As Levi Strauss makes inroads into the heart of the Polish consumer, it faces the twin conditions of the entrepreneurial condition: Significant challenges as well as significant opportunities. In being one of the first companies to move into Poland after the break-up of the Soviet Union and the economic and cultural opening of Eastern European countries to the West, Levi Strauss was gambling that its All-American image (which had long made Levi jeans a cherished black-market item in Soviet-dominated Eastern Europe) as well as the quality of its product would make its product appealing even in such a cash-strapped country. In large measure, its gamble has paid off, although there remain important challenges for the company. Ironically, even as Levi Strauss has decided to shutter its last factory in the United States, it now manufactures jeans in Poland to sell both in that country and throughout Western Europe. The fact that Americans may now buy that most quintessential American product - a good old-fashioned pair of Levi's - in Paris made by workers in Warsaw says a great deal about the ways in which globalization works.
The Levi Strauss company now employs 900 workers in its plants in Warsaw and Plock (http://www.internetwk.com/change/change101998-3.htm). The Polish economy has been relatively more stable than that of many Eastern European nations, and this has significantly helped the company, although both the company and the nation's economy as a whole remain subject to negative effects from countries farther to the east:
"Despite current hiccups stemming mostly from events further east, the longer-term prognosis for Poland remains promising," says Patrick O'Keeffe, general manager of Levi Strauss Eastern Europe. "Strong government commitment to balanced economic reform, together with a progressive social situation," should keep the current economic climate going, he says (http://www.internetwk.com/change/change101998-3.htm)...