Dame Anita Roddick, who has died aged 64 after a brain haemorrhage, opened her first Body Shop in Brighton in 1976. The year is important. The beauty business was not then about bodies, which were merely the soaped tail end of the face and hair market, its lotions laboratory tested, industrially concocted and sold through chemists’ chains or the phoney salons of department stores.
None of this connected with the 1970s change in how women wanted to pamper and present themselves. The Body Shop came from that radical sensibility that produced the self-help book Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973), much twaddle about sisterhood, and the notion, which Roddick traded on, that natural cosmetics could be feminist.
She went to a convent, then Maude Allen secondary modern school, failed to get into the Central School of Speech and Drama and, after teacher training college in Bath, taught English. Then a bold move: she travelled, taking jobs in Paris and Geneva to fund herself as far as Africa and the Far East.
At the club her mother ran back home, Anita was introduced to Gordon Roddick; they had a daughter, Justine, married in Reno, Nevada, in 1970, and wandered — before returning to Littlehampton to run a bed-and-breakfast and restaurant. How unserious their entrepreneurship was — and how far ahead of their times they were — is clear from Gordon’s decision to take a gap of two years to ride horseback from Buenos Aires to New York.
His absence was her break. She had Justine, plus baby Samantha, plus a loan of £4 000 — arranged by Gordon because Anita, in her Bob Dylan T-shirt, had failed to convince the bank of her probity. Her premises in Brighton were so derelict that she joked that green became the Body Shop colour to camouflage the mould on the walls.
Roddick’s 25 primary products were not so different from those of earlier cosmetic queens; it was the way she sold her Bedouin-recipe moisturiser that was new. She did not propose exotic fantasy: she did promise that the ingredients had not been tested on animals, were not synthetic, and — long before the Fair Trade movement — that they had been sourced directly from the world’s ground-level growers rather than commodity brokers. Her lack of packaging was anti-waste — customers should return the plain bottles to be refilled; if she huckstered anything, it was the history of the ingredients and the anthropology of their cultivators.
She sold 50% of the business to a local garage owner to raise money for a second shop, and might not have gone much further than a few more, run by friends, had Gordon not ridden back, taken over the finances and suggested franchising branches. Most franchisees were women, and they, as much as Roddick, made Body Shops unprecedented places: you would go in for brazil-nut conditioner (Roddick trekked to research adornment rituals) and be made breathless both by the concentrated smells and the fervour for green issues and aid for the developing world.
Her balance of entrepreneurship and activism seemed even weirder in the mean, greedy 1980s. The Roddicks took the business public in 1984; she later understood that that had been a serious mistake, since its success was thereafter calculated only in terms of profits and growth. Her protests about social change and alternative, egalitarian business methods did not seem to square with her new role as a pioneer female entrepreneur.
Of course, there was a reaction. By the 1990s, she was the fourth-richest woman in Britain, author of an autobiography, Body and Soul (1991), and a reliable source of quotes on ethical consumption and of finance for pacifist, ecological and human rights causes, among them Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth and the Big Issue. She was routinely derided as being left and green only to promote Body Shop or herself.
In 1992 she successfully sued over a television documentary that claimed she had lied about animal testing; in 1994 Business Ethics magazine challenged her record on green standards and fair trade — and the share price fell. She felt no contradiction in joining anti-globalisation protesters who rocked the 1999 World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle, but they were less sure about the sincerity of an anti-multinationalist who headed a company with 2 000 outlets in 55 countries.
She began to edge away, standing down as chief executive. Last year, the Roddicks outraged the finance pages and users of Jojoba cleanser alike when they sold the Body Shop to L’Oreal for six hundred and twenty-five million Pounds, of which they received one hundred and eighteen million. That she intended to give it away, plus her own fifty million Pounds or so, through the charitable Roddick Foundation, did not silence accusations of betrayal, though she was confident she could persuade L’Oreal to adopt her sort of ingredients.
But she was also relieved to be rid of the old monster, possibly because she had been diagnosed in 2004 with hepatitis C, contracted through a tranfusion during Samantha’s birth in 1971. It gave her cirrhosis of the liver, an appointment with a transplant, a sudden urgency about life and another chance to campaign, against ignorance of the disease. She was awarded the OBE in 1988 and made a dame in 2003. Gordon, Justine and Samantha survive her.
John Elkington writes: “I love her like fury, but it’s like being trapped in a brown paper bag with a bluebottle,” a relative commented of his wife — and that was Anita for me. Like all true entrepreneurs, she fired on all cylinders, all the time. I cannot remember when our paths first crossed, but I covered her work in my 1987 book The Green Capitalists, when she said: “There is something magical about small companies run by people whose thinking was forged in the Sixties. You sit down and ask not only how the business should be run, but also what should be done with the profits.”
Many thought she was new to the game of green capitalism. She wasn’t: “Although some people may think we are recent converts, the reality is that these concerns were always there … the Body Shop dates from 1976 and we were already featuring Greenpeace’s anti-whaling campaign in 1977.”
In 1988, Anita supplied the foreword for The Green Consumer Guide, which I wrote with Julia Hailes and which sold one million copies around the world. We were building on what she and Gordon had done at the Body Shop — and what groups like Friends of the Earth had done in areas like tropical timber products and CFCs. “Don’t just grin and bear it,” she encouraged readers. “As consumers, we have real power to effect change. We can ask questions about supply and manufacture. We can request new or different products. And we can use our ultimate power, voting with our feet and wallets — either buying a product somewhere else or not buying it at all.”
Anita helped us as we grew SustainAbility from 1987, advising business on sustainable development, but there was nothing special in that — she helped legions of people. Many thought her unreasonable, even crazy. But that’s typical of people who change the world.
Yes, she could get up people’s noses, castigating old-style capitalists as “dinosaurs in pinstripes”, and yet selling the Body Shop to L’Oreal, in which one of her least favourite companies — Nestlé — had a stake. But what a woman, what a heart, what a sense of humour, what a troublemaker!
At the start of the Body Shop, Anita had no real interest in the cosmetics industry, but saw a business opportunity. Her stance against animal testing was not so much driven by a love of animals as by complete incomprehension of why animal testing was necessary in the first place.
Her political activism within the Body Shop sparked many campaigns that filtered around the world through her 2 000 or so stores. After she ceased being a shareholder, her mission was to dedicate the money she had made to the causes she believed in. I’m sure her biggest regret would be that she failed to die poor, that she didn’t have the time to give her money away.
The sale to L’Oreal was almost universally perceived as a sell-out. Anita knew it was a controversial decision and agreed only on the understanding that the Body Shop would be ring-fenced within the L’Oreal group. She truly believed that she stood a good chance of being a Trojan horse and having an influence on the way L’Oreal does business.
The fact that she made one hundred and eighteen million Pounds out of the deal was lost on her. Most people would buy a yacht; she went on holiday with a file of good causes to argue over with Gordon.
To have died so suddenly was, for Anita, a great way to go. As Sam always said: “My mum won’t die, she’ll explode.” — Â