This Woman Has Changed Business Forever

The Body Shop mixes business with a devotion to social causes, inspiring both employees and customers.

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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."

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Bo Burlingham

Burlingham joined Inc. in 1983. An editor at large, he is the author of Small Giants: Companies That Choose to Be Great Instead of Big. The book was a finalist for the Financial Times/Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award in 2006. Burlingham is also the co-author with Norm Brodsky of The Knack; and the co-author with Jack Stack of The Great Game of Business and A Stake in the Outcome.

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