Profile

Levi Strauss was a German-born, Jewish American businessman, who founded the first company to manufacture blue jeans. His firm of Levi Strauss & Co. began in 1853 in San Francisco, California. Levi Strauss was born to an Ashkenazi Jewish family in Buttenheim on February 26, 1829, in the Franconia region of the Kingdom of Bavaria in the German Confederation. He was the son of Hirsch Strauss and his second wife Rebecca Strauss . At age 18, Strauss travelled with his mother and two sisters to the United States to join his brothers Jonas and Louis, who had begun a wholesale dry goods business in New York City called J. Strauss Brother & Co.