Conscious Choice: Anita Roddick Embodies “Business as Unusual”

February 2001

Anita Roddick Embodies “Business as Unusual”

by Bobbye Middendorf

"As long as we can put some idealism and reverence back on the global agenda, understanding that corporations and institutions have to be a force for positive change, then there is a light at the end of the tunnel. There are so many aspects of life that can’t be reduced to an entry in a balance book and our survival depends on remembering this.... Over the past decade, while many businesses have pursued what I call‘business as usual,’ I have been part of a different, smaller business movement.... We want a new paradigm, a whole new framework for making business a force for positive social change. It must not only avoid hideous evil — it must actively do good. I am not interested in business as usual. It is business as unusual that excites me." — Anita Roddick, Business as Unusual

What can you say about the founder and leader of a corporation who cares more for social and environmental justice than for the products sold in the company’s retail outlets that dot the globe? Say the name Anita Roddick in the circles of traditional captains of industry, and the resulting reaction is likely to be a complex mix of fear, loathing, and dismissal. Roddick’s name has been synonymous with The Body Shop, the natural skin-care retailer, ever since she created the first shop in Britain twenty-five years ago. Hers is also one of the names that repeatedly pops up when pairing the ideas of business and social responsibility. It’s not an oxymoron, and Roddick shows how successful a business can be by uniting heartfelt principles with enterprising and inspired business practices. She has dedicated herself to putting her money not only where her mouth is, but where her heart is. In her new book, she not only tells her own story, but inspires business owners and managers worldwide to consciously make a difference. She shares lessons about creating social and environmental audits to make a company’s values transparent, making them visible for all to see.

It has been a tumultuous ten years for Roddick and The Body Shop since the publication of her first book, Body and Soul in 1991. Currently The Body Shop has 1,500 stores (330 in the U.S.), serving 86 million customers in 47 markets and 24 languages. In her latest book, Business as Unusual (Thorsens, 2001) Roddick reflects on the history of the company she founded, claiming that history in her own terms and preserving the principles on which the company has grown. "The book is an opportunity for me to polish the memory of when I believed it was really radical. If it doesn’t remain so, so be it."

The U.K. edition of her book has been available for a few months, and is just coming out in the U.S. The book features dramatic black and copper inks inside for both text and illustrations. Headline-callouts are highlighted in the text. Pages are peppered with the edgy advertising illustrations that have graced store posters, the sides of trucks, and packaging as well as with quotes that have inspired Roddick, and which have made their way into all the communication vehicles of The Body Shop.

When asked why a new book and why now, she acknowledges that it marked a rite of passage. Penned just ahead of the twenty-five-year anniversary of the founding of The Body Shop and at the turn of the millennium, it resonates. "You get more reflective at those times," she notes. She also reiterates that as women grow older, "what is important is that we want to be heard."

She observes that taking the twenty-five-year mark as a milestone for reflection also gave her the opportunity to acknowledge the other businesses and leaders who have inspired her, and she mentions friends and heroes like Ben and Jerry, Yvon Chouinard, Matthew Fox, Ralph Nader, Paul Hawken, Gloria Steinem and more. It’s also her chance to bring attention to the hundreds of thousands of hard-working NGOs (non-governmental organizations) worldwide, whose efforts are bringing voice to disenfranchised communities from rural Alabama to Africa, Asia, and beyond.

The book describes the roller coaster successes and failures over the past decade. It has been ten years packed with what she calls "extraordinary experiments," admittedly not all of which have been successful. Yet the spirit of activism continues. On the copyright page, Roddick asserts, "Proceeds from this book are going towards supporting visionaries, grassroots groups, and non-governmental organizations who are debunking the myths created by the World Trade Organization."

Radicalization from a Young Age

The original shop was designed to be a source of livelihood for Roddick and two young daughters while her husband and partner Gordon trekked on horseback from Buenos Aires to New York in 1976. Coming from a hard-working family, the first Italian immigrants in the blue collar town of Littlehampton, on the southern coast of England, Roddick found her lifelong status as outsider a perfect vehicle to shape her character, both as business woman and activist.

When asked what radicalized her initially, she replied, "Being an outsider gives you a different viewpoint. My mother polished my sense of bravery. There, I saw fearlessness in practice, and I learned not to fear outside authority, neither church nor school nor any established institution. I had an incredible group of teachers who introduced me to the power of language and allowed me to read all the social writers from the 1930s. And travel was my university without walls." She also read an account of the Holocaust when she was ten years old, the same year her father died. She reports that her eighty-seven-year old mother points to that as the moment when Anita started championing causes. She hasn’t stopped in the forty-seven years since. "I’ve always surrounded myself with the educators, those who are more articulate about the issues than I am. That was how The Body Shop became a merchant of vision." In the book, she details the importance of "campaigning" in The Body Shop, sharing anecdotes about shop activism to halt the Gulf War, and work with Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and Amnesty International among others.

Coming, as she did, from a family who worked together in a restaurant, entrepreneurship was as natural as breathing for Roddick, though she admits that she neither knew nor cared about the term, and certainly wasn’t interested in business for business’ sake. Says Roddick, "Nobody talks about entrepreneurship as survival, but that’s exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking. Running that first shop taught me business is not financial science; it’s about trading: buying and selling." While she admits that in the early days she was focused on bringing in enough money to support her family, a realization dawned after the company went public in 1984. "The Body Shop actually had the potential and power to do good."

As a public company, however, Roddick notes, "One of our greatest frustrations at The Body Shop is that we’re still judged...by our profits, by the amount of product we sell, whereas what we want, and have always wanted, [is] to be judged by our actions in the larger world, by the positive difference we make. The shaping force for us from the start has not been our products, but our principles." She characterizes the company’s social activist campaigning as a way to bring values to the beauty business that had none.

Traveling to places where most business leaders dare not tread, Roddick has kept her antennae out while sharpening her radicalization. At the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle, Roddick was one of the only leaders of an international corporation who was on the other side of the police line. "The protesters were asking honorable questions. We were bringing to business the language of environmental standards and social justice. The inspired human spirit was actually a match for the brutish bureaucracy. We stood sure and weren’t suppressed by the police brutality in the face of peaceful protest."

She helped fellow protesters like Paul Hawken when the peaceful marchers were blitzed by pepper spray, tear gas, and truncheons. On the last day, after a benediction by the varied religious leaders attending, she walked fifty rows behind the Native American drummers who led the marchers, followed by indigenous people from around the globe, and then women. "And we saw people coming out of their offices to join the march. The drumming was the heartbeat, and there was a sudden passivity by the police in the face of the drumming. The words,‘Shame on you,’ were so pivotal, so powerful when addressed to the police. It had a chilling effect, because there’s no cynicism around those three short words,‘Shame on you.’ We were people coming together for a common cause. This isn’t about maximizing profits. This is about kindness, about how you look after the weak and the frail."

Keeping the Company DNA Intact

I caught up with peripatetic Anita Roddick by phone (she is sometimes characterized as a blur) just ahead of the new year. We spoke of the process of getting radicalized, and what is coming next for The Body Shop.

In early 2001, she is planning a trip to rural Alabama. Roddick decries the statistics about African-American farmers, an endangered group whose numbers have dwindled from over a million to just 1,800. Because she is constantly on the lookout to source materials from small imperiled communities, visits such as the upcoming trip to the Black Farmers Cooperative in Alabama offer a chance to instigate and shape yet another win-win opportunity.

In her company’s experiments doing business with at-risk communities, she has discovered that successes are easier to come by when a local NGO or cooperative organizes the trading process between a large corporation and individual farmers or communities. She notes, "We put enormous effort into our community trade links. Today we have something like thirty-seven projects around the world that provide employment for thousands of poor families." By empowering small local communities, and encouraging development of cooperatives, The Body Shop is actively promoting sustainable communities worldwide. But a multinational corporation it firmly is not. Roddick uses the term "multi-local" to emphasize the importance of setting up small-scale economic initiatives across the globe to grow ingredients for the company’s products. She uncovers local, endangered communities during her world travels over four months of the year. The Body Shop products’ success stories feature industrial hemp from Native American communities, and shea butter oil from Ghana.

She talks about the energy of staff volunteers working in Kosovo for twelve years building schools and refurbishing orphanages. She highlights with pride their volunteer work in Albania, details the company’s efforts to address problems with Shell in Nigeria’s Ogoniland, and other oil companies doing business with the Burmese dictatorship. "I have been most proud...when the company acted courageously." She warns against changing the fundamental DNA of a company, the essence of what has made it successful. For The Body Shop, that essence might translate as a continual exploration of all the aspects of how you develop human spirit in the workplace, thus encompassing workers and their families, issues of fun and spirit, building relationships with trading partners, and how the company’s policies benefit society at large.

But for all the principles and enthusiasm palpable in the book, the shops in the U.S. don’t seem to carry the same energy. Roddick acknowledges problems with translating her energy into the U.S. shops, and into a very different market. "The communications, values, and stories aren’t there." She realizes that she should have been more involved in the U.S. market, trusting her own instincts instead of the marketing and retailing consultants. "We soon discovered that everything we thought was quirky and different and clever about The Body Shop was much less appreciated in the U.S.... The fact is, we just got everything wrong." She devotes a chapter in the book to a no-holds-barred review of the challenges the company encountered here. She forthrightly delineates the tactical errors and misunderstandings that led to a decision point — whether to close down the U.S. shops altogether. They didn’t shut them down, but over the past few years have revamped their U.S. operations. "We have taken a long, clear-eyed look, and reinvented ourselves."

In part, the bruising experiences in the U.S. market have opened the doors for rethinking their traditional franchising operations. The Body Shop is exploring new initiatives with partnership relationships, joint ventures, and licensing, as well as developing new channels such as The Body Shop Direct (home parties) and e-commerce via The Body Shop Digital. By designing the e-commerce site as a portal to social responsibility issues, Roddick hopes to enhance the activism of customers and partners who will be the ones to move other corporations toward this unusual path of business for social responsibility. It will be a perfect vehicle for telling the stories behind the products and for sharing the upcoming publishing projects she hopes to shepherd through the company.

Roddick insists that business must now depart from the fascism of the bottom line, to encompass a bottom line that reflects social and environmental commitments. "We are looking at the human spirit at play in the marketplace." As the company she founded (which she likens to a growing child) changes, she remains alert for her role in it. "I have one major responsibility now: to keep the company passionate and steeped in the heritage for which it stands, and to keep everyone excited and breathless by challenging them to love change and human growth." She has made it clear when she will depart, and that is when the bottom line takes precedence over the activism — "...when the company becomes less progressive, when it spends more time maximizing profit and less time maximizing the human spirit."

Asked for the lessons she would offer readers, Roddick advises, "Challenge everything. Everything is subject to change. Find ways to polish the sense of spirit, your outrage about the human condition. Do anything that keeps the spirit alive, that returns a sense of reverence, awe, and wonder." Quoting from St. Augustine, "You change by delight," Anita Roddick has gone into her life with a commitment to compassion, creativity, and justice. She concludes, "All knowledge should be translated to action. It makes for an interesting life." And an interesting and inspiring read.

Business as Unusual: The Triumph of Anita Roddick ($24.95) is published by Thorsens, a division of HarperCollins Publishers.

Bobbye Middendorf is an independent writer in Chicago.

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