Body Shop’s Oxford Street store among 100 closures

Straight-talking common sense from the front line of management

THE Body Shop is closing its flagship Oxford Street store immediately, as it almost halves its high street presence after collapsing into administration.

Nearly 100 of The Body Shop’s 198 stores will close in a bid to “re-energise” the retail chain and secure its future, say administrators at FRP. The plans emerged a week after private equity house Aurelius placed the UK division of The Body Shop into administration.

FRP at the time said The Body Shop’s latest struggles followed an “extended period of financial challenges under past owners”.

Aurelius swooped for the retailer just three months ago, acquiring it in a cutprice deal worth £207m.

However, it is understood that after completing the deal, Aurelius discovered the company’s finances were in a worse state than expected. Peter Wood, one of the key dealmakers behind the deal, recently resigned from Aurelius.

Restructuring chiefs at FRP said they had evaluated the business and decided that The Body Shop’s current store portfolio was “no longer viable”.

Seven stores, including The Body Shop’s flagship Oxford Street site which was renovated five years ago, closed immediately. It is not yet known which locations will remain open.

The store shake-up is expected to result in hundreds of job losses, with further head office roles to go.

The Body Shop, which was founded in 1976 by human rights campaigner Anita Roddick, employs more than 2,200 people across the UK.

That includes around 750 staff in its head office, where around 40pc of jobs may go as part of restructuring efforts.

The administrators said: “This swift action will help re-energise The Body Shop’s iconic brand and provide it with the best platform to achieve its ambition to be a modern, dynamic beauty brand that is able to return to profitability and compete for the long term.”

They said there would be a “renewed focus on products, online sales channels and wholesale strategies”.

The Body Shop has struggled in recent years in the face of greater competition from rivals Lush and Rituals.

It was widely credited for bringing ethical – or “cruelty-free” – beauty products to a mainstream audience.

However, other stores have since also put their ethical credentials front and centre.

Q

Almost 100 of The Body Shop’s UK stores sadly face closure, with jobs at risk as well after it collapsed into administration. What do you think went wrong for the retailer after years as a familiar presence on high streets? Did the brand miss founder Anita Roddick after its sale in the 2000s? As a fellow business owner, is there a wider lesson to take away?

A

I’m proud I was featured alongside Roddick in an Open University film in 1977 about ethical marketing. I was introducing a “fair deal” for customers with a money-back promise while she had just opened an eco-friendly cosmetics shop in Brighton. It soon became clear that Roddick’s initiative was much more groundbreaking than my own. She was a pioneer and a visionary – customers loved her values and bought her company’s green image.

In no time, The Body Shop became a financial favourite, floating its shares at a princely price. “Niche retailers” were in fashion, so Tie Rack and Sock Shop followed Roddick to the market, but they lacked The Body Shop’s innovative culture and vanished before Roddick had grown her business at home and abroad to more than 5,000 shops.

She was a superstar, one of my top 10 high street heroes. Roddick was an integral part of The Body Shop. By putting her personal principles on the line, using third world suppliers and campaigning against animal cruelty, she won over a big band of customers and set ethical standards for others to follow. She was one of the few who proved that you can be nice and make money. Despite some doubts about her ethical credentials, Roddick’s magic remained until 2006 when she sold the company to L’oréal. She promised to monitor their standards but when she died a year later, L’oréal missed that vital contact with the company’s conscience. L’oreal had lost a big part of The Body Shop brand. Roddick’s intuition created a great business, but 48 years is a long time for a retail chain to prosper without adding to the original concept. To survive, businesses need to change. The shops needed reinventing to still be a high street favourite in 2024.

As a pioneer, Roddick was bound to have competitors keen to follow her success. Market leaders must keep ahead of the game – Lush prospered by following The Body Shop’s formula, and Bath and Body Shop has been a strong rival in the US. The Body Shop became trapped by its heritage – the shops look little different from 30 years ago, in contrast with Greggs, which has been a masterclass in retail development. Did the brand miss her? Yes. She was a one-off. It was tough for the L’oréal team to follow in her footsteps. A corporate professional management team is bound to find it difficult to replace an inspirational leader who ran the company using intuition, flair and moral principles rather than key performance indicators, management accounts and algorithms.

You ask what went wrong – nothing, really. The Body Shop has followed a normal lifecycle – few businesses will last forever. Every year, big names disappear from the high street, it’s not easy to keep finding a fresh formula.

What can we learn from The Body Shop? At Timpson, we have taken 50 years to evolve from a specialist shoe repairer to a chain of multi-service shops with a strong culture of trust and kindness that we call upside-down management, but we cannot stand still. We must continue to innovate while keeping our company culture.

It helps being a family business – The Body Shop was never going to lose its ethical principles while Roddick was at the helm. We will always need a chief executive who has our values ingrained in their heart. A professional manager from elsewhere would save money by cutting the colleague benefits that created our success. Succession planning is vital. Every Timpson line manager is homegrown and all new starters (including two of my grandchildren) are taught why trust, freedom and kindness matter so much.