This Woman Has Changed Business Forever

How Anita Roddick has customers and employees clamoringfor her brand of business

Here it is, the start of another bloody brilliant decade, and Anita Roddick is worried. So what if Vogue has just anointed her a queen of the beauty industry? So what if her chain of eco-conscious cosmetics stores is the toast of England, counting the likes of Princess Diana and Sting among its boosters? So what if her company's shares continue to trade at a frigging 50 times earnings on London's stock exchange? So bloody what? These matters are of no interest to Roddick as she charges through the headquarters of The Body Shop International, the company she founded in a storefront 14 years ago.

What's worrying her at the moment is language. You know, words. Language is primary, she says, and it makes her nervous to find a whole new vocabulary creeping into her company. For the first time, people are talking about such things as three-year plans, net income, and average sale, and she doesn't like it, not one bit.

Language isn't all she's upset about, either. She's also feeling real annoyance, she says, at this obsession with meetings. "We're getting to a point where we can't fart without calling a meeting. And if I'm bored by them, and I run the bloody thing, Christ knows what other people must be thinking."

Then there's the problem of people spilling coffee on the new carpeting at headquarters, another thing that's been bugging her lately. Not that coffee stains rank high on her list of global concerns. But that's beside the point. "It's a symbol, a metaphor for a whole way of thinking. That lack of housekeeping, that lack of care. We talk about being lean and green. We deny that we have a fat-cat mentality, but I can see it creeping in. The paper that's wasted. The lights left on after a meeting. What it comes down to is arrogance. We think we're so brilliant, we're so successful that anything we do is all right, and that attitude really pisses me off."

If success is at the root of Roddick's worries, she has cause for concern. The Body Shop is already a legend in the United Kingdom, where the tale is told of a 33-year-old housewife with two young daughters, a husband yearning for adventure, and an idea for a store that would feature natural lotions and potions for the body. With a £4,000 ($6,400) bank loan, she and her husband proceeded to get the shop up and running, whereupon he took off for South America. By the time he returned 10 months later, the business had gone from one shop to two, and there was no turning back.

Nor did the pace slacken thereafter. For over a decade sales and profits continued to grow on average some 50% a year. By the end of fiscal year 1990, pretax profits had climbed to an estimated $23 million on sales of $141 million -- despite the onset of a withering recession in British retailing. And here's the beauty part: in all likelihood, The Body Shop's real growth lies ahead.

That's because the company has barely begun to tap its potential overseas. Although it operates successfully in 37 countries, about 75% of its profits still come from its U.K. stores. The balance is shifting, however. For 13 years, The Body Shop has been acquiring experience abroad. Now, a number of the foreign operations are approaching the critical mass a retail chain needs to explode in a market. Meanwhile, after years of preparation, the company is beginning to make its big push in the United States, with Japan set to follow. And there's still room for expansion in such established markets as Canada, Germany, and the United Kingdom.

Even a professional skeptic, moreover, has trouble finding weaknesses that might keep The Body Shop from realizing these opportunities. "We're talking about a company that is capable of sustaining a growth rate of 40% to 50% per annum, not just this year or next year, but for 5 or 10 years," says John D. K. Richards, director of retail research at County NatWest Securities Ltd., one of England's leading securities firms.

What's even more extraordinary than The Body Shop's growth record, however, is the effect the company has on the people who come in contact with it. Indeed, it arouses feelings of enthusiasm, commitment, and loyalty more common to a political movement than a corporation. Customers light up when asked about the company and start pitching its products like missionaries selling Bibles. Franchisees, employees, and managers talk about the difficulty they would have going back to work in an "ordinary" company. Here in the United States, some 2,500 people had written in for franchises -- before The Body Shop even got its U.S. operation off the ground. It's a kind of magnetism that even affects investment analysts. "I've never seen anything quite like it," says Richards. "The nearest comparison would be something like Flower Power in the 1960s."

The analogy is apt, particularly in the United Kingdom, where The Body Shop is almost as well known for its passionate environmentalism as for its cosmetics. The association goes back a long way. From the start Roddick has incorporated her environmental beliefs into the business -- offering only biodegradable products, for example, and providing refillable containers. Today the company even has an Environmental Projects department that monitors its own internal compliance with its stated principles. Beyond that, it has used its shops as the base for a series of highly visible campaigns to save the whales, stop the burning of the rain forest, and so on.

Such activism has, if anything, enhanced The Body Shop's mystique. Once viewed as an intriguing but irrelevant remnant of the 1960s, it has increasingly come to define the mainstream. From the billboards in the London Underground to the advertising on commercial television, British companies now tout their ecological virtues. Far from a curiosity, The Body Shop is the symbol of this new business consciousness.

But environmentalism does not explain the attraction of The Body Shop, not even when coupled with a personality as dynamic as that of Anita Roddick or a manager as capable as her husband, Body Shop chairman Gordon Roddick. On the contrary, people tend to be suspicious of companies that profess devotion to social causes, and with ample reason. When altruism and business lie down together, neither one gets a good night's sleep. Indeed, it's generally expected that neither one will be alive in the morning.