Body Shop founder Dame Anita Roddick dies

Dame Anita Roddick, the founder of The Body Shop, poses with the Dame Commander Medal at Buckingham Palace in London in this November 13, 2003 Photo: Reuters

Anita Roddick, the founder of the Body Shop cosmetics store, has died after suffering a major brain haemorrhage. She was 64.

The businesswoman, dubbed the Queen of Green, died today at a hospital in southern England, with her husband and daughters by her side, the family said in a statement.

"Gordon, Justine and Sam Roddick are very sad to announce that after suffering a major brain haemorrhage, Anita Roddick died at  6.30pm this evening at the age of 64," the statement said.

"Anita Roddick was admitted to St Richard's Hospital in Chichester, close to her home, yesterday evening when she collapsed after complaining of a sudden headache."

Roddick was called the Queen of Green for her trailblazing environmentally-friendly, humane business practices that made her a leader in her native England and around the world.

Greenpeace executive director John Sauven called Roddick an "incredible woman" who would be "sorely missed".

"She was so ahead of her time when it came to issues of how business could be done in different ways, not just profit motivated but taking into account environmental issues," Sauven said.

"When you look at it today, and how every company claims to be green, she was living this decades ago."

Roddick opened her first Body Shop store in 1976 in Brighton, southern England, before fair trade and eco-friendly businesses were fashionable.

The Body Shop has grown into a global phenomenon with nearly  2000 stores in 50 countries. It became part of the French company L'Oreal Group last year, but remains independently run.

Roddick and her husband stepped down as co-chairmen of the company in 2002, but she continued to contribute as a consultant.

The company made its name as much for its values as for how its wares are made.

She said her environmental business ethics were inspired in part by women's beauty rituals that she discovered while travelling in developing countries and lessons from closer to home that her mother passed on from life during World War II.

"Why waste a container when you can refill it? And why buy more of something than you can use? We behaved as she did in the Second World War, we reused everything, we refilled everything and we recycled all we could,'' Roddick wrote.

The Body Shop opposed product testing on animals and tried to encourage the development of local communities in the Third World countries where it sources many of its goods.

It also invested in a wind farm in Wales, as part of its campaign in support of renewable energy, and has set up its own human rights award.

Roddick said in February that she had contracted Hepatitis C through a blood transfusion while giving birth to Sam in 1971.

She made the announcement after she was named head of Britain's Hepatitis C Trust charity.

In recognition of her contribution to business and charity, Queen Elizabeth II made Roddick a dame, the female equivalent of knighthood, in 2003.

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London ~~ Tuesday September 11 2007

Profile: Anita Roddick

Exotic executive

Julia Finch, City editor

March 20 1998: Anita Roddick surrounded by artificial hemp plants for the launch of a skin care range using industrial-grade hemp (Photograph: Adrian Brooks/PA)

When Anita Roddick burst on to the business scene, taking her Body Shop chain to the stock market in 1984, the City had never seen - or heard - anything like her. The arrival of a woman who looked like a hippy and talked passionately about the environment and ethical trading came as a serious shock.

As one of the first female chief executives of a listed company, she was openly contemptuous of the City and its focus on the bottom line, believing that business had a responsibility to consider its impact on society, from civil rights to recycling.

Dame Anita made environmental protection a cornerstone of the company's ethos 20 years before big retailers such as Tesco and Marks & Spencer started to emphasise their eco-credentials.

She also waged a vocal campaign against animal testing, forcing rivals to follow Body Shop's lead. The business now operates more than 2,000 stores worldwide in 50 separate markets.

By the early 1990s the shares had soared and the company was valued at £900m. But by the mid-90s profits growth had slowed. Last year she agreed to sell out to cosmetics group L'Oréal in a deal that valued Body Shop at £650m and generated £118m for the Roddick family. She insisted that she would be able to encourage L'Oréal to use more fair trade raw materials.

As for her fortune, she sought to give it all away. She recently declared it was "a joy" to be giving away £3m a year, and had lost none of her lifelong passion for campaigns and worthy causes.
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 London ~~ Tuesday September 11 2007

Dame Anita Roddick

Veronica Horwell

The Body Shop founder, Anita Roddick. Photograph: PA

Dame Anita Roddick, who has died aged 64 after a stroke, opened her first Body Shop in Brighton in 1976.

The beauty business was not then about bodies, which were merely the soaped tail end of the face and hair market, and its lotions and potions were laboratory tested, industrially concocted and sold through chemists' chains or the phoney salons of department stores. None of this connected with the 1970s change in how women wanted to pamper and present their physical selves.

The Body Shop came from that radical sensibility, which produced the self-help book Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973), much twaddle about sisterhood and the notion, which Roddick traded in, that natural cosmetics - with ingredients you might almost eat, mixed in small batches - could be feminist. She was always candid that nothing she made could stave off age or simulate gorgeousness, but you could have sensuous fun using it. She carried over that good-time approach to her business, and to the social and environmental campaigns that motivated her life.

It helped that she was dramatic, an actor hardly manqué. She was brought up the daughter of Gilda and Donny Perilli, Italian-Jewish immigrants with a cafe in Littlehampton, Sussex. Gilda later divorced gloomy, drunk Donny and married her lover, Donny's sunny cousin, Henry. She waited until Anita's 18th birthday to tell her that Henry was her real dad. It didn't worry the girl - she was still an Italian who ate lots of tomatoes.

Anita went to a convent, then to Maude Allen secondary modern, failed to get into the Central School of Speech and Drama, and taught English. Then a bold move: she travelled, taking jobs in Paris and Geneva to fund herself as far as Africa, the Far East and the Pacific.

At the club Gilda ran back home, Anita was introduced to Gordon Roddick, not short of a quid or two. They had a daughter, Justine, married in Reno, California, and wandered before returning to Littlehampton to run, in the improvisatory fashion of the period, a bed and breakfast and restaurant. How unserious their entrepreneurship was, and how far ahead of their times they were, is clear from Gordon's decision to take a gap of two years to ride horseback from Buenos Aires to New York.

His absence was her break. She had Justine, plus baby Samantha, plus a loan of £4,000 that had been arranged by Gordon because she, in her Bob Dylan T-shirt, had failed to convince the bank of her probity. Her retail premises in Brighton Lanes were so derelict she joked that green had become the company colour to camouflage the mould on the walls.

Roddick's 25 primary products were not so different from those of earlier cosmetic queens who had also stirred up their first pots on the kitchen stove and sold them door-to-door. It was the way she sold her Bedouin-recipe moisturiser that was new. She did not propose exotic fantasy; she did promise that the ingredients had not been tested on animals, were not synthetic and - long before the Fairtrade movement - had been sourced directly from the world's ground-level growers rather than commodity brokers. Her lack of packaging was anti-waste: customers should return the plain bottles to be refilled. If she huckstered anything, it was the history of the ingredients and the anthropology of their cultivators.

She sold 50% of the business to a local garage owner to raise money for a second shop and might not have gone much further than a few more run by friends had Gordon not ridden back, taken over the finances and suggested the franchise of branches. Most franchisees were women, and they, as much as she, made Body Shops unprecedented places: you would go in for brazil-nut conditioner (Roddick trekked to research adornment rituals), and be made breathless both by the concentrated shop pong and the early fervour for green issues and aid to the developing world.

Her balance of entrepreneurship and activism seemed even weirder in the mean, greedy 1980s. The Roddicks took the business public in 1984; she later understood that that had been a serious mistake, since its success was thereafter calculated only in terms of profits and growth. Her protests about social change and alternative, egalitarian business methods did not seem to square with her new role as a pioneer female entrepreneur. (A part for which she never power-dressed - she favoured Mediterranean-sexpot retro-frocks). Could you be businesswoman of the year under Mrs Thatcher and still poster your windows with Greenpeace's Save the Whale campaign?

Of course there was a reaction. By the 1990s she was the fourth richest woman in Britain, author of an autobiography, Body and Soul (1991), and an ever-reliable source of quotes on ethical consumption and of finance for pacifist, ecological and human rights causes - among them Amnesty, Friends of the Earth, and the Big Issue. She was routinely derided as being left and green only to promote Body Shop or herself.

In 1992 she successfully sued over a television documentary that claimed she lied about animal testing. In 1994 she could only wince when the magazine Business Ethics challenged her record on green standards and fair trade, leading to falls in the share price. She felt no contradiction in joining anti-globalisation protesters who rocked the Seattle World Trade Organisation meeting in 1999, but they were less sure about the sincerity of an anti-multinationalist who headed a company with 2,000 outlets in 55 countries.

She began to edge away from the business, standing down as chief executive. Last year the Roddicks outraged the finance pages and users of jojoba cleanser alike when they sold Body Shop to the multinational L'Oréal for £625m, of which they received £130m. That she intended to give it away, plus her own £50m or so, through the charitable Roddick Foundation did not silence accusations of betrayal. She was confident she could persuade L'Oréal to use her sort of ingredients.

But she was also relieved to be rid of the old monster, possibly because she had been diagnosed in 2004 with hepatitis C, contracted through a tranfusion during Samantha's birth in 1971. It gave her cirrhosis of the liver, an appointment with a transplant, a sudden urgency about life and another chance to campaign - this time against ignorance of the disease. She was awarded the OBE in 1988 and made a dame in 2003. Gordon, Justine and Samantha survive her.

· Anita Roddick, entrepreneur and activist, born October 23 1942; died September 10 2007
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 e-Paper Wednesday September 12 2007, Page 20

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London ~~ Tuesday September 11 2007

Anita Roddick, capitalist with a conscience, dies at 64

The death of Dame Anita Roddick from a brain haemorrhage, after suffering from Hepatitis C for 30 years, was met with great shock by the many she inspired. James Macintyre chartsher success

Two years after Anita Roddick found out from routine tests that for several decades she'd been carrying a painful and depressive disease, she finally broke the devastating news on her internet blog. "I have Hepatitis C," she wrote on 14 February this year. "It's a bit of a bummer but you groan and move on."

The message's selflessness defined a woman who devoted her life to ethical causes, dragging the ecological movement into the mainstream and making saving the planet fashionable. "What I can say is that having [the disease] means that I live with a sharp sense of my own mortality, which in many ways makes life more vivid and immediate," she went on. "It makes me even more determined to just get on with things." It was characteristic determination and optimism from the early pioneer of the burgeoning eco-movement.

Born in 1942 to an Italian immigrant couple in Littlehampton, Anita Roddick was always a self-described "outsider" with a "strong sense of moral outrage," awakened when she found a Penguin book about the Holocaust at the age of 10. She trained as a teacher but a captivating opportunity on a kibbutz in Israel "turned into an extended trip around the world," on which she would represent the UN.

Soon after the kibbutz experience, which ended abruptly after she was expelled for a practical joke, her mother introduced the young Anita to "a Scotsman named Gordon". Our bond was instant," Dame Anita wrote later. The pair married and had two daughters and, after opening a restaurant and a hotel in Littlehampton, Dame Anita created The Body Shop in 1976, unveiling the first shop in Brighton.

It was to emerge some three decades after she founded the Shop that she had been all that time carrying the potentially deadly disease, believed to be from infected blood given to her during the birth of her youngest daughter, Sam, in 1971.

Last night, her family issued a statement saying Dame Anita, who was 64, had died at 6.30pm from a major brain haemorrhage at St Richard's hospital in Chichester, where she had been admitted on Sunday evening after suffering a severe headache. Her husband and daughters Sam and Justine were at her bedside.

Although she campaigned on human rights causes ranging from opposition to the death penalty to domestic violence, it was as the founder of The Body Shop that she was best-known. She said she had no idea the chain would take off, let alone become a national institution which helped popularise the green movements, enabling her to fulfil her passion for campaigning against animal testing.

"I started [the shop] simply to create a livelihood for myself and my daughters, while Gordon, was trekking across the Americas," she said. "I had no training or experience ... 30 years on, The Body Shop is a multi local business with over 2045 stores serving more than 77 million customers in 51 different markets in 25 different languages and across 12 time zones."

The shop's appealing, colourful soaps and gift boxes of skin products were much-loved by their millions of customers, keen to buy goods sourced from the developing world.

"The original Body Shop was a series of brilliant accidents," she said of the Brighton store. "It had a great smell, it had a funky name. It was positioned between two funeral parlours – that always caused controversy. It was incredibly sensuous. It was 1976, the year of the heat-wave, so there was a lot of flesh around. We knew about storytelling then, so all the products had stories. We recycled everything, not because we were environmentally friendly but because we didn't have enough bottles. It was a good idea. What was unique about it, with no intent at all, no marketing nous, was that it translated across cultures, across geographical barriers and social structures. It wasn't a sophisticated plan, it just happened like that."

On The Body Shop's trade-mark green branding, Roddick joked that it was established by accident because it was the only colour that could cover the mould on the walls of her first shop, whose products were inspired from a combination of travelling the world and lessons from her mother's beauty habits from the Second World War.

"Why waste a container when you can refill it? And why buy more of something than you can use? We behaved as she did in the Second World War, we reused everything, we refilled everything and we recycled all we could," Roddick wrote.

The shop even invested in a wind farm in Wales, as part of its campaign in support of renewable energy. In 1988 the success of Mrs Roddick – hailed as an inspirational pioneer last night by Gordon Brown – was recognised with an OBE.

For Dame Anita, the truly exceptional entrepreneur, business and ethics came together. "Businesses have the power to do good," she wrote. "That's why The Body Shop's Mission Statement opens with the overriding commitment, 'To dedicate our business to the pursuit of social and environmental change.'"

Last year The Body Shop was bought by L'Oreal in France for £652m. Though she eventually scaled back her work with the chain once it was firmly established in the public psyche – she continued to help it, and said recently of the company: "Today, it is impossible to separate the company values from the issues that I care passionately about – social responsibility, respect for human rights, the environment and animal protection."

The controversial L'Oreal purchase shocked the fans of the fair trade campaigner, who once famously said: "I hate the beauty industry, it is a monster selling unattainable dreams. It lies, it cheats, it exploits women."

But Dame Anita said she was confident the legacy and values of The Body Shop, would survive. "I'm not an apologist for them [L'Oreal]," she said. "I'm just excited that I can be like a trojan horse and go into that huge business and talk about how we can buy ingredients like cocoa butter from Ghana and sesame oil from Nicaraguan farmers and how we can do that in a kindly, joyful way, and that is happening."

Recently, Dame Anita had turned her focus to giving away money to good causes through her Anita Roddick Foundation. "I wanted to do something useful with the money I had while I am still able to," she said.

Though she died prematurely, she continued to vigorously highlight injustices throughout the world and as late as 6 September was blogging on the "Angola Three", describing the case against the remaining two "political prisoners" – apparently framed for the murder of a white prison guard – as "a gross injustice." It was a cause she was passionate about, and she visited the notorious prison in 1990.

She was also a children's champion and in 1990 co-founded Children on the Edge, which worked on behalf of disadvantaged children in Eastern Europe and Asia. A strong campaigner against globalisation and global warming, in September 2001 she joined with Greenpeace to lead a high-profile international campaign against Exxon-Mobil (Esso), the world's largest oil and gas company, and 'No 1 Global Warming Villain'.

"This is the company that refuses to accept a direct link between the burning of fossil fuels and global warming, and that has turned its back on investing even a single penny on renewable alternatives, such as wind and solar," she said. She campaigned tirelessly against animal testing, against the dumping of toxic waste and against pollution, frequently teaming up with Greenpeace.

In June 2003, shortly after the invasion of Iraq, Dame Anita guest edited The Independent, focusing the edition on the plight of refugees throughout Europe.

Known for her hippyish dress sense, she described the sunset of her life as the most exciting period. "I believe the older you get, the more radical you become," said Dame Anita, who frequently quoted the author Dorothy Sayers who said: "A woman in advancing old age is unstoppable by any earthly force."

It's a true description of a life of service to ethical causes that blazed a trail around the world. Happily, her radicalism has been passed on to her daughters. In 2003 Sam organised a "naked street party against the war" outside her erotic boutique Coco de Mer, with the theme "liberate yourself from political bondage".

In the internet posting announcing her illness, Dame Anita spurned self-indulgence. Describing her characteristic decision to campaign on the disease which blighted her life, Dame Anita wrote: "In a way, campaigning with The Hepatitis C Trust is business as usual. I've always felt that activism is my rent for living on this planet and I've always wanted to celebrate and protect the human body. In a way, speaking out about my hep C is just carrying on what I helped to start at The Body Shop. Life has just taken a more interesting turn."

Tributes to a unique pioneer
* John Sauven, the executive director of Greenpeace: "She was a amazing inspiration to those around her ... She was so ahead of her time when it came to issues of how business could be done in different ways ... She was a true pioneer. When you were with her, the energy she radiated was phenomenal. She just really stood out in a crowd."

* Friends of the Earth director Tony Juniper: "Anita was a leading light of the modern green movement, and was one the first people to combine a profitable business with environmental responsibility ... Anita was an independent thinker and political activist in her own right. She will be sorely missed."

* Clive Stafford Smith, legal director of the anti-death penalty organisation Reprieve: "We were so happy to have her. She was so full of life, so fantastic, so dedicated, so energetic."

* Prime Minister Gordon Brown: "As one of this country's most successful businesswomen she was an inspiration to women throughout the country striving to set up and grow their own companies. She will be much missed and my thoughts are with her family and friends."

* Charles Gore, chief executive of the Hepatitis C Trust: "She was always willing to do anything to help. It was extraordinary how it wouldn't matter what it was ... Working with her was so joyful ... She took all her causes incredibly seriously but she never took herself seriously, which made her great fun to work with.

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Pakistan ~~ September 16, 2007 Sunday Ramazan 3, 1428

The green queen dies

By Veronica Horwell

Anita Roddick, a pioneering green entrepreneur who used the profits of her ethical beauty business to campaign for a better planet, bid adieu to the world

DAME Anita Roddick, who died on September 11, 2007 aged 64 after a brain haemorrhage, opened her first Body Shop in Brighton in 1976. The year is important. The beauty business was not then about bodies, which were merely the soaped tail end of the face and hair market. The Body Shop came from that radical sensibility that produced the self-help book Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973), much twaddle about sisterhood, and the notion, which Roddick traded on, that natural cosmetics could be feminist.

She was always candid that nothing she made could stave off age or simulate gorgeousness, but you could have sensuous fun using it.

Anita opened her first outlet with a loan of GBP4,000. Her premises in Brighton were so derelict that she joked that green became the Body Shop colour to camouflage the mould on the walls.

Roddick’s 25 primary products were not so different from those of earlier cosmetic queens; it was the way she sold her Bedouin-recipe moisturiser that was new. She did not propose exotic fantasy: she did promise that the ingredients had not been tested on animals, were not synthetic, and ­ long before the Fairtrade movement ­ that they had been sourced directly from the world’s ground-level growers rather than commodity brokers. Her lack of packaging was anti-waste – customers should return the plain bottles to be refilled; if she huckstered anything, it was the history of the ingredients and the anthropology of their cultivators.

Her balance of entrepreneurship and activism seemed weird in the mean, greedy 1980s. The Roddicks took the business public in 1984; she later understood that that had been a serious mistake, since its success was thereafter calculated only in terms of profits and growth. Her protests about social change and alternative, egalitarian business methods did not seem to square with her new role as a pioneer female entrepreneur.

Of course, there was a reaction. By the 1990s, she was the fourth richest woman in Britain, author of an autobiography, Body and Soul (1991), and a reliable source of quotes on ethical consumption and of finance for pacifist, ecological and human rights causes, among them Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth and the Big Issue. She was routinely derided as being left and green only to promote Body Shop or herself.

In 1992, she successfully sued over a television documentary that claimed she had lied about animal testing; in 1994 Business Ethics magazine challenged her record on green standards and fair trade – and the share price fell. She felt no contradiction in joining anti-globalisation protesters who rocked the 1999 World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle, but they were less sure about the sincerity of an anti-multinationalist who headed a company with 2,000 outlets in 55 countries.

She began to edge away, standing down as chief executive. Last year, the Roddicks outraged the finance pages and users of Jojoba cleanser alike when they sold the Body Shop to L’Oreal for GBP625m, of which they received GBP118m. That she intended to give it away, plus her own GBP50m or so, through the charitable Roddick Foundation, did not silence accusations of betrayal, though she was confident she could persuade L’Oreal to adopt her sort of ingredients.

But she was also relieved to be rid of the old monster, possibly because she had been diagnosed in 2004 with hepatitis C, contracted through a transfusion during Samantha’s birth in 1971. It gave her cirrhosis of the liver, an appointment with a transplant, a sudden urgency about life and another chance to campaign, against ignorance of the disease. She was awarded the OBE in 1988 and made a dame in 2003. Gordon, Justine and Samantha survive her.

Anita was an instinctive trader. At the start of the Body Shop, she had no real interest in the cosmetics industry, but saw a business opportunity that made sense. Her stance against animal testing was not so much driven by a love of animals as by complete incomprehension of why animal testing was necessary in the first place.

Her political activism within the Body Shop sparked many campaigns that filtered around the world through her 2,000 or so stores. After she ceased being a shareholder, her mission was to dedicate the money she had made to the causes she believed in. I’m sure her biggest regret would be that she failed to die poor, that she didn’t have the time to give her money away.

Recently, Anita finished a DVD that tells the story of the Body Shop from her perspective. She wanted to “set the record straight,” she said, “while I still have time.” It’s a celebration of the creativity and pioneering spirit that effectively changed the world of business. It is also an account of her regrets. When the Body Shop went public, the company expanded and made her very wealthy. But the targets set by the City meant that the organisation was forced to grow too fast. In retrospect, she wished she’d stayed small and had more control. She was also frustrated by a raft of City lawyers whose fear of litigation saw off many of Anita’s best campaigns.

The sale to L’Oreal was almost universally perceived as a sell-out. Anita knew it was a controversial decision and agreed only on the understanding that the Body Shop would be ring-fenced within the L’Oreal group. She also truly believed that she stood a good chance of being a Trojan horse and having an influence on the way that L’Oreal does business.

To have died so suddenly was, for Anita, a great way to go. As Sam always said: “My mum won’t die, she’ll explode.” –– Dawn/ Guardian News Service 

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