Columbia Sportswear

Who the brand is for

People who want functional clothing without studying membrane charts: hiking jackets, fleece, winter coats, footwear, priced below the mountaineering brands. Columbia sells through specialist retailers, department stores, outlets and its own shops in more than a hundred countries. The brand is deliberately broad; that is its business model, not a flaw.

Who owns it

Columbia Sportswear Company was founded in 1938 in Portland, Oregon, as a small hat distributor and has been listed on Nasdaq since 1998. The company owns four brands: Columbia, SOREL (since 2000), Mountain Hardwear (since 2003) and prAna (since 2014). Chairman and CEO Timothy Boyle is the founder's grandson; his son Joseph Boyle runs the Columbia brand as the fourth generation. A corporation, then, but one tied to the same family for almost ninety years.

The figures for fiscal 2025 are in the results release of February 2026: 3.4 billion US dollars in net sales, a gross margin of 50.5 percent and selling and administrative expenses of 44.2 percent of sales. In other words, about half the retail price remains after the cost of goods, and most of that goes to retail, marketing and administration. That is normal in apparel, not peculiar to Columbia, but it explains why the material value of a garment can be a fraction of its price.

A fifty percent gross margin does not mean fifty percent profit. It means half the price is spent after the factory.

Where it is made

Columbia owns no factories. The 2025 annual report lists contract manufacturers in 16 countries for apparel, accessories and equipment, led by Vietnam (about 35 percent), Bangladesh (30), Indonesia (10) and India (10). For footwear, about 80 percent comes from Vietnam and 10 percent from China. The five largest apparel suppliers account for roughly 30 percent of production.

Then there is something most brands do not offer: Columbia publishes a map of its finished-goods factories and prints a factory number into the care label that can be looked up on it. Unlike a plain group supplier list, that ties a specific garment to a specific factory. It says nothing about wages or fabric prices, but it is the kind of transparency that can be checked.

What the price buys — our view

This section is an assessment, not a finding. Columbia products are mostly polyester and nylon, often under the company's own names for coatings and linings. That is normal for functional clothing and not a drawback in itself; synthetics are the right material here. What you can check when buying is the material declaration on the product page and the factory number in the label. Both exist at this brand, which is more than the price band would lead you to expect.