Who’s Who in Green: Anita Roddick

When Anita Roddick started The Body Shop in 1976, she just wanted to find a way to support her two young daughters. She didn’t realize at the time that her decision to open up this modest little shop, which sold natural bath and body products, would revolutionize the way businesses integrate ethics into their everyday operations.

Born Anita Lucia Perilli in Littehampton, England to Italian immigrant parents in 1942, Roddick married her husband, Gordon – a poet – in 1971 and soon after, while pregnant with their second child, found herself the sole breadwinner after Gordon set off on a horseback trek from Buenos Aires to New York. The Body Shop started out as one little store in Brighton, England offering a handful of creams and body-care products inspired by her travels to places like Tahiti, Australia and South Africa. Within 10 months, before her husband returned from his travels, she opened a second store to meet the unexpected demand. Over the next 15 years, The Body Shop quickly grew into a large business with over 2,000 stores in about 50 countries.

Roddick had discovered that there was a hunger for natural products inspired by the earth that were made ethically – supporting community trade, protecting the planet, defending human rights and never, ever testing on animals. She laid out these core values for The Body Shop in the belief that companies needed to take responsibility for their actions, from acquiring the raw materials used to make their products to packaging them and marketing them.

That was one of Roddick’s secrets to success: she rejected conventional marketing practices and instead, used The Body Shop as a platform to spread her philosophy about green consumerism and how it could help the world.

Roddick told Third Way Magazine in 1993,

The original Body Shop was a series of brilliant accidents. It had a great smell, it had a funky name. It was positioned between two funeral parlours–that always caused controversy. It was incredibly sensuous. It was 1976, the year of the heat wave, so there was a lot of flesh around. We knew about storytelling then, so all the products had stories. We recycled everything, not because we were environmentally friendly, but because we didn’t have enough bottles. It was a good idea. What was unique about it, with no intent at all, no marketing nous, was that it translated across cultures, across geographical barriers and social structures. It wasn’t a sophisticated plan, it just happened like that.

The Body Shop has had its fair share of controversy over the years, with many raising questions about the company’s greenness since it did use petrochemicals, synthetic ingredients and preservatives in its products and was taken over by cosmetics giant L’Oreal, which is anything but green and engages in animal testing, in 2006. But, these things don’t change the fact that The Body Shop was a pioneer in calling for fair trade and offering recycling programs for product packaging, among other contributions to the green business world.

Anita Roddick passed away in 2007 at the age of 64, spurring an outpouring of sympathy, support, and dedication to keeping her cause alive all around the world. This Dame of the British Empire changed business for the better, and has inspired many people to follow in her footsteps and improve upon the value-based system she incorporated into her own business.

Anita Roddick’s Green Score: 59,443

Photo credit: PA/The Daily Mail

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