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ANITA RODDICK PROVED THAT YOU CAN MAKE A PROFIT AND STILL BE A FORCE FOR SOCIAL CHANGE
It’s easy now to overlook The Body Shop’s eco-ness and campaigns among the mass of brands doing similar things. But back in the 1980s, that decade of ‘loadsamoney’, hi-gloss and self-interest, the company Anita Roddick founded was innovative and standout. Anita pioneered fair dealings with developing countries, eschewing “boring” trade fairs for actual trade, going into villages in Mexico or Nepal. She once persuaded Bedouin women in Oman to reveal the formula for a heady perfume in exchange for showing them her pubic hair (they were curious as they shaved all their body hair).
Born in 1942, Anita grew up in a community of Italian immigrants in Littlehampton on the Sussex coast where, after training as a teacher, she opened her first shop in 1976. Her mother and father ran a café open all hours, which gave her the work ethic she put to good use later.
She was ahead of the thinking, but knew she had arrived at the right time, “just as Europe was going ‘green’.” Anita relished the idea of company as crusader. What she wanted was “to prove that you can be successful and still keep your sense of cool, you can make a profit and still be a force for social change.” She nurtured corporate idealism – working for The Body Shop wasn’t just about selling bars of soap but helping the community, lobbying for social change and campaigning for the environment. In a pre-internet world, what better platform than a high-street shop window for consciousness-raising? In the era of Katharine Hamnett’s pioneering political T-shirts, The Body Shop waded in. Instead of appealing to people’s vanity she appealed to their concern for the environment.
Anita got people’s backs up in the City and the beauty business, displaying a healthy cynicism for the beauty industry while promising her products could help the world. She was a rebel with a cause, most proud of the three orphanages she set up in Romania, the organic farm cooperative in Nicaragua, several health and education projects in India, a brazilnut cooperative in Brazil, a healthcare initiative in Nepal, a shea and cocoa butter cooperative in Ghana, a soap-making factory in Scotland and other legacy projects.
“It is hard to put yourself in the shoes of a person whose culture is so different they don’t even wear shoes but if by collecting brazil nuts for The Body Shop they can help safeguard their future and improve the quality of their lives, that’s fine by me,” she wrote. “Nothing The Body
Shop sells pretends to do anything other than it says. Moisturisers moisturise, fresheners freshen and cleansers cleanse. End of story.”
“In a pre-internet world, what better place than a shop window for consciousness-raising?”