``If you think you are too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito"(Elmer-Dewitt, 1). This quotation, which is displayed on the side of the Body Shop trucks in England, is one of Anita Roddick's favorite quotes. To many people, Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop, may be the mosquito. People often say "One person cannot make a difference." Roddick, however, not only did not believe that, she proved it.
Anita Roddick was born into an Italian immigrant family in 1942 and was raised in Littlehampton, Sussex. She was the third of four children. Her mother, Gilda Perella, and her husband, Donny Perella, ran the first and only American style diner in town. All the children were expected to help at the diner on weekends and after school. Gilda and Donny were divorced when Anita was eight. Soon after, Gilda remarried Henry, Donny's cousin. Henry died from tuberculosis when Anita was ten years old. Anita always felt closer to Henry than Donny. Eight years later, Anita's mother, Gilda, told Anita that Danny was really her father. Anita was the result of an affair. Upon hearing the news, Anita wrote that she "felt as if an enormous weight of guilt had been lifted off [her] shoulders. . . [Knowing that Henry was my father] gave me a lot of confidence in gut feelings-taught me to trust my instincts above everything else, and stood me in very good stead when I came to open my first shop"(Graham, 479).
In the sixties, Gilda tried to point Anita in the direction of teaching after she was accepted at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. Anita declined the offer from the school and gave up her hopes to become and actress. She was a student at the Newton Park College of Education and Bath for three years. There she studied english, history, and aesthetics. Anita won a scholarship to study the children of Kibbutzim in Israel in 1962. The three month scholarship was cut short when Anita worked with her students to play a practical joke on someone. After hitchhiking in Israel for the remainder of the scholarship period, Anita returned to England to complete her degree at Newton.
Anita held a number of jobs following school. Her work included clipping newspapers for the International Herald Tribune in Paris, teaching for a short time in England, and working for the United Nations in Geneva. Anita wrote about her experience as a teacher and said, "The only rule in my classroom was that no one should be bored and at the end of a year the lethargic, dull-eyed kids that I had started with were unrecognizable. They were proud of themselves and proud of what they had achieved"(Graham, 480). After working in Geneva, she took her savings and she "hit what she calls the hippie trail"(Elmer-Dewitt, 53). She took a self-guided tour and traveled though Tahiti, New Hebrides, New Caledonia, Reunion, Madagascar, Mauritius, Australia, and Johannesburg. The South African police shipped her back to England after she disobeyed the laws of the apartheid and went to a jazz club on "black night." Anita learned many different customs and rituals of the people in the different countries. She wrote, "You change your values when you change your behavior. . .When you've lived six months with a group that is rubbing their bodies with cocoa butter, and those bodies are magnificent, or you wash your hair with mud, and it works, you go on to break all sorts of conventions, from personal ethics to body care. Then, if you're me, you develop this stunning love for anthropology"(Graham, 480).
When she returned to Littlehampton, Anita's mother introduced her to Gordon Roddick. He was a 26-year-old Scotsman who was a poet and traveler. Anita had no interest in romance. All she wanted was to have kids and needed a sperm donor. However, Anita's interests changed and in 1971 Gordon and Anita were married while she was pregnant with their second child. The couple owned and ran a restaurant and eightroom hotel in Littlehampton. Anita was out front with the customers and Gordon was behind the scenes, organizing and managing. ARer three years of running the hotel, they found themselves overworked and not having enough time for each other or the children It was then that they decided to sell it and pursue something more adventurous. Gordon wanted to ride a horse from Buenos Aires, Argentina to New York City. Anita supported his decision and was left with two children to care for.
While Gordon was away in 1976, 33-year-old Anita decided to open a natural, environmentally conscious cosmetic store. Anita knew she would need to support herself for the two years Gordon was projected to be gone. However, she wanted to be sure that she would have time for her children every day. It was then that she opened the first Body Shop next to a funeral parlor in Brighton, which is about ten minutes away from Littlehampton. To finance the shop she used the hotel for collateral for a $6,500 loan. Throughout her travels, Anita observed no one sold bath products in small or sample sizes. In her first store she sold 15 natural cosmetic products that she developed in her garage. She packaged them in small plastic recyclable bottles, urine sample bottles to be exact. In the beginning the reason she used recyclable, minimal packaging was to keep start-up costs low. She painted the walls of the shop green to hide the damp spots, not specifically to show she was environment friendly. Anita wrote, "I made no claim to prescience, to any intuition about the rise of the green movement. At the forefront of my mind at that time there was really only one thought-survival"(Graham, 480).
Soon, Anita wanted to open a second store in Chichester. After being turned down for a $8,000 loan at the bank, she wrote to Gordon to ask his advice about turning over half the business to a gas station owned named Ian McGlinn. Ian said he would pay the full amount for half a share in the company. Anita agreed before receiving Gordon's letter advising against it. By the time Gordon returned in 1977, ten months after he left, the popularity of the Body Shop had grown so much that many customers wanted to start their own branches of the Body Shop. Up until this point the stores were run by family and friends of the Roddicks. The Roddicks had never heard of franchising, so Gordon "invented" it. The Roddicks did not charge start up or royalty fees, all that was required was that they financed the operation in exchange for the use of the Body Shop name. Before a person received the rights to franchise, Anita would interview them and ask them questions such as, "What is your favorite flower?" or "How would you like to die?" Most of the franchises were and still are opened by women.
The Body Shop was not an ordinary business. It was far different from most other cosmetic companies. In her auto biography, Body and Soul: Profits with Principles- The Amazing Success Story of Anita Roddick & the Body Shop, Anita proclaimed, "I hate the beauty business. It is a monster industry selling unattainable dreams. It lies. It cheats. It exploits women"(Graham, 479). This mind set lead Anita and Gordon to the development of the unique philosophy of the Body Shop. Their purpose was to create profits with principles. Not only did they want to make profits, they want to create social and environmental change. Anita was not going to promise to take years off a person's face or try to deceive her customers in any other way. Instead, Anita offered "A two-for-one sale no other cosmetic company could ever hope to match: buy a bottle of"natural" lotion and get social justice for free"(Drug & Cosmetic Industry, 54). The mission statement of the Body Shop reflects what a unique business they are. Their reasons for being include: "-To dedicate our business to the pursuit of social and environmental change. -To creatively balance the financial and human needs of our stakeholders: employees, customers, franchisees, suppliers and shareholders. -To courageously ensure that our business is ecologically sustainable, meeting the needs of the present without compromising the future. -To meaningfully contribute to local, national and international communities in which we trade, by adopting a code of conduct which ensures care, honesty, fairness and respect"(The Body Shop Web Page). These are a few of the statements that the Body Shop bases its existence around. Anita uses unconventional measures of advertising to stay within the profits with principles philosophy. The way she does this was by not using money to pay for advertisements. She feels that high quality items sell themselves. Even with her first store, Anita did not advertise. She lined the sidewalk with perfume leading into her store. She also hung potpourri to lure people into the shop. At one point she heard the funeral parlor directors say that her shop would hurt their business. Anita anonymously leaked the story to the press. Soon after, people's curiosity brought them to the shop. Since then, satisfied customers' recommendations to friends have been the only "advertisements" Anita use. The Roddicks received publicity by campaigning for social and environmental change. They used their window space in the store to display various to promote environmental groups. Their first display was for Greenpeace's lobbying efforts against dumping hazardous waste into the North Sea. The Roddicks used their trucks and bags to convey social messages. Other campaigns they have supported and promoted are: the save-the-whales campaign, Amnesty International, the rain-forest activists Survival Internations, and the Friends of the Earth. She has also promoted AIDs awareness, ending animal testing, and recycling. Anita focuses much of her attention to the empowerment of communities in the Third World. Her campaigns for the Third World include "Stop the Burn" to save the Brazilian rainforests and "Trade not Aid." The Body Shop sets an example not to exploit Third World workers by paying them comparable wages to those that are earned by British workers. Anita once remarked, "How can you ennoble the spirit, when you are selling something as inconsequential as a face cream?"(Wallace, 119)
Anita has also become involved with social activism in the United States. She has joined three dozen other companies to form Business for Social Responsibility. Their ambition is to ""revolutionize how business in America operates" by promoting such progressive policies as family leave and environmentally sound manufacturing"(ElmerDewitt, 54). In the U.S. Anita has used the Body Shops as voter-registration sites. In fall of 1992 they signed up 50,000 new voters and urged customers and passerby's to vote.(Elmer-Dewitt, 54) When she opened a new store in Harlem, all profits went back into the community.
Anita is also very selective in choosing her employees. The employees are hired only after they make it clear they have the same philosophy towards environmental and social issues as the Body Shop. Body Shop headquarters staff are given one day a month off to work with disadvantaged children. At the Body Shops, the sales people do not pounce on you when you walk through the door. Nor, will you see pictures of beautiful models or promises of miraculous benefits. Sales people are trained to be knowledgeable, but not forceful. If you want information, you must ask for it. But, there is plenty of information available to the customer. The containers clearly state the ingredients and purpose of the product. One can also find educational brochures about "Animal Testing and Cosmetics" and "What is Natural." The customers even have access to a reference book called The Product Information Manual that provides backgrounds on everything the Body Shop sells. As reported in Inc. magazine, "The Body Shop establishes credibility with its customers by educating them. . . Few customers suspect they're in a classroom, but that doesn''Et keep them from learning"(Inc., 34-36 ).
Today, the Body Shop has grown from a single "hippie" store in England to a multi national company with 1,366 stores in 46 countries. Anita Roddick's success has grown as well. In 1993 she was one of the five richest women in England. She has received many awards. These include being named London's Business Woman of the year in 1985 and being awarded an Order of the British Empire in 1988. In addition she has been named Communicator ofthe Year, Retailer of the Year in 1988, and received the United Nations' "Global 500" environmental award. However, Anita owes some of her success to Gordon, whom London analysts believe is the "financial wizard behind Anita's success"(Elmer-Dewitt, 52-5). Anita writes, "I think Gordon provides a sense of constancy and continuity while I bounce around breaking the rules, pushing back the boundaries of possibility and shooting off my mouth"(Graham, 482).
The success of the Body Shop demonstrates that one person can make a difference. Who would have guesses Mr. McGlinn's $8,000 investment would grow into more than $145 million? Perhaps the profits with principles theme is one that more companies should follow. As for now, Anita, Gordon and the Body Shop are continuing to promote social and environmental awareness. Anita states, "I wake up every morning thinking. . . this is my last day. And I jam everything into it. There's no time for mediocrity. This is no damned dress rehearsal"(Graham, 482).
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"The Body Shop: Truth & Consequences." Drug & Cosmetic Industry February 1995: 54-9.
Chatzky, Jean Sherman. "Changing the World." Forbes 2 March 1992: 83-4.
Elmer-Dewitt, Philip. "Anita the Agitator." Time 25 January 1993: 52-5.
Graham, Judith, ed. Current Biography Yearbook 1992. New York: The H.W. Wilson Company, 1992.
Queenan, Joe. "Saved By the Belle." Chief Executive June 1994: 66-67.
"This Woman Has Changed Business Forever." Inc. June 1990: 34-44.
Wallace, Charles P. "Can the Body Shop Shape Up?" Fortune 15 April 1996: 118-20.
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