As the year comes to close Levi’s has launched one of the 2014’s most powerful cause-led activations, ‘Field Of Jeans’, demonstrating the huge impact that can be made by small everyday community/fan acts.
Leveraging its San Francisco 49ers partnership, led by naming rights at the NFL team’s new Santa Clara stadium, Levis Straus * Co allied with the football franchise to host a clothing drive to benefit their non-profit partner ‘Goodwill’ and to reduce the astonishing 26 billion pounds of textiles that end up in US landfills every year.
Field of Jeans at Levi’s Stadium was a two-week campaign calling on 49ers fans and the local community to bring their unwanted jeans to the stadium for recycling on Sunday, 23 November.
The initiative kicked off with an online launch video fronted by Levi’s ambassador and 49ers tight end Vernon Davis who encourage fans to donate their old denim and other clothing at the entrance gates of Levi’s Stadium.
For those unable to make it to the stadium itself, donations could be dropped off in Goodwill bins located at Intel Gate A, SAP Tower Gate B, Dignity Health Plaza Gate C and Toyota Gate F.
Or at Gallery 85, Vernon Davis’ own art gallery.
Donors were also all rewarded with a Levi’s discount coupon for Levi.com or any Levi’s® retail location (valid until 3/31/15).
Astonishingly, the drive collected more than 18,850 pairs of jeans which were used to create the Field of Jeans art installation by Hannah Sitzer (of Antlre Creative) and then donated to Goodwill locations in the Bay Area.
All donated denim was used as part of the Levi’s Field of Jeans artistic representation of the impact a community can make on both the planet and people when they band together to give back.
The donations not only generated local jobs by using the proceeds from sales to fund Goodwill job training programs, but also kept more than 12 tons of textiles out of landfills.
Comment
The old ‘out with the old, in with the new’ is a classic approach in an ever-changing society, but this participatory eco initiative sees a relevant, giant brand leverage fan collectivism, the reach and power of a star player and the local team and an art project to drive awareness of the ‘throw-away society’, to generate changing habits and benefit the local community
This is not just the first cause campaign of scale in which Levi’s is leveraging its new set of 49ers stadium naming rights, but part of the wider, ongoing partnership with Goodwill.
Indeed, every year LS & Co donates around $2.5m worth of product samples to Goodwill – enabling the charity to sustainably redirect thousands of product samples while generating hundreds of thousands in donations to Goodwill to fund job-training programs.
Links
Field Of Jeans Website
http://www.levisstadium.com/fieldofjeans
Antlr Creative
http://www.antlre.com/
Levis Unzipped Website
www.levistrauss.com/unzipped
Goodwill Website
http://www.goodwill.org
San Francisco 49rs Website
http://www.49ers.com/
Vernon Davis Website
http://www.vernondavis.com/
