Asked what trust means to him, Jason Gowans has a simple answer.
“Trust is doing what you say you’re going to do,” the chief digital officer of Levi Strauss & Co. tells me from Seattle. “Part of it is being really clear about what you’re going to do and then following through on that.”
Gowans is on that mission. Since joining Levi’s in early 2023, he’s led an effort to put the customer first and bolster the denim retail giant’s digital presence.
The e-commerce strategy behind that push has three pillars, Gowans explains: Focus on the fundamentals, evolve the assortment, and create a digital flagship experience.
Focusing on the fundamentals is rooted in three observations backed by external research, he says. “The first is that 80% of customers say that the experience matters as much as the product,” Gowans notes. “The second observation is that more than 70% of customers will switch channels depending on the context, whether it’s online or offline.”
Observation No. 3: More than a third of customers will leave a brand they love after just one bad experience. “Your competition is the last great experience that somebody had.”
The upshot? “You can’t think of your business as a series of channels,” says Gowans, who previously spent a decade with Nordstrom. “You’ve got to put the consumer at the center.”
Doing that means making sure that when someone engages with you, it’s a good experience, Gowans stresses. “You cannot disappoint the customer.”
For Levi.com, the fundamentals hinge on a couple of key moments in the consumer journey. One is reaching the product detail page. “How many of those customers go on to add to cart?” Gowans asks. “It’s that moment of truth where you’re trying to give the customer the information, and ultimately the confidence, that this is the right product for them.”
Evolving the assortment is a two-way street. “We aspire to be a world-class denim lifestyle retailer, and so that’s really all about head-to-toe outfitting,” Gowans says. To that end, Levi’s is leaning into tops: shirts, sweaters, outerwear. It’s also expanding its women’s business. Customer satisfaction surveys show that shoppers are asking for those things, too.
And the digital flagship experience? It’s three things: mobile app, loyalty, and omnichannel.
“This isn’t just about growing our business on Levi.com,” Gowans says, noting that the brand has some 3,000 stores worldwide. “This is using the totality of our presence and our assets to create a great experience for the customer, whether they want to shop online or go in the store.”
Levi’s now has more than 37 million customers in its Red Tab loyalty program. Besides free shipping, members get early access to events such as Black Friday sales, and to collaborations with the likes of McLaren Racing. Free hemming and repairs are another perk.
Gowans and his global team have also been chipping away at other moments that improve the customer experience, he says. For example, when surveys told them that Levi’s slow website was a barrier to purchasing, they boosted its speed by 40%.
Those efforts have paid off. Digital sales are approaching 10% of total business, Gowans says. “We’ve been posting double-digit growth of the digital channels now for, I think, eight to 10 consecutive quarters.”
When it comes to the online customer experience, there’s another key trust-building ingredient.
“The hardest thing [about] digital commerce is stirring a positive emotion, or creating an emotional connection with the customer,” Gowans says. To do that, Levi’s often looks to the “cultural moments” it creates, he says. “One such example would be our recent campaign and partnership with Beyoncé, where we brought that to life on Levi.com.”
Speaking of emotional impact, building trust as a retailer is about being excellent every day, Gowans says.
For instance, when a customer uses Levi’s Pickup In-Store service, the company must make sure not to cancel their online order. “These are things that don’t create a lot of headlines, but they certainly create an emotion with your customer when you let them down,” Gowans says. “And so we’re really focused on making sure that we do what we say we’re going to do.”
True blue.
Nick Rockel
nick.rockel@consultant.fortune.com
IN OTHER NEWS
Vote of confidence
CEOs of the world’s biggest companies are trusting that everything will be alright with President Donald Trump in charge. In a post-election Fortune and Deloitte survey of leaders from the Fortune 500, the Fortune Global 500, and other major players, 42% called themselves optimistic about the global economy. That’s a big jump from 29% in a summer poll and only 7% a year ago, Robert Stevens reports. Although 73% of CEOs surveyed think international trade and tariffs pose a risk under Trump, 84% are bullish on their own companies’ prospects. Best of luck.
Good eye
A leading tech exec wants us to trust AI surveillance. AI-powered security cameras will help first responders act faster, Motorola Solutions CTO Mahesh Saptharishi said at Fortune’s recent Brainstorm AI conference in San Francisco. Saptharishi cited benefits like image recognition and real-time language translation. For example, if a parent tells a 911 operator what their missing child was wearing, that description could be automatically sent to smart cameras and law enforcement. Shaving 60 seconds from the average emergency response time could save 10,000 lives a year, Saptharishi reckoned. Just a few privacy wrinkles to iron out first.
Double duty
Sadly, many workers can’t seem to trust one employer to keep them afloat in today’s economy. Almost 90% of job-seekers have worked a side hustle, a new poll reveals. Roughly 40% admit to working two jobs at once, either part- or full-time. But here’s the thing: Half of companies have no rules against side hustles. Despite employers’ concerns about lower productivity, workers are jumping at the chance to diversify their income and skills. And most job-seekers think employees should be allowed to work on the side during company time if their main gig doesn’t cover essential bills. Not unreasonable.
Moral issues
As generative AI keeps advancing, can we trust that it will match human intelligence? No, argued a panelist at Fortune’s Brainstorm AI conference. AI can’t meaningfully cultivate moral reasoning and human-level judgment, said Ann Skeet, director of leadership ethics at Santa Clara University’s Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. As Skeet explained, moral reasoning is like learning to read and write, and people typically reach full-form consciousness at around 40. “We need to be aware that AI can’t do that.” Someone tell Sam Altman.
TRUST EXERCISE
“After more than 1,400 days in prison, Hong Kong’s most famous entrepreneur took the stand in late November to defend himself against charges of undermining national security. Jimmy Lai, who started as a sweater manufacturer and expanded to publishing, said his goal was not to undermine Hong Kong, but simply to inform. As he explained in court, ‘The more information you have, the more you are in the know, the more you are free.’
It’s peculiar, after four decades of China’s unparalleled economic success, that Beijing now appears singularly threatened by a man who is, above all, a businessman. Anyone who travels to China knows the country is all about business, nowhere more so than in the autonomous city of Hong Kong, a former British colony known for its go-go free-market spirit. Yet for four years, the man many Hong Kongers proudly claim as a hero has been sitting in solitary confinement in the maximum-security Stanley Prison.”
Trust the Chinese Communist Party to ruin a good thing. A while back, I spent a month living in Hong Kong, and that once famously open city will always hold a special place in my heart. But now that the CCP is running the show, I doubt I’ll ever return. I can’t be the only one.
Mark Clifford, president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation, knows Beijing’s crackdown on the city’s freedoms all too well. Under the pretext of safeguarding national security, Clifford notes, the Chinese government has persecuted his old friend Jimmy Lai for championing democratic rights via his publishing company and newspaper. Lai is just one of many Hong Kong businesspeople and other citizens who have met such a fate.
Partly thanks to Beijing’s oppression, Hong Kong isn’t exactly booming these days. As Clifford points out, its benchmark stock index has plunged since the National Security Law took effect in 2020.
He raises an excellent question: If China wants to jail a successful entrepreneur simply for doing his job, why should anyone trust Hong Kong as a place to do business? To me, the answer is obvious.