Columbia chief known as ‘One Tough Mother’
Jewish refugee transformed sportswear firm
Gert Boyle, who was thrust into managing her family’s struggling outerwear business and helped build it into a multibillion-dollar juggernaut, Columbia Sportswear, while starring in humorous advertisements as “One Tough Mother,” died Sunday at an assisted-living centre in Portland, Oregon. She was 95.
Her son, Tim Boyle, the company’s president and chief executive, confirmed the death but did not give a cause. He was named acting chairman on Monday, succeeding Boyle, who had previously served as president.
Boyle was 46 and a stayat- home mother of three, when her husband, Neil, died after a heart attack in 1970. He left her with a debtladen company.
Selling the business was out of the question and would have been out of character for Boyle, a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany who arrived in the United States at 13, speaking not a word of English.
With help from her mother and son, at the time a college senior, she staved off Columbia Sportswear’s creditors while trying to keep the company afloat.
By the end of Boyle’s first year, sales had dropped 25 per cent. She held on and spurned prospective buyers and resisted critics who suggested that a man might do better at the helm.
By the 1980s, Columbia Sportswear had found its footing, spurred by the success of water-repellent GoreTex coats and jackets with removable linings — and by an advertising campaign that fuelled the company’s expansion. The ads presented the 5- foot- 3 “Ma Boyle” as a gruff, no-nonsense figure.
Sales grew from $ 13 million at the campaign’s launch in 1984 to $ 260 million in 1994, six years after Boyle stepped down as president, making way for her son.
Gertrude Lamfrom was born in Germany, on March 6, 1924. Her father, Paul Lamfrom, ran a shirt factory before leaving the country, taking the family to Portland in 1937 to join his brother. The next year, he bought a local hat company and named it after the Columbia River, in part to mask its Jewish ownership amid memories of anti-semitism in Germany.
Boyle studied sociology at the University of Arizona, where she met Neal Boyle. They married in 1948, and Neal took over the family business in 1964.
In addition to her son, survivors include two daughters.