Anita Roddick – inspiration for a generation

Anyone who came into personal contact with Anita Roddick has said much the same of her. She radiated energy, often leaving people struggling to keep up in her wake. She was a non-stop ideas machine, introducing new products, coming up with outrageous publicity stunts and drawing millions of women into supporting her dream.
As customers we were spoiled right from the early days. Body Shop products were inexpensive and yet were coveted. We didn’t want the brands our mothers and aunts bought. We wanted what the Body Shop produced for our generation and we were hungry for every new product that Body Shop released. We signed Body Shop petitions to stop animal cruelty, to save the rain forest (that was back in 1989!), to support campaigns against domestic violence, and political injustices.
Those employed by The Body Shop or who supplied it that could rise to pioneering Anita’s demands of them flourished, those that couldn’t walk the talk or who were “only in it for the money or the kudos” were quickly found out and sidelined. She worked her staff hard and most would have had it no other way because they knew she was working even harder. For a person heading a business such as The Body Shop became, it was never going to be easy. On the one hand it had “hippy values” and was run by an outspoken, wild haired woman who eschewed all the trappings of corporate life yet, on the other, it was hugely successful and highly profitable. When the business floated in 1984 Anita Roddick was unleashed in full sail in the grey suited world of the money markets. Her passion and confidence was such that the City fraternity both envied her the business she had created whilst shunning her for her outspoken views on issues that they felt uneasy with. Their world, our world needs inspirational people cut in the cloth of Anita Roddick. They and we all now know this.
Yet who are we remembering now? The city slickers who make their money not from creating wealth but from gambling with other people’s money? Or the woman who devised, orchestrated and shaped the business that The Body Shop became? It is Anita Roddick we will remember. Always questioning, constantly campaigning, and single handedly championing what was to become the business of the future …. green, ethical and human. Ms Roddick was both ahead of her time yet also spot on with her timing. The original Body Shop became the destination for women everywhere and, as new branches were added, the word spread that here was a source of basically packaged products that were not tested on animals, that were not mass produced by some global conglomerate, but by a small business headed by a woman. A woman who happily lent her shop windows to promote ethical trading and to bring attention to the plight of workers in overseas countries. A woman who inspired an entire generation of women – showing by example that they too could succeed in starting their businesses in what was still a male dominated world, and who could also air injustices and campaign for causes that mattered to them. The Body Shop was certainly not the fly by night enterprise that many City pundits expected it to be. It grew and grew and grew requiring rafts of senior people to join the Roddicks at its helm. Some gelled with Anita, some did not, but still the business grew both within the UK and internationally. It is the legacy that Anita has left to us that matters most – she showed us all that it is possible to start a small business with next to nothing and to nurture it and develop it without losing sight of basic ethics and principles.
Many of us felt personally for Anita when she achieved the sale of her business to L’Oreal, only to face accusations of selling out and compromising the future of Body Shop. Unbeknown to many people, Anita was already quite ill by then and needed to step out of the limelight. Her retort to her detractors was that the responsibility of the ownership of The Body Shop would force L’Oreal to adopt Body Shop policies with regard to animal testing and ingredient sourcing across its entire business. A business that is twenty, thirty, forty times the size of The Body Shop, if not larger. What an expert strategist we have lost.