Columbia Sportswear, which is gearing up to celebrate its 70th anniversary next year, will put all its brands for the first time under a single roof next December, except for Pacific Trail. Columbia’s large product range will be featured alongside Sorel boots, Montrail footwear and Mountain Hardwear apparel in a relatively large Columbia store due to open next December in the ski and winter sport-rich French town of Chamonix. The store will span two floors and measure 220 square meters. Jean-Francois and François Coquoz, who have 40 years of retail experience in the region, will be Columbia’s partners in this unique venture. No decisions have yet been made about other multi-brand Columbia stores of this kind in Europe.
Looking at the next couple of years, the group’s management doesn’t have plans for a possible introduction in Europe of Pacific Trail, an American lower-tier brand that it most recently added to its portfolio to be positioned as a complementary brand for the U.S. market. On the other hand Paul Gils, the Swiss-based European general manager of Columbia, continues to take what he calls “baby steps” with the integration of Montrail and Mountain Hardwear into the company’s European sales apparatus. For example, the now integrated sales force of Columbia in Germany will likely take care of Montrail as well.
In France, Montrail will continue to be handled by a dedicated agent, Energylab, because it is doing a good job in the country, whereas some of Columbia’s sales reps take care of Mountain Hardwear as well. Agents in Italy and Belgium share Montrail and Mountain Hardwear already. Mountain Hardwear still has its own separate distributors for the UK and Norwegian markets.
Anyhow, as Columbia did previously with Sorel, all the back-office functions of Montrail and Mountain Hardwear are now shared with the main brand, starting off with the logistics. Even sales and marketing are handled by one single team in Geneva. The result has been a high level of service and higher growth rates for these secondary brands than for Columbia in Europe, where the direct sales of the group now amount to the equivalent of about $200 million a year.
For the Columbia brand, France, Spain, Finland and Russia have been the strongest markets in Europe as of late. The biggest challenge as well as the biggest opportunity for Columbia in Europe is Germany, where the company now has a fully integrated sales team. Columbia says it is “on track” in the UK, and that it continues to have a strong relationship with Blacks Leisure Group in the country.
Columbia is satisfied with its position in Russia, its fastest-growing market in Europe, where it works through the Sportsmaster group. Columbia continues to have its products distributed in China by Swire Resources, a Hong Kong-based firm that operates more than 150 retail outlets in Hong Kong and China in addition to distributing brands like Arena, Champion, Puma, Rockport, Skechers and Teva.
Among other things, the American company prides itself on having successfully stayed out of mainstream advertising techniques for the last 23 years. Around the same time that it introduced its Bugaboo coat (named after a mountain range in British Columbia), Columbia launched some new advertising ideas that raised eyebrows among marketing professionals, but proved to be successful for Columbia.
As the quintessential godmother of the firm, Gertrude Boyle will be at the center of next year’s celebration of Columbia’s 70th anniversary. Special events and promotions are already being planned around this still dynamic woman who unexpectedly took the reigns of the company when it was still a small outdoor fishing and camping apparel maker in Oregon, following the sudden death in 1970 of her husband Neal.
Her history is divulged in a book titled “One Tough Mother: Success in Life, Business and Apple Pies,” which gives a profile of Gertrude Boyle’s life and outlines Columbia’s rise. All royalties of the book, which was written in 2005 by Boyle and Terry Tymchuk, are being donated to the Special Olympics and CASA for children. Columbia has been supplying uniforms to the Special Olympics since 1995.
Today, at age 84, Gertrude Boyle is still active as the company’s chairman, and her son Tim Boyle is the president. The mother-son duo became known in many places from the quirky commercials in which Gertrude would test the durability of Columbia’s products by running Tim over with a Zamboni, putting him through a cement mixer and sending him through a car wash, among other things. When asked what the advantages or disadvantages have been to having a mother/son management team, Gertrude Boyle told SGI Europe that having a son as an employee can be beneficial because “you know what you’ve got because you raised ‘em,” while lamenting that “you can’t talk to employees like you can talk to your children.”
