Sunday, November 26, 2006
Dame Anita Roddick, Founder of " Body
Shop", 2nd Generation Italian
The ANNOTICO Report
Dame Anita Roddick, a second-generation Italian immigrant,
is the self-styled hell-raiser of the business world and one
of the
Now 31 years old, The
Body Shop is a multi-local business with 1,980 stores serving over 77 million
customers in 50 different markets in 25 different languages and across 12 time zones, that she sold to L'Oreal in 2006 for 650
million lbs, making her family worth in excess of $100 million.
But she takes greater pride
in her now fulltime activism regarding the issues that she cares
passionately about social
responsibility, respect for human rights, social justice, the environment and
animal protection.
She rails against MNC (Multi
National Corporations) and claims they harbor more criminal activity than
anywhere else, and that they have no soul.(Of course
this is of some concern to her parent corporation!!)
Anita was born in 1942
in Littlehampton, a small
Her childhood, and family
are seldom spoken about, but I have discovered Anita was born in a
bomb shelter during WWII. Her mother, Gilda, brought up her four children alone
after divorcing her first husband, Donny, and marrying his cousin, Henry, who
died two years later. The family ran a cafi where the
children were required to work at weekends and after school. It wasn't until Roddick was 18 that she learned that Henry was her real
father, and that she was the result of an affair. Roddick
was relieved, for Donny was irascible. Gilda inspired in her children a work
ethic and a respect for natural remedies: they soaked smelly socks in crushed
ivy, learned that olive oil was good for the hair.
Nor have things always run smoothly with Gordon,
who, in 2000, had an affair. At the time Roddick
declared that they had an open marriage. Later she qualified it by explaining
that she meant that they had different and separate interests, rather than it
being open in the sexual sense. While Gordon loves polo and golf, his wife
would rather spend six months travelling with a
vagrant in
Dame Anita's radical
approach
BBC News
By Laura
Cummings
BBC News Online business reporter
17 July, 2003
Dame Anita Roddick, the self-styled hell-raiser of the business world
and one of the
The Body Shop name may conjure up images of
cocoa butter moisturiser and tea-tree facial oil -
but its founder says the company was always about challenging business ethics.
"There is no more powerful institution
in society than business," says Dame Anita in her book 'Business as
Unusual'.
"I believe
it is now more important than ever before for business to assume a moral
leadership."
Such idealism didn't always sit well with her
counterparts in the City.
As the Body Shop became a global brand and
more preoccupied with commercial realities, Dame Anita's radicalism was seen by
insiders as more of a liability than an asset.
Last year she stepped down as the co-chair of
the Body Shop and decided to take a backseat at the company she set up more
than 25 years ago.
Not just about vitamin E cream...
Stepping down
hasn't diminished her need to shake up convention - ethically, socially and
environmentally.
Her activism is palpable the minute we meet -
she is smaller than anticipated but with an intense energy, leaving you feeling
that anything is possible.
The Body Shop, she insists, was always about
communicating issues and campaigns - even if the cocoa-butter buying customers
didn't always realise it.
"The politicism
of the Body Shop has always been its DNA - the shops became our billboards.
"I don't give a damn if we were made
successful by Mrs Rosie Brown who loved her vitamin E
cream. Behind us there was a tacit acceptance of what we were doing."
Campaigns included a nationwide petition
against animal testing that helped change the law after four million people
signed it.
The Body Shop also had the first childcare
centre attached to a workplace in
Since giving up her role as co-chair, her
activism has blossomed. "I'm getting more radical," she says.
Entrepreneurship
The Body Shop was started when her husband
Gordon Roddick was riding horseback
from
Dame Anita describes the founding of the
company as an act of survival.
She says her enterprising streak - the Body
Shop followed an attempt to run a picture-framing shop, a hotel and a
restaurant - was born of her sense of "difference", coming from an
Italian family in a small
"Entrepreneurs are obsessed with
freedom... and have an enormous work ethic," she says.
But she concedes: "We couldn't organise ourselves out of a paper bag!"
Dangerous wealth
There is, of course, an inherent irony in a
company that tries to challenge conventional business methods and then becomes
incredibly profitable.
"I didn't want to be like any other
chief executive," says Dame Anita as she explains the reasoning behind her
more unusual business trips, including spending a week with a
"vagabond".
Yet the Body Shop has been making profits of
about #25m since the mid-1990s, even with a recent slump in sales.
"Being wealthy can corrode human spirit
but it also allows you to be generous."
Nonetheless,
the group has received its fair share of flak for what critics claim was a gap
between its ethical image and its products.
Dame Anita insists "frugality was always
there".
Profits were ploughed not into private jets
and lavish offices, but into funding in-house campaigns for human rights, a
community care department and an environmental projects team.
Dame Anita also insists their
"green" approach to business served them well.
"Our naivety was our strength - we
didn't realise we couldn't bring our hearts to the
workplace."
Her timing was also immaculate - the Body
Shop's heyday in the early 1990s coincided with greater public awareness of the
environment.
Hypocritical?
There was, however, the unavoidable moral
dilemma - what to do if your board doesn't support the political stance you are
passionate about?
Dame Anita says
she "walked to the brink" during the first Gulf crisis, threatening
to walk out when directors expressed scepticism about
the Body Shop's anti-war protests.
She was "saved" by two truck
drivers who had seen the reality of war and spoke out at a company meeting.
The potential discord didn't end there.
City analysts have suggested her
"anti-City" attitude was ill-grounded for a company that raised funds
by listing on the London Stock Exchange.
"It's massively hypocritical,"
retail analyst Richard Ratner told BBC News Online.
"If making money from the City, you've
got a nerve criticising the very people you're taking
money from."
Running scared
One of Dame Anita's biggest gripes with
business is that "people are too timid".
"We are living our comfort off the back
of slaves," she says.
Her latest book, "A Revolution in
Kindness", she describes as an attempt to look at "what our world
would look like if we valued basic human kindness above all other ideals, such
as wealth and power".
She sent a copy to a member of the
The book was banned from the prison.
"They fail to see the irony," she says. "Now they have declared
'kindness' the enemy. How revealing is that?"
It was last month, in the "belly"
of her
Inevitably, she saw her accolade, awarded for
services to business, as yet another spur for her activism.
"I hope it will push me to be even more
radical," she responded at the time.
http://www.business-standard.com/lifeleisure
/storypage.php?leftnm=5&subLeft=3&chklogin
Maximizing
the Value of Celebrity Name Recognition
Dame Anita Roddick, DBE started The
Body Shop in 1976 simply to create a livelihood for herself and her two
daughters, while her husband, Gordon, was trekking across the
Mrs. Roddick was born in Littlehampton in 1942, the child of an Italian immigrant
couple in an English seaside town. She trained as a teacher but an educational
opportunity on a kibbutz in
I! t wasnt
only economic necessity that inspired the birth of The Body Shop. Her early
travels had given her a wealth of experience. Mrs. Roddick
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. Also the
frugality that 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? Taking a cue from her mother, Anita reused
everything, refilled everything and recycled all she could. The foundation of
The Body Shop's environmental activism was born out of ideas like these.
The Body Shop has always been recognizable by its green
color, the only color that she could find to cover the damp, moldy walls of her
first shop. She opened a second shop within six months, by which time Gordon
was back in
Mrs. Roddick believes that
businesses have the power to do good. That's why the
Mission Statement of The Body Shop opens with the overriding commitment, To dedicate our business to the pursuit of social and
environmental change. In 1997 Mrs. Roddick
helped to launch The New Academy of Business, a masters degree course at
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 cares passionately
about soci
a! l responsibility, respect for human rights, the
environment and animal protection, and an absolute belief in Community Trade.
But The Body Shop is not a one-woman-show its a global operation with
thousands of people working towards common goals and sharing common values.
Thats what gives The Body Shop its campaigning
and commercial strength and continues to set it apart from mainstream business.
Anita is now a Non-Executive Director of The Body Shop
and a Creative Consultant, which means she can get back to doing what she does
best - pushing at the edge of ideas, innovating and infusing the business with
her ongoing excitement about the possibilities. Anita will also continue to
travel the world in search of great new ingredients and ways of improving the
standard of living for the farmers that grow the ingredients and their surrounding
communities.
In 2000, Mrs. Roddick published
her autobiography Business As Unusual and in 2001, she edited Take ! It Personally, a collection of
provoking through piece to challenge the myths of globalization and the power
of the WTO. The excitement and success of these books prompted her to start her
own communications company, Anita Roddick
Publications, to advance and celebrate human rights, the environment and
creative dissent. On a mission to manufacture "weapons of mass
instruction," Brave Hearts, Rebel Spirits: A Spiritual Activist's
Handbook and A Revolution in Kindness were published in 2003. She
launched her own website in 2001, www.anitaroddick.com. Amidst all of this,
Anita will be looking for new projects in her continued campaign for human
rights and the environment.
The
ANNOTICO Reports
Can
be Viewed, and are Archived at:
Italia
Italia Mia: http://www.ItaliaMia.com
Annotico
Email: annotico@earthlink.net