Dame Anita Roddick

Dame Anita Roddick
Founder of The Body Shop

Anita Roddick was born in 1942, to an Italian immigrant couple in an English seaside town. She was a natural outsider, drawn to other outsiders and rebels. James Dean was her schoolgirl idol. She also had a strong sense of moral outrage, which was awakened when she found a book about the Holocaust at the age of ten.

Trained as a teacher, her educational opportunity on a kibbutz in Israel turned into an extended working trip around the world. Soon after she got back to England, she was introduced to a young Scotsman named Gordon Roddick. Their bond was instant. Together they opened a restaurant, and then a hotel. They got married in 1970.

She started The Body Shop in 1976 to create a livelihood for herself and two daughters, while husband, Gordon, was trekking across the Americas.

She had no training or experience and her only business acumen was Gordon’s advice to take sales of £300 a week. Entrepreneurship is about survival and, creative thinking. Operating that first shop taught her that business is not financial science. It is about trading: buying and selling. It is about creating a product or service so good that people will pay for it.

Thirty years later, The Body Shop has over 2,045 stores serving over 77 million customers in 51 different markets in 25 different languages and across 12 time zones.

Her early travels had given her a wealth of experience. She had spent time in farming and fishing communities with pre-industrial peoples, and been exposed to body rituals of women from all over the world. The frugality her mother exercised during the war years made her question retail conventions. Why waste a container when you can refill it? And why buy more of something than you can use? They reused everything, they refilled everything and they recycled all they could. The foundation of The Body Shop's environmental activism was born out of ideas like these

She believed that success is more than a good idea. It is also about timing. The Body Shop arrived just as Europe was going 'green’. The Body Shop has always been recognisable by its green colour. She opened a second shop within six months, by which time Gordon was back in England. He came up with the idea for 'self-financing' more new stores, which sparked the growth of the franchise network through which The Body Shop spread across the world. The company went public in 1984.

Businesses have the power to do good. That’s why The Body Shop’s Mission Statement opens with the overriding commitment, ‘To dedicate our business to the pursuit of social and environmental change.’ The stores and products are used to help communicate human rights and environmental issues.

The Body Shop and Anita Roddick have always been closely identified in the public mind. Today, it is impossible to separate the company values from the issues that she cared passionately about – social responsibility, respect for human rights, the environment and animal protection, and an absolute belief in community trade.

The Body Shop is a global operation with thousands of people working towards common goals and sharing common values. That has given it a campaigning and commercial strength and continues to set it apart from mainstream business.

She launched her own website www.AnitaRoddick.com in 2001 and an activism portal www.TakeItPersonally.org in 2004. She was overwhelmed by the potential of the web to link like-minded people and move them to mass-action. She believed in the saying, we are only limited by our imaginations.

Roddick died of a major acute brain haemorrhage on 10 September 2007, after being admitted to St Richard's Hospital, Chichester the previous evening suffering from a severe headache. She fulfilled her promise to leave her daughters nothing, on moral grounds, when she died; all her estate went to charities.

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