BUSINESS 101: Ex-Levi’s exec blasts ‘elitist jerks’ at Harley-Davidson, Bud Light for failing to put customer first

It’s the first rule of business: "the customer is always right."Now a former senior marketing executive for blue jean maker Levi Strauss is blaming “elitist jerks and hypocrites” for woke-afflicted meltdowns such as the Bud Light boycott and the public shaming of iconic motorcycle maker Harley Davidson.“It’s Business 101. You don’t disrespect your core consumers and you certainly don’t alienate and abandon them in the search to grow and expand elsewhere,” Jennifer Sey, a former senior marketing executive for Levi Strauss & Co. Told Fox News Digital on Tuesday.The self-professed ‘life-long Democrat’ said she was forced out of a 23-year career at Levi’s in 2022 for opposing the state of California’s — and her own company’s — response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which included school lockdowns..“I was a leader in the community and I was just vilified for speaking out against school closings. I was demonized because I cared about keeping schools open. I mean, it became an unlivable place for me,” she said.“San Francisco is the most aggressively conformist place you can fathom,” she added. “It is not inclusive. It is not logical. And it is not progressive.”After being “cancelled” by corporate America, Sey relocated to Colorado and started her own line of performance athletic wear..But she says that basic message was not lost on her after activists like Robby Starbuck managed to take down one iconic American firm after another for betraying its values — and customers.In each case, Starbuck targeted companies with at least 100 years of history, associated with bedrock American ideals of freedom, individualism and hard work.“The elites adopt all these crazy far-left positions to assuage their guilt about having tons of money and privilege,” she said. “These companies are now populated by Gen Z employees from a woke education system and from woke universities who were raised in safe spaces and want you to know their pronouns… the inmates are running the asylum.”.“We are trying to take on traditional capitalism and trying to redefine it,”Harley-Davidson CEO Jochen Zeitz.Harley-Davidson is a case in point. Its CEO, Jochen Zeitz, turned discount Puma sneakers into a global fashion brand even as he socialized with the the likes of Sir Richard Branson, launched a sailing race team and opened an art museum in his name in South Africa. “We are trying to take on traditional capitalism and trying to redefine it,” Zeitz told global leaders at a conference in Switzerland in 2020, the same year he took top spot Harley.But Sey says he failed to understand the brand’s global appeal — its unabashed ‘American-ness’. Ditto for Bud Light, Jack Daniel’s and all those other brands that are facing the wrong end of a growing consumer backlash.On Monday, home improvement retailer Lowe’s was the latest to recant divisive DEI policies.“They lost their human touch. That’s the best way to put it,” longtime Harley-Davidson biker “Horseshoe” Johnny Hennings told Fox at the end of the Sturgis Motorcycle Rally in South Dakota last week.