Gert Boyle, 95, sportswear chief was billed as ‘one tough mother’

Gert Boyle, a Germanborn businesswoman who built the billion- dollar Columbia Sportswear Co. and starred in its ads as “One Tough Mother,” died Sunday in Portland, Oregon. She was 95.

Her son, Timothy Boyle, confirmed the death in an assisted living facility.

A charismatic figure known for her wry sense of humor, Boyle had taken over the company from her husband, Joseph Boyle, who was known as Neal, after he died of a heart attack in 1970. Columbia Sportswear was a small company in debt. Gert Boyle was 46 and had spent her life raising three children. But she decided to take the helm when her bank encouraged her to take an offer of only $1,400 for the company.

“For $1,400, I would just as soon as run this business into the ground myself,” she recalled saying to a local business executive in her 2005 memoir, “One Tough Mother: Taking Charge in Life, Business, and Apple Pies.”

Boyle, becoming president and chairwoman, soon repositioned the company as one that offered sportswear for everyone, not just experienced athletes. She knew that as a middle- aged woman she was an unusual president, so she made herself the face of Columbia, starring in a print and television ad campaign as the Tough Mother who stood stone-faced as she oversaw absurdist product tests on her son (dropping him out of a helicopter, strapping him to the roof of her car).

Columbia Sportswear flourished, becoming the largest outerwear brand and leading seller of ski wear in the United States. When Boyle took over the company, it was recording about $800,000 in sales a year (the equivalent of about $5.4 million today). Last year, the company, which is now run by her son, Tim, and employs more than 7,800 people, earned $2.8 billion in revenue.

“If someone asked me to swim a mile, I would tell them I couldn’t,” Boyle wrote. “But if someone took me out on a boat and pushed me into the ocean a mile from shore, you better believe I would start swimming.”

Gertrude Lamfrom was born March 6, 1924, in Augsburg, Germany, to Paul and Marie Lamfrom. Her father ran a shirt factory there. When she was 13, with the Nazis in power, she and her family, who were Jewish, fled Germany for the United States and settled in Portland.

Her father soon bought a small business there, the Rosenfeld Hat Co. Because he felt that the company’s Jewish- sounding name could pose a risk, he decided to change it. Opening the phone book, he noticed that a lot of businesses took their name from the river that runs through Portland. Doing likewise, he renamed the business the Columbia Hat Co.

Boyle and her two sisters would work there putting hat boxes together.

After graduating from high school, Boyle enrolled at the University of Arizona, where she studied sociology. She met her husband at a fraternity party.

Back in Portland, hats were losing popularity, but her father could see that hunting, fishing and skiing were not. The company began manufacturing ski gloves and became Columbia Sportswear.

Boyle and her husband moved back to Oregon, and he began working for the company in the 1950s, taking over as president in 1964, when her father died. Gert Boyle worked in the home.

When she took over the company in 1970 after her husband’s death, Boyle brought along her young son to be her right-hand man.

“I was a housewife and a mother, and Tim was a 21-year- old college student, when fate put us at the helm of Columbia,” she wrote. “While we may not have had business experience, we did have tenacity.”

She had to quickly piece together how the business was run.

“We had absolutely no clue what was going on,” she wrote. “We searched Neal’s desk, hoping to find a document that would provide some guidance on the day-to-day operations of the business, but only found a few notes that made no sense.”

Some people around her doubted that a woman could run a company. Many suggested that she bring on a male executive. She wrote: “I could still hear the businessman who, upon learning that I was president of the company, proclaimed, ‘But you’re a woman.’ My response to him? ‘ You know, I noticed that when I got up this morning.’ ”

After her first year in charge, sales were continuing to fall and Boyle had to lay people off. She began manufacturing products for other brands. She outsourced to Asia. Though other outdoors jackets were selling for $300, Columbia aimed for $100.