Columbia Sportswear Women's Benton Springs FleeceColumbia Sportswear Women's Benton Springs Fleece
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- Machine washable
- 100% polyester MTR fleece with 100% tricot lining
- Perfect layering piece
- Hand warming pockets
- Non-pilling fleece with Maximum Thermal Retention
About Columbia Sportswear
Founded in 1938, Columbia Sportswear Company has grown from a small family-owned hat distributor to one of the world's largest outerwear brands and the leading seller of ski-wear in the United States. Columbia's extensive product line includes a wide variety of outerwear, sportswear, rugged footwear and accessories. Columbia specializes in developing innovative products that are functional yet stylish and offer great value. Eighty-year-old matriarch Gert Boyle, Chairman of the Board, and her son, Tim Boyle, President and CEO, lead the company.
Columbia's history starts with Gert's parents, Paul and Marie Lamfrom, when they fled Germany in 1937. They bought a small hat distributorship in Portland, Oregon, and named it Columbia Hat Company, after the river bordering the city. Soon frustrated by poor deliveries from suppliers, the Lamfroms decided to start manufacturing products themselves. In 1948, Gert married college sweetheart Neal Boyle, who joined the family business and later took the helm of the growing company. When Neal suddenly died of a heart attack in 1970, Gert enlisted help from Tim, then a college senior. After that, it wasn't long before business really started to take off. Columbia was one of the first companies to make jackets from waterproof/breathable fabric. They introduced the breakthrough technology called the Columbia Interchange System, in which a shell and liner combine for multiple wearing options. In the early 1980s, then 60-year-old Gert began her role as "Mother Boyle" in Columbia's successful and popular advertising campaign.
The company went public in 1998 and moved into a new era as a world leader in the active outdoor apparel industry. Today, Columbia Sportswear employs more than 1,800 people around the world and distributes and sells products in more than 50 countries and to more than 12,000 retailers internationally.
- Apparel: 0 pages
- Publisher: Columbia Sportswear
- Label: Columbia Sportswear
- Studio: Columbia Sportswear
- Average Customer Review: based on 104 reviews
- Sales Rank in Apparel: #28
I bought three Benton Springs jackets on 1-27-2010 at Sports Authority and I'm returning at least the two white ones, where the difference in quality is really noticable. I'm going to keep a navy blue one where the inferior cut, styling, workmanship, and quality control is not as noticable. In white, mine look cheap and slightly flawed, workmanship wise. I have another white fleece jacket from Walmart with the same problem that came as a liner with a (cheap) white raincoat.
Another difference is that the new ones are fuzzier, softer and thicker and the white is pinker. That would be fine if it hung and fit nicely like it's predessor.
It's so hard to replace women's clothes when they wear out, even in classic styles. Often I have to go to another brand to get the same thing since it's "out of style" in the brand I start with. Are they assuming it never wears out? The zipper eventually broke on my original Columbia fleece jacket, not before I got a lot of wear out of it, and a white jacket cannot stay stain free forever even though this fabric was very stain resistant.
