What I learnt from Anita Roddick –
The Body Shop: a tale of business as unusual
When I went to work for Anita and Gordon in the mid ’90s, I was given responsibility for the brand and marketing communications across 50 countries or so. Anita was evangelical and educational. She was political. She believed that, through active participation, colleagues and customers could unite to make the world happier and more sustainable.
Anita hated the Beauty Industry, whilst inventing a global cosmetics and beauty brand. As Mark Constantine of Lush wrote, without The Body Shop there is no Lush or any of the natural/clean/vegan brands that have followed over the past 40 years. We advocated beauty from within, for and with real women– a positioning subsequently adopted by Dove – with tremendous impact. We celebrated ritual – bringing marmalade scrub to Tokyo and Japanese bathing salts to Guildford.
The business itself was an experiment – it created the first ethical audit, established fair trade (Trade not Aid), enshrined volunteering, pioneered reuse, recycling and water conservation, and built long term relationships with suppliers with open book sourcing. It famously changed the law about animal testing and alerted us to climate change. As Mark Constantine says, so much of this practice is now embodied within the B Corp movement.
Through communication and design, extraordinary talent was encouraged to use visual and verbal language to court controversy, campaign and persuade everyone that they could make a difference. Early Pret and Innocent graphics and tone of voice owe much to TBS.
The Body Shop has created tangible impact and legacy across consumer brands and within business practice. All good stuff. But perhaps the real differentiator was the political activism and participation. Not soft and woolly, but hard edged and, sometimes, polarising. Patagonia now leads the trail here.
I was already a believer in business as a force for good before I joined The Body Shop. And I still am. I set up Circus with The Body Shop as our first client. But what I have since learnt is the importance of ownership. Conviction can only be delivered with owners who understand that purpose must contain sacrifice, as much as ideology. And here, The Body Shop has had a rocky ride. Anita railed against laziness and apathy, not against business or profit.
As Anita said in Business as Unusual – “You can’t stop business from going global, but you can make it listen to the responsibilities that go with jumping onto the globalisation bandwagon. It comes from the businesses involved seeing that acting responsibly and responsively is actually good for business. Business cannot avoid moral choices, after all: its future depends on it.”
Written by Dilys Maltby
February 2024
Header image: The Body Shop
