Anita Roddick - Founder of The Body Shop

"I started The Body Shop in 1976 simply to create a livelihood for myself and my two daughters, while my husband, Gordon, was trekking across the Americas. I had no training or experience and my only business acumen was Gordon's advice to take sales of £300 a week. Nobody talks of 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. It's about creating a product or service so good that people will pay for it. Now 26 years on The Body Shop is a multi-local business with 2010 stores serving over 77 million customers in 52 different markets in 25 different languages and across 12 time zones. And I haven't a clue how we got here." 

Anita Roddick was born in Littlehampton, in 1942, the daughter of Italian immigrants. She always helped out in her family's business and learned early lessons of war-time frugality from her mother. Lessons: Re-use, Re-fill and Re-cycle, that would become the cornerstore for her Environmental Activism. Anita says she was a natural outsider. (Her childhood idol was James Dean.) Spending time in a Kibbutz in Israel led to an around the world working trip where she was exposed to many other cultures and beauty rituals. 

These experiences planted the seeds of how she would do business after she started The Body Shop in a tiny shop in Brighton, England. Frustrated that she couldn't buy small sizes of every day cosmetics, she started her own small cosmetics company, using natural products, sold in inexpensive plastic bottles. The rest, as they say, is history. "I am aware that success is more than a good idea. It is timing too. The Body Shop arrived just as Europe was going green." 

Over the years, the International success of the Body Shop allowed Anita to "dedicate our business to the pursuit of social and environmental change.""For me, campaigning is about putting forward solutions, not just opposing destructive practises or human rights abuses." She believes that one of the bravest things The Body Shop ever did was to challenge the huge multi-national SHELL. 

At a United Nations Human Rights Conference in 1993, Anita met a delegation of Ogoni tribespeople from Nigeria. They were seeking justice and reparations against Shell for ravaging their lands thru oil exploration. Working with other NGO's, The Body Shop took on their cause and 4 years later Shell revised their way of doing business and committed the company to human rights and sustainable development. Tragically, Ken Saro-Wiwa(the key Ogoni spokesperson) and 8 others were executed in 1995 by the Nigerian government, but, eventually 19 others were released.

Anita Roddick walks her talk. She is an activist, entrepreneur, wife, mother, author, a lady, a recipient of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) and on and on. She has helped create and push forward so many things and won so many awards and backed so many worthy campaigns. Her vision keeps on growing and changing to fit what she sees happening around her and to help provide solutions to those injustices.