Anita Roddick

Dame Anita Lucia Roddick (born Perella; 23 October 1942 – 10 September 2007) was a British entrepreneur, human rights advocate, and environmental activist. She is most famous for founding The Body Shop, a cosmetics company that sold natural beauty products and helped define the concept of ethical consumerism. The business was among the first to ban animal testing on some of its items and to champion fair trade with developing nations.

Roddick spent much of her life campaigning for social and environmental causes, working with groups like Greenpeace and the newspaper The Big Issue. In 1990, she set up Children on the Edge, a charity that supports disadvantaged children in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. She argued that businesses should provide moral leadership, claiming they could be a more powerful force in society than religion or government.

Born in a bomb shelter in Littlehampton, Sussex, Anita Perella was one of four children. Her mother was Gilda (née de Vito), wife of restaurateur Donato Perella, but her biological father was Donato’s cousin, Henry Perilli, who ran an ice-cream and soda bar. Her birth surname was registered as Perella. She attended St Joseph’s Convent and Maude Allen secondary modern school in Littlehampton, then trained as a teacher at Newton Park College of Education in Bath. After that, she taught history and English at Maude Allen school.

Roddick opened her first Body Shop in Brighton, England, in 1976. Her goal was to earn money for herself and her two daughters while her husband was traveling in South America. She wanted to sell quality skincare products in refillable containers and sample sizes, marketed with honesty rather than hype. A second shop opened six months later, and when her husband returned, he joined the business.

According to a 2002 article in The Globe and Mail by Jon Entine, Roddick had copied the name, concept, and original brochures from a Body Shop that started in Berkeley, California, in 1970. That shop had three stores when Roddick visited the Bay Area in the early 1970s. Her early brochures were near-verbatim copies of the Berkeley shop’s materials. When Roddick later expanded into the United States, she bought the rights to the Body Shop name for $3.5 million from the original owners, who signed a confidentiality agreement. The original shop then renamed itself Body Time and stayed open until April 2018.

By 1991, the Body Shop had 700 branches, and Roddick received the World Vision Award for Development Initiative. In a 1996 interview with Third Way, she described the original shop as “a series of brilliant accidents.” It had a great smell, a funky name, and was located between two funeral parlours. The year 1976 was a heatwave, so there was plenty of bare skin. The shop recycled everything, not out of environmental concern, but because they lacked bottles. She said the concept translated across cultures and social structures without any sophisticated plan.

In 1997, Roddick launched the company’s most successful campaign, introducing Ruby, a size 16 doll resembling Barbie. The campaign came from ethical communications consultancy Host Universal, which created the image of a naked red-haired doll with her hands behind her head. Photographer Steve Perry shot the image. By 2004, the Body Shop had 1,980 stores and served over 77 million customers worldwide. It was voted the second most-trusted brand in the UK and the 28th top brand globally.

In March 2006, L’Oréal bought the Body Shop for £652 million. This sparked controversy because L’Oréal used animal testing and was partly owned by Nestlé, which had faced criticism over its treatment of third-world producers. Roddick addressed the criticism in an interview with The Guardian, saying she saw herself as a “Trojan horse” who, by selling to a large firm, could influence its decisions. Suppliers who had worked with the Body Shop would now contract with L’Oréal, and she would work with the company 25 days a year, giving her input into decisions.

Roddick was known for her environmental campaigning and served on the advisory council for the think tank Demos. Despite her high-profile statements about the Body Shop’s charitable mission, the company made no charitable donations for its first 11 years. After going public in 1984, the first sponsorship—funded by the IPO—was for Greenpeace posters in 1985. In 1990, after visiting Romanian orphanages, she founded Children on the Edge to address the crisis of overcrowded, poor conditions there. The charity works to de-institutionalize children and helps those affected by conflicts, natural disasters, disabilities, and HIV/AIDS. In the late 1990s, Roddick became involved in the case of the Angola Three, three African-American men held in solitary confinement for over two decades at Louisiana State Penitentiary, and helped raise international awareness of their situation.