If it looks like garbage and it smells like garbage, it’s probably Levi’s gender-neutral collection.
Last week while speaking at Axios BFD, the CEO of Levi Strauss & Co, Chip Bergh announced that the brand plans to expand its gender-neutral clothing line, asserting that there is a large “consumer appetite” for the products.
“We are building [the clothing line] out slowly,” Bergh said. “It started with a small collection of gender-neutral or gender-fluid line, and there’s definitely consumer appetite for that.”
During the interview, Axios senior business reporter Hope King told Bergh that roughly 1 percent of adults globally would identify as transgender, non-binary, or gender-fluid — and used this data to apparently confirm the assumption that there is a largely untapped market for non-binary clothing. But this phrasing excludes the 99 percent of individuals who would not be searching for gender-inclusive clothing, and simply want to look and feel good about what they wear, which is difficult to do if gender markers were to be removed.
King also brought up the Bud Light boycott that took hold last month when the company partnered with transgender-identifying activist, Dylan Mulvaney. After announcing the endorsement, Bud Light’s sales dropped more than 20 percent during the month of April. The beer brand quickly learned that its product is non-essential and easily replaceable, but other companies like Target and Levi’s seem willing to gamble that their customer bases will stick around simply because they have to.
Levi’s former global brand president, Jennifer Sey, was pushed out of the company in 2022 for her public comments on the COVID-19 pandemic and other political matters that directly opposed the progressive stance the company had decidedly taken. She had worked for the clothing brand since 1999. Sey torched the leadership at Levi’s on her way out, after enduring what she called a “hostile work environment,” and “constant bullying and harassment.”
“Levi’s is known as an all-American brand rooted in rugged individualism. A successful ad campaign that I created as the chief marketing officer exhorted our fans to ‘use their voices.’ The idea that I could not use mine in defense of children conflicted with all the brand claimed to stand for.”
Jennifer Sey
Sey commented on the company’s decision to expand the gender-neutral line by explaining that, to her best recollection prior to 2022, the line brought in less than .5% of total sales. “While I was still at Levi’s, there was a lot of employee feedback pushing to re-arrange the Levi’s stores as gender-neutral. No men’s section or women’s section,” Sey said. “Just a big free-for-all.”
The former marketing executive also said that the company received its fair share of negative feedback from shoppers who claimed the store was already difficult to navigate because the distinction between men’s and women’s sections wasn’t very clear. “Why make it more confusing for the majority of shoppers?”
“Here’s what the data says: the vast majority of people shop for clothing overall, and jeans in particular, by their gender. The majority of people also say they prefer brands that don’t weigh in on polarizing politics.”
Jennifer Sey
“So why do this? Why market to the 1% (not a commercially viable segment of the population),” Sey questioned, but the answer is simple: because the brand feels that it can.
Levi’s, Target, Bud Light, Ulta, Disney, and other left-loving corporations all have the same thing in common — they feel that they can pander to their radically progressive employees, and the small percentage of customers who seek out woke content and products, while not losing out on the other 99 percent of consumers.
Brands realized that appeasing the larger percentages of the customer base isn’t necessary because the consumers would simply keep coming, and as long as they receive great environmental, social, and governance scores, the company could take a few small hits to their market value and still come out on top.
