LONDON, Sept. 11 -
Anita Roddick, the crusading entrepreneur who used the
Body Shop chain of cosmetics stores she founded to promote causes like ending
animal testing and supporting the environment, died in
A woman of fierce
passions, boundless energy, unconventional idealism and sometimes diva-like
temperament, Ms. Roddick was one of
At times, her
anti-establishment philosophy seemed to clash with her stature as a successful
businesswoman. She joined the front lines of protesters at the World Trade Organization talks in
Anita did
more than run a successful ethical business: she was a pioneer of the whole
concept of ethical and green consumerism, Tony Juniper, director of
Friends of the Earth, wrote in The Evening Standard on Tuesday. There are
quite a few business people today who claim green credentials, but none came
anywhere near Anita in terms of commitment and credibility.
Anita Lucia
Perilli was born in
Ms. Roddick said later that she had always felt closer to Henry
than to the man she had thought was her father, and that the news made her feel
as if an enormous weight of guilt had been lifted from my shoulders.
After her
application to drama school was turned down, Ms. Roddick
worked for a time as a secondary school teacher and then quit to travel to
When
youve lived for six months with a group that is
rubbing their bodies with cocoa butter, and those bodies are magnificent, or if
you wash your hair with mud, and it works, you go on to break all sorts of
conventions, from personal ethics to body care, she once said.
She married
Gordon Roddick, a Scottish poet, in 1970, when she
was pregnant with their second daughter. When her husband later announced that
he wanted to fulfill his dream of traveling on horseback from Buenos Aires to
New York (and that, by the way, it might take a couple of years), Ms. Roddick took out a modest loan and in 1976 opened the Body
Shop, her first, in Brighton.
The shop sold
just a handful of creams and hair-care products; its walls were painted green,
to cover the damp spots. But it proved an unexpected success and the business
began to grow, helped, too, by Mr. Roddick, when he
came back from his trip. Hes the doer, Im the
dreamer, she once said. Within 15 years, Body Shop stores had
blanketed
Ms. Roddick, who rejected conventional marketing, was so
recognizable with her wild hair, wild public pronouncements and unbusinesslike demeanor that she was probably her own best
advertisement. She used her stores to spread her philosophy and promote causes,
and urged franchise owners and customers to join in.
In 1990, she
helped establish the magazine The Big Issue, produced and sold by homeless
people. She also set up Children on the Edge, a charity for children in Europe
and
More recently,
she had been campaigning to raise awareness of hepatitis C, which she
contracted from a blood transfusion while giving birth to her younger daughter.
The Body Shop
went public in the mid-1990s, and the company was sold to the French cosmetics
giant LOrial for about $1.14 billion last year.
Although the Roddicks had stepped down from managing
the company in 2002, they remained on as nonexecutive
directors and reportedly made about $237 million from their 18 percent stake.
The sale drew
criticism from environmentalists who said that, among other things, LOrial had yet to ban animal testing. But Ms. Roddick said she hoped that the Body Shop would spur LOrial to behave more ethically.
In 2003, she was
made a Dame of the
Among the great
contradictions in a woman whose life was full of them was her tendency to scoff
at the kinds of products her company sold.
I have never
felt that beauty products are the body and blood of Jesus Christ, she once
said. Nothing the Body Shop sells pretends to do anything other than it
says. Moisturizers moisturize, fresheners freshen and cleansers cleanse. End of
story.