PORTLAND, Ore. — Years before Columbia Sportswear started selling outdoor gear and was a multi-billion dollar business, it started as a much smaller company.
"We've been very, very fortunate. We've had lots of great help," said Columbia Sportswear CEO and President Tim Boyle.
His family started the business well before he was born and it didn't even start out as the same Columbia Sportswear its customers know today. When you think of Columbia, Gert Boyle's 'One Tough Mother' commercials and her no nonsense approach to running the business may come to mind. It was her father, Paul Lamfrom, that started it all.
Paul Lamfrom, before immigrating to Portland, was a successful businessman and store owner in Germany.
"He had a little business that made shirts, which he sold in the local markets. He wanted to get out Germany," Tim Boyle said about his grandfather.
The year was 1938. Adolph Hitler had already taken power as dictator of Nazi Germany. Lamfrom had his business taken away from him because he was Jewish. He fled the country with his wife, Marie, and their three daughters. They settled in Portland, where Paul's brother lived.
"My grandfather bought a little hat and cap company called Rosenfeld Hat Company, but just coming from Nazi Germany, he didn't want to have a Jewish name on the business," Tim Boyle said.
So he changed it to one that was seen throughout the phone book and named it after Columbia River.
"It was the Columbia Hat Company," Tim Boyle said.
Lamfrom did well for himself selling hats for more than a decade. Then the business started to slow down in the early 1950s.
"All of a sudden, men in America quit wearing hats. That became a problem if you're in the hat business," Tim Boyle said.
The Columbia Hat Company needed a new approach in order to stay alive and tried to sell what they could.
"The family cast about trying to sell all sorts of stuff, from little league uniforms to boats and swimsuits. and almost anything you could think of," Tim Boyle said, "And luckily, what stuck was something called a rope tow mitten."
A rope tow mitten makes it more comfortable to grab the rope-tow at a ski hill with. There was just one problem: it was a seasonal item. During a brainstorming session one night with his mom, Gert, and some executives, the group came up with an idea while sitting around her sewing machine: a double layered fishing vest that was reversible.
"That's what the company was founded on, those two ideas. Rope tow mittens, fishing vests and then we started manufacturing a few ancillary items that were along the lines of other outdoor products. That's what really sustained the business for many years," Tim Boyle said.
In 1950, his dad, Neal, joined the family business. By this time, the company had rebranded itself to reflect the products it was selling. The name was changed from Columbia Hat Company to Columbia Sportswear.
In 1964, after Lamfrom had passed away, Neal took over the business and grew the company over the next several years. In 1970, he took out a $150,000 loan from the bank, but just two months later, he passed away suddenly from a heart attack. By this time, the business had moved from downtown Portland to a building under the St. Johns Bridge.
Tim Boyle dropped out of school to help run the company with his mom, but things would go from bad to worse. Sales of the company had fallen from $1 million a year to $500,000. Columbia Sportswear was on the verge of bankruptcy.
"Things were bad and then things got worse because we had no idea what we were doing, and it was a very tough time," Tim Boyle said.
The bank called to collect on the outstanding loans and suggested selling the company, but only one offer was made for $1,400.
"My mom simply just said, 'I can drive it in the ground myself. I don't need that,'" Tim Boyle said.
In a 1988 interview with KGW, Gert Boyle said she took things into her own hands. "I had had it up to here and I fired everybody and we started all over again."
The bank had another idea to save the business and suggested talking with the owner of a nearby shoe company to help turn things around.
"He talked to Mr. Knight and Mr. Knight said, 'Yeah, I have a few folks that might be interested in helping out.' We were very fortunate that a gentleman named Ron Nelson had agreed to come on a pro bono board to help us understand how to do business."
Among the changes the board suggested was to reduce the amount of items they sold in their catalog. They cut the catalog from close to 700 items to around 100 and began importing items from overseas.
"What we did based on the advice of this pro bono board was shrink our offering down to only those things which had some real value and real points of differentiation."
Tim Boyle said the company started to design some unusual products.
"Primarily the Bugaboo Parka was our first real launch of our unusual, highly differentiated item," he said.
From there, things were off to a good start and would only get better from there. What started out as a hat store in downtown Portland has grown to a lucrative, worldwide sportswear brand that will bring in more than $3 billion in revenue this year alone.
When asked if he thought Columbia would be this successful 50 years ago, Boyle responded, "I mean, if I ever thought we would survive that would be way greater than I ever thought we would be successful doing."
Columbia Sportswear has three other brands under their name and went public in 1998. The company employs thousands of employees around the world.
VIDEO PLAYLIST: What's in a Name?