launched a campaign against the denim-maker last year called “Too Dirty to Wear,” applauded the Levi’s move. But it said it also wants to see the company commit to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 60% to 70% by 2050.

It can be extremely difficult for companies to calculate their total carbon emissions because the true impact stretches beyond the factories to raw materials providers and transport operations. The basic production of denim material also uses large amounts of water and produces chemical runoff. “When they say supply chain,” says an MIT prof, I’d ask, ‘How deep? If it’s tier 1, do you even know your tier 2, 3, 4, or 5 suppliers?”

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Discuss the impact of blue jeans on sustainability (See the OM in Action box in Supplement 5).
  2. Why is sustainability such a difficult issue in the apparel industry?

Video Tip: Product Design at Levi Strauss

Levi Strauss’ new design lab has created video game-like software that allows designers to build new styles on an iPad, reports Fast Company (Feb. 28, 2018). This allows them to take one of Levi’s styles like the 501 in one of a few basic colors, then use buttons and levers to distress the jeans, add studs, rips, or other design elements. The lab makes the 3D graphics more realistic than other tech on the market. The digital file that the designers produce can be immediately sent to a laser machine, which will produce the design on a prototype of real jeans.

This is very different from how jeans are typically prototyped, which involves taking an image and having people manually re-create it on a pair of jeans using sanding and chemical treatments. With this new system, the images are realistic, and the laser turns that vision into reality within 90 seconds, reducing the prototype process to just 3 steps. Previously, with all the drawing, reiterating, and then manually creating prototypes, it took 12-18 steps.

That digital file can also be sent to a manufacturing facility, where an entire season’s worth of jeans can be made using automated lasers rather than manual labor. This creates a much safer environment for workers and reduces the number of harsh chemicals used. Levi’s is trying to phase out, for example, potassium permanganate, which has terrible side effects when inhaled, including sore throat, burning sensations, and labored breathing.

The process could radically speed up the time it takes to bring a new design to market. If a new trend emerges, a designer could whip up a prototype within hours, which could then be produced at scale within months. This is important because there is a lot of waste in the fashion industry, a sizable chunk of which comes from new clothes that were never sold. Between 80 and 100 billion never-worn garments are sent to landfills globally every year!

The Fast Company article includes a very interesting 5-minute video describing the design process. (Click on the photo called Lasers! Gas!)

OM in the News: Levi’s New Laser-Wielding Robot That Makes Ethical Jeans

You know those jeans that your students love, the ripped ones that look like they’re 30 years old? (Even though they just bought them.) You probably don’t realize it, but a team of designers took weeks to figure out exactly where to fade the indigo and position the tears for the most authentic vintage look, reports Fast Company (Feb. 28, 2018). Then, factory workers used sandpaper and harsh chemicals to make it look properly worn in. The jeans washed for hours, so that the blue color would fade out–even though those dyes end up polluting the groundwater.

At Levi’s, a brand that talks about trying to be as sustainable and humane to workers as possible, the ugly reality of what it takes to make jeans—especially when you are selling $4.6 billion worth of them a year—isn’t something that is brushed under the table. “Our company offers over 1,000 different finish looks per season, which is mind boggling,” says a Levi exec. “They’re all produced with very labor-intensive, repetitive motion jobs, and a long list of chemical formulations.”

But the firm has just introduced a brand new laser technology that will, in a snap, do what now takes much longer. The breakthrough uses infrared light to etch off a very fine layer of the indigo and cotton from a pair of jeans, creating the same kind of faded finishes and tears in 90 seconds flat. “It started as an idea for a change in a manufacturing process,” says Levi’s supply chain officer. “But it has actually evolved into a holistic digital transformation that covers the whole supply chain from end to end.” Using the laser-wielding robots in Levi’s factories has the potential to eliminate many repetitive, dangerous tasks that are an everyday part of the job for denim workers– and help cut down on the 13,500 workforce. The new laser tech saves time, effort, and the Earth.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Are your students aware of how faded jeans impact the Earth?
  2. Why is this a supply chain issue?

 

OM in the News: Levi Strauss Considers Leaving China

leviThirty years ago, Levi Strauss & Co. began producing its iconic jeans in China, eager to tap a seemingly endless stream of workers willing to sew for a few dimes an hour. Now that stream is starting to dry up. “Over the coming decades, a labor shortage will force Levi and scores of other Western brands to remake their China operations or pack up and leave,” writes The Wall Street Journal (Nov.24, 2015). The changes will mark a new chapter in the history of globalization, where automation is king, nearness to market is crucial and the lives of workers and consumers around the world are once again scrambled. “Labor is getting more expensive and technology is getting cheaper,” says one of Levi’s major suppliers in China.

Fearing that it will see an exodus of manufacturers, China last year called for “an industrial robot revolution,” and the country has become the world’s largest market for automation. It is an open question whether automation can hold down costs as effectively as Chinese peasant labor did. But consumers should look forward to more choice, faster delivery and, perhaps, less harm to the environment. Some technologists even think that inventions such as 3-D printing will have a big impact by 2050. In such a world, printers could spew out clothing, food, electronics and other goods ordered online from a nearly limitless selection, with far fewer workers involved in production. The end of very cheap labor in China is giving a push to these advances in technology, which will make China less central to global manufacturing.

China’s rise to the world’s No. 2 economy relied on a huge increase in the country’s working-age population, which expanded by 380 million people between 1980 and 2015. In one of history’s greatest migrations, hundreds of millions of rural Chinese headed for cities for manufacturing jobs that were a step up from peasant labor, even though the work paid poorly by global standards.

Classroom discussion questions:

  1. Will more and more companies be leaving China to chase cheaper labor?
  2. Why is automation so important to China? To the U.S.?

OM in the News: Levi Strauss’s Push for More Ethical Factories

leviIn an attempt to bolster its ethical credentials and meet the demands of increasingly fussy millennial consumers, Levi Strauss is offering a new financial incentive to suppliers as far away as Bangladesh and China to meet environmental, labor and safety standards. The jeans maker is providing lower-cost working capital to those of its 550 suppliers who do best on those measures. The project sprang out of the 2013 Rana Plaza factory collapse in Bangladesh, which left more than 1,100 dead and prompted new scrutiny of international fashion brands’ supply chains.

“The move reflects two important trends in globalization,” writes The Financial Times (Nov. 4, 2014). As consumers fret about the conditions under which their clothes are made, fashion brands are facing greater pressure to ensure their suppliers in places like Bangladesh, Cambodia and Vietnam abide by higher standards. In some cases that issue, together with rising wages and costs in China and other production centers, is leading to brands “reshoring” production closer to home. But the combination of those pressures and the way global supply chains are becoming ever more intricate is also leading multinational companies to build tighter bonds with suppliers and to use new tools to manage them.

Levi Strauss’s VP of sustainability said the company now relies on “fewer, more capable” vendors and that its relationships go back an average of 10 years with top contractors. The firm claims to require its suppliers to abide by some of the strictest labor standards in the garment industry and employs full-time inspectors to visit factories around the world. It also is rare among fashion brands in publishing a full list of the factories and suppliers it uses around the world. It has, however, had dark chapters in its past. In the early 1990s Levi Strauss was accused of using Chinese prison labor to make clothes. It withdrew production from China on human rights grounds for five years, becoming an example of the potential pitfalls of doing business in China.

Classroom discussion questions:

1. Why is Levi Strauss making this move?

2. What are the advantages of having fewer vendors?