The Errant Æsthete

Anita Roddick with Princess Diana, England, 1986

It is with profound sadness that the EA reports the passing this past week of a notable and distinguished woman and wonderfully dynamic aesthete.

Anita Roddick, founder of the Body Shop and Britain’s leading female entrepreneur, whose cruelty-free cosmetics and environmentally sensitive packaging helped change the worldwide skin-care industry, died of a brain hemorrhage Monday at St. Richard’s Hospital in Chichester, England. She was 64.

Roddick announced in February that she had cirrhosis of the liver, caused by hepatitis C she acquired during a blood transfusion 36 years ago when she was giving birth to her youngest daughter. She didn’t find out about the infection until two years ago.

Dramatic and energetic, the 5-foot-2-inch Roddick described herself as a flower child of the 1960s who launched the company in 1976 to support herself and her two children. Her nature-based cosmetics, such as pineapple facial wash, jojoba moisture cream and elderflower eye gel, came out just as the environmental movement took off.

The Body Shop’s promotion of recycling and its use of suppliers among indigenous people in developing countries made the British company a phenomenon, growing from a single store to more than 2,100 stores in 55 countries within 30 years. The company was purchased in 2006 by L’Oreal of France for $1.2 billion.

Roddick, the public face of the firm, devoted significant hours to globalization protests, rain forest preservation marches and Take a Daughter to Work days. The anti-corporate crusader – who once famously said, “I hate the beauty industry. It is a monster selling unattainable dreams. It lies. It cheats. It exploits women.” – became a favorite of singer Sting and Princess Diana. Queen Elizabeth II made her a dame commander of the British Empire in 2003.

“I came out of the womb as an activist. I’m part of the 1960s; it’s in my DNA. So the idea of dying with loads of money doesn’t appeal to me at all,” she said in June. “I want to use the last years I have to get my hands dirty working for civil change. I want to be able to see the positive difference that money can make by giving away what I have.”

Anita Lucia Perella, the daughter of Italian immigrants in seaside Littlehampton, was attracted to activism after reading a book about the Holocaust. She graduated from Bath College of Education in 1962, taught school briefly, then spent a year in Paris clipping newspapers for the International Herald Tribune. She spent another year in Geneva working for the United Nations, then hit the hippie trail.

She sailed to Tahiti, New Hebrides, New Caledonia and Australia, ending up in Johannesburg by way of Madagascar and Mauritius. Running afoul of apartheid laws by going to a jazz club on a “black night,” she was deported by the South African police.

Back in England, she met and married a Scotsman, Gordon Roddick, and with him opened a restaurant and a small hotel.

Within a few years, the restaurant closed. Roddick, then 33, borrowed $8,000 from a bank, using the hotel as collateral, and contacted an herbalist found in the Yellow Pages to help with her unusual list of ingredients. She painted the walls and shelves of her backstreet Brighton store emerald green and started with 15 products in small, plain bottles. If customers brought in their own container to refill, all the better. The business took off, and within six months, she opened a second store. Her husband took over the financial end of the business.

From the start, it was a social cause masquerading as a highly successful business. Franchisees had to agree to support some local community or environmental project, and products could not be tested on animals.

In 1984, the Body Shop went public, and shares rose more than 50 percent on the first day. But 10 years later, the company’s stock price began to languish. It was slow to enter the U.S. market, and competitors stepped into the breach. In 1997, the Roddicks unsuccessfully tried to take the Body Shop private with the aim of turning it into a charity. Roddick stepped down as chief executive the next year, and she and her husband stepped down as co-chairmen of the company in 2002. She retained a role as consultant after L’Oreal bought the firm.

She had, however, started a trend. Natural cosmetics, which hadn’t even shown up in industry figures when she began, by 1992 accounted for about 4 percent of the $16 billion U.S. cosmetics market.

“I have a deep sense that to accumulate wealth is obscene,” she told Time in 2004. “And when the community gives you your wealth, I have a strong belief that you give it back.” One of her returns was a donation of $1.8 million to Amnesty International for a “school of activism” at the organization’s new Human Rights Action Centre in London.

Survivors, in addition to her husband, include two daughters.

Source

-MORE-

Long before going green was an international pastime, when the only corporate responsibility was to the bottom line, a small store opened in Brighton, England, selling homemade moisturizers and hair-care products packaged in plastic urine-sample jars. The cosmetics were all-natural, the containers were reusable and the ethos — creating products that were as good for the earth as they were for your skin — was still considered radical, the kind of thing only hippies cared about. But when Anita Roddick opened The Body Shop in 1976, she wasn’t thinking about changing the world, just supporting her family while her husband followed his lifelong dream of trekking across the Americas on horseback. It was almost by accident that she started a revolution.

By the time she died of a brain hemorrhage on Sept. 10, at 64, Roddick and her husband Gordon had turned that first Body Shop into a global retailing phenomenon, the Starbucks of cosmetics with nearly 2,000 stores in 50 countries and revenue of $986 million in 2005. But more impressive than the numbers are the ideals behind them. In an industry that relies on people feeling bad about themselves to push products, Roddick made her millions helping people feel good and do good. To the Queen of Green, bath salts and foot lotion were just the hook, a way to get people into her stores — which she called “billboards” — to learn about the issues she loudly and tirelessly campaigned for, from the environment to fair trade to human rights.

From the beginning, The Body Shop was against animal testing and for Third World development, getting its materials from small communities in poorer countries like Guatemala (aloe vera) and Nambia (marula oil). Over the years, the scope of campaigns that Roddick had taken up — and that Body Shop has supported in its storefronts — grew and expanded. Now a tube of lip gloss can increase awareness about domestic abuse and a bottle of perfume is a weapon in the fight against HIV. “She made shopping a political act,” says her friend Josephine Fairley, co-founder of organic chocolate company Green & Black’s. “She was the first person to do that. She made cosmetics fun, sexy and affordable, and there was always a message. But instead of ‘Buy this mascara, it will change your life,’ her message was, ‘Buy this mascara, it could change someone else’s life.’”

Following The Body Shop’s lead, major corporations everywhere are now seeing green. “They were one of the first companies to have a values report,” says Fairley. “Back then, companies didn’t have values reports, they had balance sheets.” But the birth of ethical business was not an easy one. Roddick’s critics accused her ethics-over-profits stance of being nothing more than a marketing gimmick. And the one-time Veuve Clicquot Businesswoman of the Year had an uncomfortable relationship with the whole business of big business: she once referred to financiers as “dinosaurs in pin-stripes.”

Early on, she cast the body shop as the David to the beauty industry’s Goliath, an us vs. them attitude that she held throughout her life as a company head and an activist. Her very public criticism of the the same industry that had made her rich and famous, calling it in her 1991 autobiography Body and Soul a “monster selling unattainable dreams,” would come back to haunt her. Although Roddick stepped down as co-chair of The Body Shop in 2002 (while staying on as a consultant), she was still accused of selling out, both the company and her principles, when The Body Shop was sold to L’Oreal last year for $1.3 billion. But as far as Roddick was concerned, the sale was a chance to change the industry from the inside. “The real triumph isn’t the fantastic price that L’Oreal paid for Body Shop,” says Rory Stear, head of the Freeplay Energy, a company that develops environmentally responsible electronic products and has Gordon Roddick as one of its directors. “It’s that L’Oreal has now adopted into its core operating model plans to move the biggest cosmetics group in the world towards the ethical standards that Anita had championed.” The cosmetics giant has already said it plans to phase out its animal testing. “The triumph is that The Body Shop, which was a relatively small player in global business terms, now, after 30 years in existence, has the big players turning to it and saying, ‘You were right all along. We want to do that, too.’ Anita was clearly a visionary, way ahead of her time.”

Since the sale of The Body Shop, Roddick, whose sense of social injustice kicked into gear after she read a book on the Holocaust when she was 10, had been focusing on the charities and campaigns she held dear. Claiming that she didn’t want to “die rich,” she gave away around $6 million a year and planned to spend the rest of her time doling out grants and donations and lending her name to causes like stopping sweatshop labor and protesting the imprisonment of two of the “Angola 3″ Black Panther members being held in a Louisiana state prison for a murder many say they didn’t commit. Writing on her website recently, Roddick said: “The most exciting part of my life is now — I believe the older you get, the more radical you become.” She had already transformed the cosmetics industry, awakened the world to social responsibility and proved there was money in caring — but Anita Roddick was just getting started.

Source