Levi's is an American clothing company known worldwide for its brand of denim jeans. With over 500 stores worldwide, Levi Strauss & Co. is one of the world’s largest apparel companies. The blue jean brand is available in more than 100 countries.
Levi’s Retail Partner Group needed to provide training and development for its franchise channel in order to ensure that performance and customer experience was in line with its company-operated fleet. Levi’s franchise stores also had an inconsistent look and feel, and lower than expected productivity and customer experience ratings. Moreover, there were too many franchise partners owning stores in the channel and not always the right partners.
As a result, the Retail Partner Group needed to increase its influence and control over the brand in this channel to ensure brand consistency and experience, and increase growth to come in line with the company-operated stores. In order to address these issues, Levi’s needed a solution that would scale across 29 countries with multiple cultural and language challenges.
Kineo and Levi’s designed the Partner Playbook - a digitally interactive application that houses best practices, trainings, case studies, and expectations of the franchise partners. This tool tells franchise owners everything they need to know about how to successfully run a Levi’s business, from selecting the best store sites, negotiating with landlords, merchandising the store, hiring and training employees, participating in omnichannel technology, and utilizing marketing resources to their benefit.
The program was designed for a dual audience—internal teams and external partners/landlords. It was designed to be brand inspiring, sleek, easy to navigate, interactive, and easy to push updates to ensure up-to-date, fresh content. The tool is multi-lingual (8 languages) and contains links to many translated tools, templates, and case studies to support the program content.
For this project, Kineo designed one elearning course for the Partner Playbook that contains nine topics. It is created as a way to facilitate ease of access and maximize take-up of the program. The app efficiently delivers the capability and complexity of this unique partner learning resource as a SCORM training package. The program design also had special customized features, including a language selector, glossary search, and progress tracking features.
The Levi's partner playbook solution was able to standardize expectations and ways of working while also leveraging best practices across the globe. With a single source of truth for their brand partners, Levi's is able to fulfill their ongoing goals of increasing store productivity and partner performance.
A month after launching, the Partner Playbook received an average of 5 views per person, with 96% of those views coming from the app. So far, there have been 1,187 views of the content in total, most originating from the Levi’s scale markets the content was meant to target.
Partner Playbook tool to set up new partners for success, enable existing partners to course correct and improve performance, demonstrate to potential partners the sort of support they can expect, and to arm internal teams with standards and best practices for working with partners. The Partner Playbook is the embodiment of the updated Levi’s franchise strategy.
