Once upon a time The Body Shop was a High Street sensation, one of many very first companies to reap the inexperienced area of moral consumerism.
It bought cosmetics and skincare merchandise which had been cruelty-free and promoted truthful commerce and was run by pioneers who blended their unique fragrance oils with social values.
The packaging was easy, the plastic bottles had been recyclable, the luggage had been biodegradable. All this may occasionally appear unremarkable right now, however again in 1976, when Dame Anita Roddick opened her first Body Shop retailer in Brighton, it was really a revelation.
Within a decade or so, The Body Shop was a smash hit; its White Musk was the scent of a technology, whereas the Japanese Cleansing Grains and fruit-shaped soaps grew to become iconic merchandise.
Body Shop founder Anita Roddick outdoors one among her shops in 1984. Her first store launched in Brighton in 1976 and inside a decade or so the model was a smash hit
JAN MOIR: Even now, it’s onerous to separate The Body Shop from its charismatic founder. There was a time when Anita Roddick was all-powerful; by no means off a soapbox or the tv
Even Princess Diana purchased the model’s Peppermint Foot Lotion whereas the extremely fragranced Dewberry vary — so fashionable within the Nineteen Nineties that many faculties threatened to ban it — was nearly a ceremony of passage for teenage ladies.
Now the once-beloved Body Shop is on the ropes. Yesterday, it was plunged into administration, leading to an unsure future for its 200 UK outlets and placing 1000’s of staff in danger.
The image can also be bleak world wide, the place The Body Shop operates greater than 900 shops in 20 nations, with an extra 1,600 franchised shops in a further 69 nations, giving a complete of round 22,000 jobs which could quickly bubble down the plughole.
Perhaps the miracle is that it has lasted this lengthy. Here within the UK, The Body Shop isn’t the one High Street chain to hit onerous occasions, however it’s going to take greater than a Hemp Body Mitt to wash away its issues.
For a begin, The Body Shop’s core clients at the moment are procuring at magnificence counters elsewhere; now not impressed by vitamin E lotions and ginger shampoo, they’re shopping for tanning drops, acrylic nail merchandise and £30 retinol serums from manufacturers comparable to E.L.F and Glossier.
In the age of TikTook close-ups and selfie sticks, can there nonetheless be a future for a gentler model providing shea physique butter from Ghana and a paraben-free avocado lip masks? The reply appears to be no.
The information comes solely three months after new proprietor Aurelius took management of The Body Shop following an extended interval of decline. The German personal fairness agency, which specialises within the buy of troubled companies, purchased the corporate for £207million from Brazilian cosmetics big Natura & Co in November.
Following ‘dismal’ buying and selling over Christmas, Aurelius confirmed it had appointed accounting agency FRP Advisory as directors — maybe heralding the dismantling and inglorious finish of yet one more nice British model.
One of the important thing causes cited for The Body Shop’s low gross sales figures is that they function in a saturated market with too many different corporations — together with Lush and Rituals — copying their unique thought of environment-friendly private care merchandise.
Ironic, actually, as copying appears to be precisely what Anita Roddick herself did all these years in the past.
It has handed into Body Shop folklore that enterprising Anita nicked the thought — and the title — from a small enterprise in Berkeley, California, owned by two sisters-in-law, Peggy Short and Jane Saunders.
In their Body Shop, the American girls bought their merchandise in biodegradable bottles that might be refilled. Anita went on a ‘buying binge’ of their retailer and returned to Britain with a lot of merchandise — and a marketing strategy. (In 1987, The Body Shop paid Peggy and Jane £2.7million to vary the title of their firm to Body Time.)
Even now, it’s onerous to separate The Body Shop from its charismatic founder. There was a time when Anita Roddick was all-powerful; by no means off a soapbox or the tv, a feminist businesswoman spoken of in the identical buccaneering breath as Richard Branson or Freddie Laker.
It was her perception that enterprise might be a pressure for good, and he or she would zig-zag the globe, shopping for merchandise comparable to Brazil nuts and hemp from indigenous peoples to make her pure concoctions; saving the world in addition to saving your complexion, and all of the whereas campaigning in earnest for worthy causes.
Her core activism concerned rescuing the rainforest and fostering commerce hyperlinks with the creating world. She supported Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the Ogoni individuals from Nigeria, the Kayapo tribe of Brazil and Boys Town in Kerala, India.
To purchase a banana shampoo bar, you more and more needed to negotiate a picket line of slogans, banners and Roddick’s worthy obsessions in each Body Shop outlet.
There had been all the time accusations, which had been by no means fairly thrown off, that the corporate was responsible of utilizing its social conscience as a advertising and marketing train.
‘I have an agenda of outrage on some issues, and I use the shops for that,’ Roddick as soon as stated.
When I met her in 1997, it was like coming nose to nose with Edina from Absolutely Fabulous.
She had simply returned from ‘my most profound trip ever’, which had concerned travelling for 3 months by the southern states of the U.S., residing with households whose solely supply of revenue got here from promoting crack cocaine, cooked in their very own kitchens.
Anita slept in a few of these crack shacks, in a bid to maintain herself actual. ‘Jan, my great fear is wealth,’ she advised me. ‘Wealth corrodes; it separates you from the human condition.
‘And my other great fear is that I will end up like Estee Lauder. So give me any excuse to stop that, to jerk me back into a new consciousness.
‘I’ve obtained all these freaking outlets and I believe: “How can we help? What can we buy from these people?”’ Maybe some low-cost crack, I joked. But wasn’t there one thing distasteful about wanting on the lives of poor individuals in a bid to validate your personal?
She agreed, however added: ‘I didn’t simply take a look at them; I learnt from the expertise. To perceive the poor, it’s a must to perceive that they know every part about poverty.’
Yet regardless of such notion, controversy was by no means far-off. In 1994, it grew to become recognized that the caring, sharing Body Shop had made zero charitable donations throughout its first 11 years in enterprise — after which contributions elevated considerably.
There was a rocky patch within the early Nineteen Nineties when damaging doubts — vigorously denied — had been raised about how inexperienced and moral some Body Shop merchandise actually had been. A tense relationship with their City backers (‘those pin-striped dinosaurs’, based on Anita) continued lengthy after the corporate’s 1984 flotation.
Perhaps most telling had been the skirmishes with Body Shop franchisees, who felt they weren’t getting a good deal — that the corporate was extra centered on the plight of the Ogoni and Wayapo individuals than on them.
Everything modified in 2006 when Anita and husband Gordon bought the model to French magnificence big L’Oreal for £652million, which appeared to go in opposition to the grain of their hippy values.
Yet two years earlier, Anita had found she had hepatitis C, which she believed she had contracted in 1971, following a blood transfusion after the beginning of her daughter.
Her household now imagine Anita was one of many first victims of the blood contamination scandal. She died aged 64 of a mind haemorrhage in 2007, leaving her £51million property to charity, as she’d all the time promised to do.
So she was no Estee Lauder, but a lot of her critics will nonetheless argue that the countless proselytising of the Body Shop resulted in little of the worldwide change they boasted about. Certainly, after my encounter with the formidable bubble-bath mogul I couldn’t assist however really feel it was all about Anita moderately than Anita’s pet causes.
‘If I take away the work from my life, I don’t assume I’m actual,’ she stated.
The Body Shop has gone by many modifications since then, however the one factor it can’t change is public style. Everyone goes to overlook it, however nobody was shopping for it, in additional methods than one.
It is unhappy and Anita could be appalled, however possibly Dewberry has lastly had its day.