Google and Levi's connected smart jacket will come out this fall and costs around $350
A delayed product is better than no product — The connected denim smart jacket made in partnership between Levi's and Google's ATAP division now has a price tag, but its release date has been pushed from this spring to the fall.
Context & Ripple Effects
When Google's ATAP division and Levi's unveiled the touch-enabled jacket last May, it was pitched as the first consumer garment for Project Jacquard, with a spring 2017 launch and no price. Today's update closes both gaps: the Commuter Trucker Jacket ships this fall at around $350, trading a season's delay for a finished product.
The pricing matters because it follows ATAP's established playbook of pairing its lab tech with heritage consumer brands — the same structure behind the Google, Intel and TAG Heuer luxury smartwatch partnership. A $350 denim jacket is priced as a premium garment that happens to be smart, not as a gadget.
First-order effects
- Levi's now has a shippable premium SKU at roughly $350, and ATAP finally converts a Project Jacquard demo into a retail product after the spring slip.
- Buyers get concrete terms — music, maps and call controls woven into a trucker jacket they can pre-plan for fall — instead of a vague launch window.
Second-order effects
- Other apparel brands now have a reference price and a working template for tech partnerships, forcing them to decide whether to license touch-textile tech or cede the connected-garment category to early movers like Levi's.
- Jacquard's future hinges on sell-through at that price point: strong demand gives ATAP leverage to sign more brand partners, while weak sales make the next textile deal harder to justify internally at Google.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, garments become a distribution channel for tech platforms — clothing brands supply the body and brand equity while Google supplies the sensing layer, mirroring how ATAP structured the TAG Heuer watch.
- A viable $350 smart garment would push wearables beyond wrist-worn devices toward ambient interfaces embedded in everyday clothing, though whether consumers pay a premium twice (for the garment and the electronics) remains the open question.
The trend: Heritage apparel brands are becoming hardware partners as tech labs like ATAP move from demos to priced, shippable products that embed computing into clothing.