Google and Levi’s sold just 3 Jacquard-enabled jackets in the first 2 hours of sales in LA

Today was the official retail launch day for the Levi’s Commuter Trucker jacket with Jacquard fabric (yep that’s pretty much the official name), a product we’ve known about since May 2016. According to someone who was at the LA location this morning, sales are off to an unsurprisingly slow start…

The person we spoke to was the first person to purchase the jacket at the Fred Segal location in Los Angeles, California. He was there with a friend, who also purchased the jacket, and one other customer. He said that within 2 hours of the store being open, those three jackets were the only ones sold.

While this was only the first day of the jacket’s availability, that’s a slow start for the first consumer product that sports Google’s Jacquard fabric technology — which has been in development within the ATAP division of the Mountain View company for well over 3 years. The technology was first demoed publicly in its most primitive form at Google I/O 2015.

For now, the jacket is only available to buy in-person at a select few retail outlets, including Fred Segal in LA, California; Kinfolk in Brooklyn, New York; and Concepts in Cambridge, Massachusetts. One could assume that sales at those outlets weren’t much hotter (I mean LA would be like the hotspot for this kind of product, right?) so it’s likely that Levi’s didn’t sell more than 20 (10?) of these today. But like I said, that’s not surprising considering the jacket’s price and how little marketing is going into it.

Online sales are set to open up on the Levi’s website on October 2nd. We’re hoping to get our hands on one soon so that we can share some thoughts on whether that $350 price tag is worth it for a jacket with capacitive fabric. Regardless of sales numbers, I’m a fan of the idea.