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Anita Roddick says in her autobiography* that
what struck her first in Tahiti was the women’s
skin, “straight out of a Gauguin painting”. Even
elderly women had soft, smooth, elastic skin. What
did they use on it? They showed her what looked
like a lump of lard, but turned out to be cocoa
butter.
During the travels which interspersed her first
jobs as a schoolteacher and as a
women’s-rights-seminar organiser for the
International Labour Organisation in Geneva, she
was fascinated by the way women round the world
used natural substances, such as cocoa butter and
pineapple, to care for their skin and hair.
So, when her husband Gordon decided to fulfil
his ambition of riding a horse through South
America, the cocoa butter and the pineapple gave
her an idea for making a living for herself and
their two daughters while he was away.
In her home town of Littlehampton, where her
Italian mother owned a cafe and then the Cubana
nightclub, the Roddicks had run a hotel and a
hamburger restaurant, which proved both exhausting
and time-consuming. A shop, she thought, could be
nine-to-five. It could sell natural products
without fancy packaging and in small quantities, as
opposed to the big bottles at Boots. It would be
called The Body Shop, like the garages where dents
are banged out of cars.
A bank manager refused her a £4,000 loan
when she turned up with the children and wearing
jeans. The following week he granted the loan to
Gordon, who was wearing a suit and carrying a
gobbledegook-filled business plan in a plastic
folder.
She tried making her lotions in the kitchen but
then turned to a small manufacturer with whom she
drew up a list of 25 products using ingredients
that were readily available.
She then found a shop in a pedestrian precinct
in Brighton-richer and trendier than Littlehampton
-and painted it dark green to cover the damp
patches. This became The Body Shop ‘s standard
colour. The logo cost £25, and they put the 25
products in urine-sample bottles in the kitchen of
their Littlehampton hotel. Without enough bottles,
she decided to offer refills in customers’ own
containers.
Two nearby funeral directors threatened to sue
her if she used the Body Shop name. She saw them
off by phoning the story anonymously to the
Brighton Evening Argus, which gave it a
centre-spread and taught her you never need pay for
advertising.
On her first day in business, March 27, 1976,
she took £130 but some weeks brought only
£l50 and she had to lug heavy five-gallon
containers of lotions into the shop herself. The
hot summer of 1976 rescued her and she decided to
open another shop in Chichester, for which she got
£4,00O from a local garage-owner in exchange
for a half-share of the business. His half-share is
now worth over £140 million.
Franchising began when Max Bygraves’s daughter
opened a branch of The Body Shop in Hove and it
continued as a cheap way to expand. There are now
200 branches, mainly franchised, in Britain and 500
in 30 countries abroad.
When a sale of shares on the Stock Exchange in
1984 made the Roddicks millionaires, they discussed
what they should do next and decided on
campaigning. They campaigned with Greenpeace for
whales, with Friends of the Earth for the ozone
layer, with Amnesty International for human rights.
They also backed recycling, attacked the testing of
products on animals, and set up a soap factory in
the grey,jobless Glasgow suburb of Easterhouse.
Campaigning and a desire to buy natural
ingredients from the people who produced them
caused Anita Roddick to launch Trade Not Aid. “When
l was working in Geneva, I had seen the waste
involved in aid programmes. . . . I wanted to be
Christobel Columbus going into villages in Mexico
or Guatemala or Nepal and seeing what they had to
trade.
Her first effort, however, went wrong. She
commissioned the International Boys Town Trust in
South lndia to make “footsie rollers”, a massage
device, and went there herself to see the boys
making them. A new Boys Town was built with money
from The Body Shop, franchise holders and
employees. Then she found the rollers were not
being made by the boys but in sweatshops for a
price far below what The Body Shop was paying.
Undaunted, she went on to projects in Nepal and
Brazil. The Body Shop also sponsored a Canadian
television series about endangered tribes. With TV
crews, Anita Roddick travelled into a remote
mountainous area of Nepal and then into the Sahara
where she met the Wodaabe people of Niger.
“Fundamentally:.” she says,”what we have learned
is that the art of giving is not simply doling out
money nor dishing out things we assume people want.
lt is the ability to work with them. The art of
development is helping people find the right tools,
and the right approach, to develop themselves.
The Body Shop has just come out top in the 1991
UK Awards for Volunteering. Every employee can have
half a day off a month, with pay, to do some
voluntary service. Anita Roddick says: “You educate
people, especially young people by stirring their
passions. So you take every opportunity to grab the
imagination of your employees. You get them to feel
they are doing something important.”
As for money, “l think its value is the
spontaneity it gives you. There are too many
exciting things to do with it right now to bother
about piling it up.
*”Body and Soul” by Anita Roddick
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