Levi Strauss & Co. (LS&CO) is a privately held American clothing company known worldwide for its Levi’s brand of denim jeans. It was founded in 1869 when Levi Strauss came from Buttenheim, Franconia, (Kingdom of Bavaria) to San Francisco, California to open a west coast branch of his brothers’ New York dry goods business. Although the company began producing denim overalls in the 1870s, modern jeans were not produced until the 1920s.