Speeches and Creams
Hedonism and activism harmoniously abide in Anita Roddick, kindred spirits in her improbable realm of banana conditioner and saved whales, jojoba moisture cream and unchained political prisoners, strawberry body wash and healthy rain forests.
Roddick has catapulted a lucrative retail empire built on soap suds into an international soap box. Now, at 53, starting her third decade as boss and personification of the Body Shop, she’s a body-loving den mother of the Great Bath and effervescent champion of Good Causes.
Not everybody wants to buy Carrot Moisture Cream in a shop designed as a “social action station,” just as not everybody thinks that Roddick is for real. But she thinks so, and even critics concede that her purse snaps open for causes nearly as often as her mouth does.
“Employees do not go home thinking of moisture creams in my company,” Roddick says in a corner office at her headquarters in the seaside English Channel town where she was born.
Over the past six years, more than 300 employees, in fact, have volunteered in a Romanian village where the company aids orphans. The homeless on London streets sell a magazine, the Big Issue, born on a Roddick grubstake.
If there is a causal link between selling shampoo and washing out injustice, Roddick says, it is that her get-involved ‘60s hippie ethic is unslaked two decades after she stumbled into the body-care business.
“Our reason for being,” says a Body Shop statement of principles, is “to dedicate our business to the pursuit of social and environmental change.”
The Body Shop helps finance hand-crank portable radios for Africans too poor to buy batteries. Last fall, it smuggled executed activist Ken Saro-Wiwa’s brother out of Nigeria.
“After 20 years I still want to get my hands dirty. It’s activist. I was an activist as a kid, always was, and you just bring that to the work place. Nobody told me you couldn’t do it; that’s the benefit of not going to business school,” says Roddick, who is one of Britain’s most successful businesswomen.
Getting steadily richer from products that massage egos, she is unabashedly contrarian. “Our company got where it is by breaking plenty of rules. Why change it now?” the Body Shop asks itself in this 20th year of its improbable birth.
First came Roddick’s formation by fire. She started as Anita Perella, daughter of one of a handful of Italian immigrant couples in town, sent to Mass by a Catholic mother who hated the priest and crushed garlic between her children’s fingers “to fight the incense.”
Buon giorno, aromatherapy. “At school it was like a bloody tennis game,” Roddick recalls. “The nuns said, ‘Put skirts on,’ and my mum said, ‘No, it’s cold, wear trousers.’ . . . So you came out having all the sacred cows shattered and you ended up without knowing it by being given a sense of bravery about everything you wanted to do. . . .”
Then came trial by saddle. She married her husband of a quarter century, Englishman Gordon Roddick in a $25 quickie at City Hall in Reno while pregnant with their second child.
Later, he decided to ride a horse from Buenos Aires to New York. They sold their cafe, he rode off and, in 1976, she borrowed $6,000 and opened a tiny toiletries shop in Brighton. She painted it dusky green, the only color that would cover the damp.
Only 20 products filled the shelves built by a carpenter who was stoked on pot. To make the inventory look more impressive, she packaged what few items she had--including her soon-to-be all-time best-selling Vitamin E Cream--in five different sizes. She labeled cheap plastic bottles by hand to save money.
Every morning, Pied Piper fashion, she trickled perfume essence to the shop door from wherever she parked the van. Customers were more impressed than were local officials, irked that a business, sandwiched between funeral parlors, called itself the Body Shop.
Now Roddick is rich and almost-famous enough to do an American Express commercial.
She has almost 1,400 shops, both franchises and company-owned, in 45 countries, including more than 250 in the United States. The more than 76 million individual sales a year of more than 700 products make the Body Shop the United Kingdom’s leading international retailer.
Roddick lives not far from her headquarters but travels incessantly in search of new markets, new experiences, trying to keep ahead of what she calls “plagiarist” competitors. She tallied 147,000 air miles in a year. It is a serious business, she says, deeper and more meaningful than anybody’s glamour-promising gloss.
“I’m not some kind of cosmetics diva spending time putting makeup on,” she says. “I sit in, whether it’s a mosquito alley or the Amazon. I sit with women and I sit with men and I watch the rituals of the body; rituals of birth, marriage and death. . . . I’ve watched the body being prepared, played with the body. Every part.”
She has learned some things, Roddick says: “Every society has an erogenous zone, every society wants thicker hair, smoother skin and they also want a body that works, can gather water, cultivate. They also use the body as play and for adornment and I don’t think it’s hedonism, it’s about celebrating the body. . . . “
A grandmother of a certain age, she once told an interviewer that she is increasingly drawn to the Dogon people of Mali, who see great beauty in drooping breasts.
Roddick is a one-woman volcano who wows company “stakeholders” and business school deans with the same earnest mile-a-minute commitment with which she stalks experience. She seeks inspiration in visits to tar-paper shacks and family huts in jungle clearings.
The hippie has tumbled into the boardroom, backpack among the attache cases. But the essence beneath all the smell-nice essences, she says, is as it ever was: “I am not seduced into thinking business is about private greed. I think it is about public good.” The money turns the wheels, simply making possible what Roddick calls the “juicy part.”
In its third decade, with her company formally committed to “passion and progress,” she is, as ever, bursting with ideas.
This year, the Body Shop published not only environmental and animal protection reports but also a social statement for which independent auditors queried employees, suppliers and donor recipients to establish whether the company was meeting its ethical standards.
On tap, says Roddick, is a “green” business school that will teach students that effective 21st century management means striving for social responsibility, corporate activism for the common good, as well as for profits.
The Body Shop, good neighbor, has brought 1,500 jobs to Littlehampton. This year, upward of 100,000 visitors will traipse through the high-tech, environment-friendly factory where dewberry perfume, orange oat shampoo and rhassoul mud soap meet their makers.
“Speak out,” urges a pamphlet displayed near the seaweed and peony shampoo (normal hair) in the Knightsbridge Body Shop in central London. “What’s the matter, are your lips stuck together? Speaking out is a civic responsibility.” Think you’re too small to have an impact, the Body Shop taunts, “try going to bed with a mosquito.”
“We bring in campaigns for human rights and justice because where the shops are, millions of people are passing. We have the best opportunity in the world on any of the issues we care passionately about,” says Roddick.
There are a lot of these, including Third World indigenous communities. The company imports some 40 tons of bananas a year (the Taiwano Indians treated scalp problems with heated banana extract, customers are reminded). It buys shea butter from the Mbanayilli and Dalung Women’s Cooperative in Ghana, supports a honey-processing scheme in Uganda and helps the Ogoni tribe in Nigeria as Roddick inveighs against multinational Shell for seeking oil on Ogoni lands.
Sometimes, there is backfire. The Body Shop and a disgruntled former employee in Brazil are feuding publicly over a Roddick-negotiated purchase agreement with Chief Pytaki-Re of the Kayapo people in the Amazon for a hair conditioner oil extracted from the Brazil nut.
And Anita and Gordon Roddick regularly catch flak from both shareholders and fellow activists. Are they in business to make money or to save the Earth?
“Whatever the Roddicks say about increasing shareholder value, it is now clear that they would sooner be up the Amazon discussing the finer points of tribal remedies for dandruff . . .” said a recent tart commentary in the Independent newspaper, headlined “Body Shop arrives up the Amazon, paddle-less.”
Amid toughening competition, with some critics saying the company’s growth has stalled, there are painful questions, Roddick says: “Are we a full-profit company or are we not? And if we are, why do we behave in such a bloody non-full-profit way? You don’t have human rights campaigns on your payroll if you’re full profit. Somebody was here yesterday from a socialist magazine and said, ‘This looks like a bloody political party down here.’ ”
The Roddicks took their company public in 1984. Last year, they announced plans to buy it back. But this month, they abandoned the attempt. “The company finds itself lambasted both by the city [Wall Street] for being too green, and the green groups for not being green enough,” the Independent said in a business page editorial.
Criticism comes with the territory, Roddick says. But it is vexing to be simultaneously measured against angels by activists and against profit-uber alles corporations by stock analysts. “If we did what the cosmetic industry does, if we said, ‘Buy this moisture cream, it will get rid of wrinkles and make your sex life better,’ and if we took the money we put into social action and activism into promotion there’s no doubt we’d make more money,” Roddick says.
At what cost? “At the cost of not having any frigging identity.”
Too high for Roddick. Unpayably high.
