Anita Roddick’s Concept of Sustainable Business Model
"Over the past decade... while many businesses have pursued what I call 'business as usual,' I have been part of a different, smaller business movement, one that tried to put idealism back on the agenda."
Anita Roddick also called the "Queen of Green" or the "Mother Teresa of Capitalism" was born on October 23, 1942 in Littlehampton, West Sussex, England. She is founder of The Body Shop International Plc. - one of England’s best known retailers of cosmetics and personal care products. There are more than 2,750 Body Shops world-wide. Anita Roddick was a teacher, traveller, aid worker for the UN, she was also restaurant and hotel owner, and at the edn she became the creator of a new, sustainable business model – The Body Shop, where she would peddle some of the back-to-nature cosmetic knowledge she picked up during her travels.
“You change your values when you change your behaviour”.
Roddick was born into an Italian immigrant family in 1942, her father died and her mother steered her into the teaching profession, but Anita was adventurer and her cravings for doing so were too strong to keep her in the classroom. She had a number of jobs during her education. She was in Paris where she clipped newspapers, after that she went to Geneva where she worked for the United Nations, during this time she realised that she needed some adventure. Anita took her savings and hit what she called “the hippie trail”, she travelled through Europe, the South Pacific and Africa. During her journeys, she became familiar with rituals and customs of many different cultures, including their forms of health and body care. This influenced her life later on when she became a businesswoman.
When Anita returned back to England, her mother introduced her to her future husband – Gordon Roddick. They got married in 1971 and after a while they had two children. The couple owned and ran a restaurant and a bed and breakfast hotel (B&B) in Littlehampton. Gordon was also an adventurer, a poet and a traveller so he decided to follow his dream to ride horses in Argentina, Anita supported his decision and was left alone with two children to care for. In 1976, while he was away, Anita decided to open a cosmetic store which was supposed to be natural and environmentally conscious one.
“Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that's exactly what it is and what
nurtures creative thinking.”
She did have an idea but she did not have the funds to put it into effect, she had no income, no assets, no experience nor business plan, so the bank refused to grant her a loan. Therefore Anita asked a good friend to lend her $ 4,000. She spotted a location between two funeral parlours in Brighton and there she opened the very first store of ‘The Body Shop’. During her travels Anita had realised that no one sold bath products in small or sample sizes, so started with doing that. In her first store she had 15 products that she made in her garage. She packaged them in small plastic recyclable bottles. The reason of using that kind of bottles was not ‘to be environmentally friendly’; it actually was to keep start-up costs low. Moreover Roddick painted the shop green to hide the mould. Therefore customers started to like that innovation and were open to the new idea of recycling the bottles and thinking ‘green.’ Anita did not want to spend money and time on advertising; she rather relied on word of mouth adverts. She felt that the high quality items sell themselves.
“If you do things well, do them better. Be daring, be first, be different, be just.”
The success came quickly and Roddick wanted to open a second store this was before the company’s first year was over. However a friend helped her to open the second store, Ian McGlinn became a partner to Roddick when he funded the business with $ 8, 000. The combination of unique products, highly trained staff and good public relations quickly generated a buzz; the company became very popular around the world. Gordon Roddick returned home in 1977 and joined his wife’s business.They continued to grow the business really quickly, mainly through franchising. In the beginning they did not charge start up or royalty fees. The only condition was that theoperation was financed by franchisees. This was a brilliant formula for a while, during the times when the franchising was a cash cow. The financial problems for Body Shop began in 1990s when the competition in cosmetic industry became very sharp. In a 1995 article it was quoted that Body Shop products are "low-end...at a premium price." Moreover in that time the Roddicks’ were paying more attention to social causes like: the save-the-whales campaign, Amnesty International, ending animal testing and Greenpeace rather than to their own business. In 1996 it became clear that the company needed a change. A. Roddick shared in a interview for Fortune magazine: "We're having to grow up; we have to get methods and processes in. And the result of that is a hierarchy that comes in-and I think that's anti productive."
The Body Shop has grown from a single store to a multinational company which was sold to L’Oreal in 2006 due Anita Roddick’s illness (Hepatitis C). She died in 2007 as she was a commander of British Empire, $ 16 billion global cosmetic business and one of the richest women in England. When she opened her first store she did not expect to get rich, she just hoped to survive – "I'd rather promote human rights, environmental concerns, indigenous rights, whatever, than promote a bubble bath" was her concept for business. The Body Shop was different from other cosmetic companies, their purpose was to create profits with principles. Not only did they want make profits, but they also wanted to contribute to a social and environmental change.
