‘One tough mother’: reluctant boss who transformed fortunes of family firm
Gert Boyle, who has died aged 95, was thrust into managing her family’s struggling business and helped build it into the multibillion-dollar juggernaut Columbia Sportswear, starring in humorous advertisements as ‘‘One Tough Mother’’.
Boyle was 46, a stay-at-home mother of three, when her husband, Neil, died after a heart attack in 1970. He left her with a debtladen company that she had scarcely been involved with, aside from designing a fishing vest for her husband that became one of Columbia Sportswear’s top sellers.
Selling the business was out of the question; three months earlier,
Neil had used their house (and her mother’s house) to take out a large loan.
And selling 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.
The family settled in Portland, where her father bought a hat company that grew into Columbia Sportswear. ‘‘I’d heard business talk all my life from my dad and didn’t pay any attention, because you know it’s just never gonna affect you and never gonna matter,’’ she told Inc. magazine in 2006. ‘‘And then one day it does. So I’ll tell you what: Always listen.’’
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, learning to navigate the factory floor and make sense of a sprawling inventory of hunting and skiing products. ‘‘We worked diligently, but we had no idea what we were doing,’’ son Tim Boyle said. ‘‘We promptly lost all the equity in the business.’’
By the end of Boyle’s first year, sales had dropped 25 per cent. She held on and spurned prospective buyers, including one who offered US$1400, telling him that, for that amount, ‘‘I’ll drive it into the ground myself!’’
She also resisted critics – and some employees – who suggested that a man might do better at the helm. ‘‘They kept telling me, ‘Come on, Gert, you’re a woman – you don’t know how to run this thing,’ ’’ she told Fortune magazine.
She soon fired the doubters and received support from Ronald Nelson, an accountant turned Nike executive who shared the same banker and became a mentor. By the 1980s, Columbia Sportswear had found its footing, spurred by the success of water-repellent Gore-Tex coats and jackets with removable linings – and by an advertising campaign that fuelled the company’s expansion far beyond the Pacific Northwest.
Created by the agency Borders Perrin Norrander, the ads presented the 5ft 3in (1.6-metre) ‘‘Ma Boyle’’ as a gruff, no-nonsense figure with a ‘‘Born to Nag’’ tattoo on her biceps. She was shown pushing (or forcing) her son to hang off a cliff, or stand in an automatic carwash, to ensure that Columbia Sportswear goods were up to snuff.
In one television spot, she used a dart gun to sedate Tim Boyle, then left him alone on a snowy mountaintop; in another, she strapped him to the roof of a car and drove through the rain and mud. ‘‘Our first ad, a quarter-page, got rejected by The New Yorker because it was too salacious,’’ Tim Boyle recalled. ‘‘I think it said ‘Tough Mother’. So at that time we knew we really had something.’’ Sales grew from
$13 million at the campaign’s launch in 1984 to $260m in 1994, six years after Boyle stepped down as president, making way for her son.
‘‘I don’t really think of myself as that nasty woman in the ads. I’m so much nicer, taller, blonder, and thinner,’’ she joked to Fortune Small Business magazine in 2003. ‘‘But I am a different person here at the office than I am at home. Because if you let somebody leave tyre tracks on your back, you’re never going to make it. You have to speak up and say, ‘This is what I am about.’
‘‘After my husband died, I said, ‘It’s the same ballgame – it’s just a different coach. I might not know what I’m doing, but we’re going to do it my way.’ ’’
Gertrude Lamfrom was born in Augsburg, Germany. Her father, Paul, 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 antisemitism in Germany.
Gert studied sociology at the University of Arizona, where she met Neal Boyle under a table at a fraternity party. ‘‘When you have a few drinks, it’s a lot more comfortable to sit, and I guess there wasn’t a chair,’’ she told Inc. magazine. ‘‘Somehow or other I ended up down there. So, always look under the table to see what’s there.’’
They married in 1948, and Neal took over the family business in 1964.
Under Tim Boyle, Columbia Sportswear acquired brands including Mountain Hardware, Prana and Sorel, and reported sales last year of $2.8 billion.
In addition to her son, survivors include two daughters, a sister, five grandchildren, and eight great-grandchildren.
Into her 90s, she remained active in business and philanthropy, notably donating $100m to the Knight Cancer Institute in Portland. She was often seen in the office issuing ‘‘Gertisms’’, mantras such as ‘‘Early to bed, early to rise, work like hell and advertise’’. Until only about three months ago, she was still signing all the company’s cheques.
‘‘I get up in the morning and go to water aerobics, then I come to work, then go around and verbally abuse as many people as I can,’’ she told Inc. magazine. ‘‘You know what I’d have to do otherwise? Stay home and do housework. That’s not my bag. They asked my son, what are you gonna do when your mother dies? He said, we’ll have her stuffed. In Columbia gear.’’ – Washington Post
‘‘I get up in the morning and go to water aerobics, then I come to work, then go around and verbally abuse as many people as I can. You know what I’d have to do otherwise? Stay home and do housework. That’s not my bag.’’