Faded Denim? A look back at the 125 years of Lee Jeans
Lee Jeans turned 125 this year, but despite its rich heritage this once iconic denim brand appears to be struggling to remain relevant in an era of increased competition. Brand Union strategy director Laura Tan takes a look.
It’s one of the most iconic images in modern cinema. James Dean in his plain white tee, red jacket and blue jeans, leaning casually against a bare brick wall. With a cigarette poised between his lips, he epitomises ‘cool’ as the Rebel Without a Cause. You will know this iconic star, but would you know which brand of jeans he was wearing? My guess is that if you knew they were Lee 101Z jeans, it’s because you’re a movie buff and not because the brand has held onto its iconic status. How has a brand that proudly stood for pure craft and authentic style fallen from the stars into the dark corners of department stores?
The best brands are like your favourite pair of jeans; they stand the test of time. Yet despite Lee’s 125-year history, its rich heritage appears to have faded from the brand’s image today.
Lee’s brand story began with a pioneer. In Kansas in the steamy summer of 1989, businessman and factory owner Henry David Lee spotted an opportunity that would change the way we dress forever. As with most great innovation, it began with dissatisfaction at the status quo. Unhappy with the quality of reliable work wear from eastern suppliers, Lee set out to do better by inventing the iconic onepiece overall that would protect the worker waist-up and waist-down. This evolved from functional to fashionable when the first Lee cowboy pants were introduced, as well as the first ever fly zip. The market was beginning to grow from work-wear to pop culture and with it, the choice of denim brands.
Lee developed its product range, featuring tailored sizing based on the rise and seat proportions, as well as inseam measurements. With the creation of the hair-on-hide label, featuring the company logo literally branded onto a leather patch on the Lee Rider jeans (reminiscent of the cowboy image of masculinity it wanted to stand for), denim branding was transformed forever. This simple stroke of marketing magic sheds light on the kind of innovation Lee jeans once had.
Compared to when Lee first emerged, denim is a busy and ubiquitous category and so communicating to customers why they should choose your brand over another is more challenging than ever.
The heritage brands such as Lee and Levi’s are up against a double-squeeze: from above with the more luxury, specialist denim brands such as J Brand and Seven For All Mankind, and from below with the high street’s increasingly credible offering. Tellingly, Topshop’s popular Baxter jean style reportedly sells nearly 20,000 pairs a week.
In his TED talk on ‘The Paradox of Choice’, Barry Schwartz describes his experience of buying jeans that he now wears every day. Once upon a time there was only one classic pair to choose from. They got the job done, sure, but they didn’t have that unmistakable feeling of the perfect fit. Schwartz points out that with hundreds of jeans to choose from, the onus is now on the customer to make the right choice. If you pick the wrong pair, it’s your fault. That growth in choice has led to increasing anxiety among consumers.
Therefore, the opportunity for brands is to provide an experience that makes choosing a pair of jeans easy, efficient and, above all, enjoyable. Unfortunately for Lee, it’s hard to find evidence that it is making the choice-to-purchase journey either easy or enjoyable.
From a retail perspective, in the UK it is not actually possible to buy Lee jeans via its website. One has the ‘choice’ of either trawling through sites such as ASOS, Debenhams or even Amazon to find a pair from their limited collections, or to look at a visual minefield of a map to find nearest bricks-and-mortar stores. Yet perhaps one would be willing to overlook these (major) obstacles if the brand itself was compelling enough to seek out.
The brand has long stood for comfort, with deep associations of masculinity and sturdiness (as epitomised by the ‘Can’t bust ‘em’ promise it held for years). This was perhaps the root of the ‘Move Your Lee’ campaign, which attempts to show Lee jeans in action on ‘real’ New Yorkers. The demonstration of great fit through the ‘Move Your Lee’ stories and images are aesthetically appealing and feels contemporary – if relying a little too heavily on the ubiquitous street-style fashion photography – yet it fails to deliver beyond secondary sponsored testimonials. The experience should emphasise the ‘Your’ not the ‘Lee’, and help customers to discover their perfect fit.
For example, the Acne jeans site features a visual tool, Virtusize, which allows you to compare the jeans you are buying with the exact fit of your current pair. It’s a simple, insightful way of improving the experience by helping you feel you’ve made the best choice for you. Another attempt at authenticity which crashed into cliché is Lee’s #Leemodernman campaign. Again, a credible idea rooted in the brand’s heritage - redefining the rules of masculinity.
Yet in a campaign that was set up to subvert stereotypes, new ‘Rules for the Modern Man’ features generic glossy imagery with lines including ‘Always have your beer cold’, ‘Never wear tighter jeans than your girlfriend’ and – in the tone of a fridge magnet you found at a 1950s car boot sale – ‘Happy wife, happy life’. It’s a woefully missed opportunity to stand for something greater, at a time when young men are looking to rewrite the rules of masculinity.
The aforementioned campaign concepts suggest that Lee is looking to stand for something; but predictable, cliché execution proves that the brand isn’t brave or decisive enough to make a commitment. As a result, its recent marketing feel a bit ‘me too’, drawing on the familiar techniques of its competitors and other fashion brands but in so doing, getting lost in the noise. Lee has the potential to own a number of compelling territories in the denim market, whether that is staying true to its masculine, no nonsense roots or concentrating on a long heritage of understanding comfort and fit.
Interestingly, the brand is gaining traction in Asian markets, where Lee has been presented as a more premium choice when it comes to great fit, so perhaps there is something in this? James Dean famously said “Dream as if you’ll live forever. Live as if you’ll die today.” Perhaps it’s a mantra that Lee should live by as a brand. A classic brand can only live forever if it acts with agility and innovates to meet the needs of today. Until Lee decides what it truly believes and boldly behaves in accordance, it will be like the faded starlet who looks wistfully at old photographs and says ‘I was in a movie once’.
Laura Tan is strategy director at Brand Union where she is lead strategist on the global Vodafone account and responsible for the strategic output of the Brand Union consumer branding practice. She also lectures at the London College of Fashion on luxury marketing and has a regular column in the Metro on the subject of fashion and digital.
This interview was originally published within The Drum magazine's 3 September issue, available to purchase through The Drum Store.
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