Meeting Anita was like an audience with Edina from Ab Fab. But I just didn’t buy the hype
As renowned chain hits the buffers, JAN MOIR on a very revealing encounter with its pioneering founder...
ONCE upon a time The Body Shop was a High Street sensation, one of the very first businesses to harvest the green field of ethical consumerism. It sold cosmetics and skincare products which were cruelty-free and promoted fair trade and was run by pioneers who blended their exotic perfume oils with social values.
The packaging was simple, the plastic bottles were recyclable, the bags were biodegradable. All this may seem unremarkable today, but back in 1976, when Anita Roddick opened her first Body Shop store in Brighton, it was truly a revelation.
Within a decade or so, The Body Shop was a smash hit; its White Musk was the scent of a generation, while the Japanese Cleansing Grains and fruit-shaped soaps became iconic products.
Even Princess Diana bought the brand’s Peppermint Foot Lotion while the highly fragranced Dewberry range – so popular in the 1990s that many schools threatened to ban it – was almost a rite of passage for teenage girls.
Now the once-beloved Body Shop is on the ropes. Yesterday, it was plunged into administration, resulting in an uncertain future for its 200 UK shops and six Irish stores putting thousands of employees at risk.
The picture is also bleak around the world, where The Body Shop operates more than 900 stores in 20 countries, with a further 1,600 franchised stores in an additional 69 countries, giving a total of around 22,000 jobs which might soon bubble down the plughole.
Perhaps the miracle is that it has lasted this long. In the UK, The Body Shop isn’t the only High Street chain to hit hard times, but it is going to take more than
She believed business could be a force for good
a Hemp Body Mitt to scrub away its problems.
For a start, The Body Shop’s core customers are now shopping at beauty counters elsewhere; no longer impressed by vitamin E creams and ginger shampoo, they are buying tanning drops, acrylic nail products and €40 retinol serums from brands such as E.L.F and Glossier.
In the age of TikTok close-ups and selfie sticks, can there still be a future for a gentler brand offering shea body butter from Ghana and a paraben-free avocado lip mask? The answer seems to be no.
The news comes only three months after new owner Aurelius took control of The Body Shop following a long period of decline. The German private equity firm, which specialises in the purchase of troubled businesses, bought the company for €245million from Brazilian cosmetics giant Natura & Co in November.
Following ‘dismal’ trading over Christmas, Aurelius confirmed it had appointed accounting firm FRP Advisory as administrators – perhaps heralding the dismantling and inglorious end of yet another great British brand.
One of the key reasons cited for The Body Shop’s low sales figures is that they operate in a saturated market with too many other companies – including Lush and Rituals – copying their original idea of environment-friendly personal care products.
Ironic, really, as copying seems to be exactly what Anita Roddick herself did all those years ago.
It has passed into Body Shop folklore that enterprising Anita nicked the idea – and the name – from a small business in Berkeley, California, owned by two sistersin-law, Peggy Short and Jane Saunders.
In their Body Shop, the American women sold their products in biodegradable bottles that could be refilled. Anita went on a ‘buying binge’ in their store and returned to Britain with lots of products – and a business plan. (In 1987, The Body Shop paid Peggy and Jane $3.4million to change the name of their company to Body Time.)
Even now, it is hard to separate The Body Shop from its charismatic founder. There was a time when Anita Roddick was omnipotent; never off a soapbox or the television, a feminist businesswoman spoken of in the same buccaneering breath as Richard Branson or Freddie Laker.
It was her belief that business could be a force for good, and she would zig-zag the globe, buying products such as Brazil nuts and hemp from indigenous peoples to make her natural concoctions; saving the world as well as saving your complexion, and all the while campaigning in earnest for worthy causes.
Her core activism involved rescuing the rainforest and fostering trade links with the developing world. She supported Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Ogoni people from Nigeria, the Kayapo tribe of Brazil and Boys Town in Kerala, India.
To buy a banana shampoo bar, you increasingly had to negotiate a picket line of slogans, banners and Roddick’s worthy obsessions in every Body Shop outlet.
There were always accusations, which were never quite thrown off, that the company was guilty of using its social conscience as a marketing exercise.
‘I have an agenda of outrage on some issues, and I use the shops for that,’ Roddick once said.
When I met her in 1997, it was like coming face to face with Edina from Absolutely Fabulous.
She had just returned from ‘my most profound trip ever’, which had involved travelling for three months through the southern states of the U.S., living with families whose only source of income came from selling crack cocaine, cooked in their own kitchens.
Anita slept in some of these crack shacks, in a bid to keep herself real. ‘Jan, my great fear is wealth,’ she told me. ‘Wealth corrodes; it separates you from the human condition.
‘And my other great fear is that I will end up like Estée Lauder. So give me any excuse to stop
The thing they can’t change is public taste
that, to jerk me back into a new consciousness.
‘I’ve got all these freaking shops and I think, “How can we help? What can we buy from these people?”’ Maybe some cheap crack, I joked. But wasn’t there something
distasteful about looking at the lives of poor people in a bid to validate your own?
She agreed, but added: ‘I didn’t just look at them; I learnt from the experience. To understand the poor, you have to understand that they know everything about poverty.’
Yet despite such perception, controversy was never far away. In 1994, it became known that the caring, sharing Body Shop had made zero charitable donations during its first 11 years in business – after which contributions increased significantly.
There was a rocky patch in the early 1990s when damaging doubts – vigorously denied – were raised about how green and ethical some Body Shop products really were. A tense relationship with their City backers (‘those pin-striped dinosaurs’, according to Anita) persisted long after the company’s 1984 flotation.
Perhaps most telling were the skirmishes with Body Shop franchisees, who felt they were not getting a fair deal – that the company was more focused on the plight of the Ogoni and Wayapo people than on them.
Everything changed in 2006 when Anita and husband Gordon sold the brand to French beauty giant L’Oreal for €765million, which seemed to go against the grain of their hippy values.
Yet two years earlier, Anita had discovered she had hepatitis C, which she believed she had contracted in 1971, following a blood transfusion after the birth of her daughter. Her family now believe Anita was one of the first victims of the blood contamination scandal. She died aged 64 of a brain haemorrhage in 2007, leaving her £51m (€60m) estate to charity, as she’d always promised to do.
So she was no Estée Lauder, yet many of her critics will still argue that the endless proselytising of the Body Shop resulted in little of the global change they boasted about. Certainly, after my encounter with the formidable bubblebath mogul I couldn’t help but feel it was all about Anita rather than Anita’s pet causes.
‘If I take away the work from my life, I don’t think I am real,’ she said.
The Body Shop has gone through many changes since then, but the one thing it cannot change is public taste. Everyone is going to miss it, but no one was buying it, in more ways than one.
It is sad and Anita would be appalled, but maybe Dewberry has finally had its day.