Levi's omni-channel & the Next-Gen Store

COVID reshaped retail overnight. Stores that had been about browsing and trying on now had to be safe, fast, and digitally connected. Levi's needed mobile and browser experiences that could carry a contactless holiday season, plus a CX pilot that bridged the gap between shopping online and walking into a store. The first North American NextGen store had just opened at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto: a 2,650-square-foot rethink of the fitting room, the checkout, and how a phone fits into both. The app and web flows had to keep pace.

I designed the holiday mobile and browser experiences, then built the self-checkout and contactless-returns flows for iOS and Android. The contactless-returns flow let a shopper scan an order in the Levi's app, drop the items at an in-store counter, and get refunded without touching a screen anyone else had touched that day. Self-checkout connected the app to in-store inventory so a Stanford shopper could scan, pay, and walk out. I contributed to the omni-channel pilot that tied store inventory to the app's ‘endless aisle’ (if a fit wasn't on the floor, the in-store stylist could order it for you at no charge), and worked on UK-market expansion and localization.

The flows shipped on both iOS and Android in time for the 2020 holiday season. The pilot landed at the Palo Alto NextGen store, then scaled with the rollout that opened around 100 new stores in 2020 and another 100-plus in 2021. Across the same window, Levi's digital ecosystem grew 36% year over year in Q1 fiscal 2021, and digital share of revenue climbed from under 10% in 2015 to about 26% by early 2021. The holiday push the contactless flows fed into helped carry Levi's to $5.8B in fiscal 2021 revenue, ahead of pre-pandemic 2019.