"We began rolling out the sites with Korea and Japan, and now we also have a presence in Australia. We will continue to take a regional approach towards how the new sites should look. While the templates are there, we will be looking for partners in each market."
Raju added that the key to selecting an interactive agency would be integration of the brand's offline marketing and advertising with online initiatives, and its understanding of what worked on the web.
"It's not so much a case of finding an agency that understands the Levi's brand because if you haven't worked on it, you will never fully understand it. It's more about understanding creative work on the internet and translating the work we do on more traditional media and how that can be adapted to or adopted for a fresh perspective for our online work. The design and coolness will be something that the agency needs to understand. And it should have good knowledge about best practices on the web."
Consumers are linked to Levi's country-specific sites through www.levi.com.
According to Raju, the sites are very product-focused.
Against a backdrop of shrinking sales, Levi's had unveiled an ambitious internet plan in the late 1990s to turn levi.com into the only store on the web selling the brand.
However, the brand's e-commerce experiment came to an abrupt end when the company decided to pull the plug on its online direct sales initiatives to focus on brand building.
"We made a significant push to use the web as a commerce and consumer intimacy channel. We have decided now not to do ecommerce but to link our sites to our retail partners, where people can go to their website to purchase the product online,
said Raju.
"We looked at the returns and the investments that would go into the infrastructure to set up something like this, which involves huge costs, and it made more sense to let our partners handle the commerce part.
"Fashion brands particularly need to focus on branding the company or name on the internet. The goal now is to set our footprint across the different markets."