Roddick, Anita

▪ 1994

      Recycling waste, saving the rain forests, and stopping animal testing were unusual concerns for a business when Anita Roddick opened the first Body Shop in Brighton, England, in 1976. The natural-ingredient skin and hair products she sold were unproven oddities in the cosmetics industry. Roddick's progressive ideas found an audience, though, and the audience liked the products enough that by 1993 Body Shop International operated in 41 countries.

      She was born Anita Lucia Perella on Oct. 23, 1942, in Littlehampton, West Sussex. She watched her Italian-immigrant family transform a common English café into an ostentatious American-style diner, an experience she described as "my first lesson in marketing aesthetics."

      She attended Newton Park College of Education at Bath, Avon. While teaching at a secondary school, she was awarded a scholarship to study in Israel for three months. Returning to Littlehampton, she resumed teaching, but she had experienced too much of the world to contain herself in a classroom.

      In the early 1970s Roddick lived a desultory existence with her husband, Gordon, and two daughters. A bed-and-breakfast venture peaked and crashed quickly. They had some success with a restaurant but found it too time-consuming. Roddick then had an idea. In her travels she had admired the skin and hair of women in less developed countries, who used nothing more than the plants and fruits nature provided. She also saw no need for elaborate packaging of cosmetics. In fact, why not refill customers' empty containers? So began The Body Shop.

      After two funeral directors in Brighton objected to the name of her business in close proximity to their own enterprises, Roddick told it to the press. The coverage brought in customers and began a company tradition of using publicity instead of paid advertising. Within months she was scouting locations for a second store. By the late '70s she was authorizing franchises across Europe. In 1984 the company went public on the Unlisted Securities Market, and Roddick began receiving awards from the business community. In 1991 she published her autobiography, Body and Soul.

      Roddick's desire to teach never diminished. She used The Body Shop as a source of funds and a forum to educate the public about the work of Amnesty International, the Kayapo tribe of the Brazilian rain forests, and anything else she deemed worthy. In July 1993, with sales (and the share price) hurt by the recession, the Roddicks and their company won a judgment of £ 276,000 in a libel suit against Britain's Channel Four, which had aired a television program that questioned their social commitment. (STEPHEN S. SEDDON)

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