Hard Boyled

Celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, Columbia still enjoys a rich history, potent brand image and a volume and distribution strategy that should make it the envy of any company in the outdoors.
Tim Boyle doesn't latch himself to the roof of a car driven by his mother for nothing. And there's a reason why he finds himself thrown over a cliff, forced through a car wash, or why he touts himself as the guinea pig for Columbia's all-weather outerwear. Simply stated, he does it to be different.
Different, that is, from Nike, Reebok, Adidas and Fila.
Different is indeed the word to describe Columbia's advertising campaign that since 1983 has followed matriarch Gert Boyle as she puts son and company chair Tim through the ringer on a series of all-weather product tests.
It's fun, it's light, it's irreverent, it makes consumers remember Columbia-it is, in a word, different.
"The overriding issue when we talk about marketing is, how do we not be Nike, Adidas, Reebok or Fila?" says Tim Boyle. "Those guys have a way of marketing their products that is driven by formula, and it's obviously very effective. The key for us is, how can we differentiate ourselves and still have a broad audience?"
So far, the company has been successful in doing just that. In the outdoor industry, Columbia is probably one of the most broadly distributed brands, yet its image is strong enough to be carried through a multitude of distribution channels, from specialty outdoor to big box sporting goods and showing up in just about everything in between. Columbia seems to have nailed the formula, establishing that hard-to-attain balance between brand image and volume. And the numbers can prove it: in 1987 Columbia was a $30.5 million company. By 1993 that figure had catapulted to $192 million; and at presstime the brand was forecasting $350 million in sales for 1997.
GOING EVERYWHERE
"It's been a distinct strategy for the company to have products that can sell in many different kinds of distribution channels," says Boyle.
But he is quick to point out that it wasn't always that way by choice. Sixty years ago upon the company's founding, and then in the '70s when it was near bankruptcy, Columbia took orders from, well, anyone who would place them. "We didn't have a lot of options," Boyle says. "We couldn't be selective and take orders from only those people who had the most prestigious stores. We had to take them from anyone who was willing to give them to us."
But the orders came in, and as it grew, Columbia slowly but surely became a manufacturing-based company that had to sell at high volume to keep its operations-and profitability-well-oiled. "Having to sell a lot means you have to sell to dealers who buy a lot, and you have to balance that part of the business with an established business which is to smaller dealers who buy smaller quantities," he says. The answer? Make a broad enough product line so that there's room for everyone-a goal that Columbia has been steadily striving towards since its birth 60 years ago and just now seems to have reached.
Columbia was founded in 1937 by Gert Boyle's parents Paul and Marie Lamfrom, who fled Nazi Germany in 1937 and resettled in Portland, where they purchased a small hat distributorship and shortly after began manufacturing hats and accessories themselves. In the late '50s and early '60s it evolved into a hunting and fishing-based company under the leadership of Gert and husband Neal Boyle. In 1970 Neal died of a heart attack, and Gert enlisted son Tim to take the company from near bankruptcy through its next phase of growth, outerwear. The decade that followed saw the debut of the brand's Interchange system (a three-layer system initially launched in a hunting jacket) to the ski industry with the landmark Bugaboo jacket-which crossed the million-unit mark in 1993 and remains one of the company's best sellers.
BREAKING OUT
However, it's been Columbia's latest phase of growth-the mid-to late-'90s-that has seen the most action, as Columbia began a product diversification process that has since seen it enter into the sportswear, footwear, golf, kidswear and snowboard apparel markets-all distinctly different businesses that, as Boyle admits, each had their own learning curve.
"I would say that, in general, they've all been more difficult to enter than we'd originally thought," he says. "In snowboarding, we had to get over some internal, theoretical issues"-like, would young, edgy people really buy Columbia? Same story with golf: how could Columbia convince the market that there was room for a brand that wasn't born and bred on the country club? Still, with each new market the company has entered, it has been able to successfully carve a place for itself, usually bringing to bear the same product-value-brand image formula that put it on the map in outerwear-and that keeps its retailers happy.
"I think it's being innovative, and being a value," Ron Menconi, GMM for G.I. Joe's, says of the brand's success. Columbia is consistently the chain's best-selling outerwear brand, and Menconi notes that positioning the brand as all-purpose outerwear-and not just skiwear-has been key to its image with the consumer.
Additionally, Menconi says the recent segmentation of the line-positioning the Titanium collection of waterproof/breathable outerwear at the company's upper-tier-has been successful, and has eliminated some concerns about Columbia's broad distribution strategy. "Anytime you have something that's selling very well you're concerned about someone else selling it," he says. "But they've done a great job with the Titanium collection. That's where we've had our best success."
THE HARD QUESTION
With all the success the company has had in diversifying, the question begs: what about hard goods? In a market where Nike's rumored to be toying with snowboards and Timberland packs and travel gear are pulling through at retail, isn't there room for Columbia to spread its brand image to categories beyond apparel?
"We've looked at licensing opportunities," admits Boyle, but he insists the company has always passed to focus on apparel. "It's not in the foreseeable future anywhere on the radar screen that we would be in hard goods," he says. "It's just a whole different deal. I'm not sure we should spend our time doing that."
Boyle says the company is through with its spurt of category extensions for now, and says the next phase of growth will come from international business, particularly in Europe and Asia. Going public is one of the biggest rumors at Columbia, which is one of the largest privately-held companies in the outdoor industry. Here, Boyle is fuzzy. "We analyze this stuff all the time in terms of what's the best way for the company to capitalize itself-but we're not ready to make any announcements yet."
And as for long-term goals, Boyle is equally vague. "We don't have any timetable," he says, and simply cites the company's mission statement, which has indeed been its modus operandi throughout its history: "To grow as fast as possible, responsibly." (Outdoor)