The business landscape is littered with stories of companies that hit lofty heights only to plummet toward irrelevancy as a result of their failure to anticipate marketplace changes and consumer preferences. The 2010 bankruptcy of the Blockbuster video chain is one of the more recent examples.
Even Levi Strauss & Co., the iconic American brand founded in 1873, found itself coping with steeply declining revenues and market share loss just years after sales hit record highs in the mid-1990s. The company’s financial performance has since stabilized; it reported net revenue of $4.8 billion in 2011, an 8% increase over the previous year.
In the early 2000s, Levi’s responded to its financial challenges, in part, by partnering with Walmart to sell a lower-priced line of jeans at the retail giant’s thousands of stores.