Body Shop, the

Anita Roddick (b. 1942), founder of The Body Shop cosmetic company, has long had an understanding of how to play the media. Her first encounter with the media came in 1976 as she was opening her first shop in a down-in-the-heels alley in Brighton, an English south coast resort town. No one, certainly not Roddick herself, foresaw that this hole-in-thewall, inopportunely situated across from a funeral parlor, would become a fifty-country empire of two thousand stores with annual revenues of more than a half-billion dollars.

Roddick said that when she put up “The Body Shop” sign, the funeral parlor owner demanded that [Page 106]she change the name and even threatened her. He was afraid that it would confuse his customers. Roddick rang up the local newspaper, the Evening Argus, and landed a sympathetic column, creating a publicity stir. Much to everyone's surprise, The Body Shop's cash register was soon ringing.

It's a heart-warming tale, but according to friends and colleagues, as with many of Roddick's tales, it's a tall one. There was no threat. Beginning a pattern of stretching the truth that would serve her well for many years—but that would also challenge the ethical claims that became The Body Shop's calling card—Roddick simply concocted the story of a naïve woman entrepreneur under siege. The understaffed newspaper ran with it. It was a lesson in media gullibility that Roddick would never forget.

Operating on a skimpy budget, Roddick sold soaps and shampoos with no-frill promises in no-frill plastic bottles. Well before the “natural” craze had caught on, she struck a responsive chord among the hippies who dominated the scene in Brighton by claiming that her fragrances and lotions were “100 percent pure.” Neither she nor her customers were sophisticated enough to know that the bright colors, heavy scents, and preservatives in her products were made with synthetic chemicals.

While her husband Gordon masterminded the company's fast expansion through franchising, the charismatic Anita emerged as a media favorite with a tart tongue. She took shots at mainstream cosmetic companies, run almost exclusively by men, who, she charged, “lie,” “cheat,” and “exploit women.” She vowed she would never hire an executive with an M.B.A., particularly from Harvard, one of many promises she would make to great fanfare and break to little notice. She was quick to play the beleaguered female card. “Business practices would improve immeasurably if they were guided by ‘feminine’ principles—qualities like love and care and intuition” (Roddick & Prokop, 1994), she often said, a quip from a speech that found its way into almost every adoring feature story written about her.

In its early days, The Body Shop thrived on the idealism of young women such as Anne Downer, a British citizen living in Singapore. On a visit home in 1981, Downer wandered into a Covent Garden, London, store and fell in love with The Body Shop concept. The twenty-two-year-old hopped on a train to company headquarters in Littlehampton, eventually coming away with rights to markets in eight Asian countries for a few hundred British pounds. “I thought Anita was quite a maverick,” said Downer. “I liked her wacky sense of ‘let's do it differently’” (interview by author, 1993).

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