New York (CNN Business) Columbia Sportswear "matriarch" Gert Boyle has died at age 95, the company announced Sunday.

Boyle led the Portland, Oregon-based outdoor apparel company for half a century, including as president and, more recently, as chairwoman of Columbia's board . The charismatic executive had also become somewhat of an icon, known within the company as Columbia's "One Tough Mother" (also the title of her autobiography) and appearing in ad campaigns alongside the likes of actor Zac Efron.

That toughness was key to the way Boyle — one of the few women leaders in the male-dominated sportswear industry — approached running the business.

"Let me tell you something," Boyle said in a 1998 CNN interview . "In business, you have to have a vision of the way you want things done, and you can't have people leave tire tracks on your back."

Born in Augsburg, Germany in 1924, Boyle's fled Nazi Germany with her family at the age of 13. They landed in Portland, where her father Paul Lamfrom founded the company that would become Columbia Sportswear.

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