This Woman Has Changed Business Forever

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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.

What The Body Shop elicits, however, is the opposite of suspicion. Rather, it is the kind of intense commitment -- Anita calls it "electricity and passion" -- that companies spend fortunes trying to create, and that may yet make The Body Shop a $1-billion company by 1995. Less clear is how it actually pulls off this bit of alchemy, and Anita is not providing many clues as she races around her headquarters in Littlehampton, England, talking about language and meetings and the fat-cat mentality.

So where does that electricity come from? We are talking, after all, about a chain of stores that sells shampoo and skin lotion. Its success raises questions, not just about technique or strategy, but about some of the most fundamental aspects of business. What do customers really want from a product, and what do they want from the company that makes it? Are they motivated by forces that traditional marketing efforts ignore, and that traditional test-marketing techniques can't pick up? So, too, with employees. What do they want out of work, and what are they looking for in the organizations that provide it? Are they also motivated by forces conventional management techniques simply miss?

Those are perhaps the most important questions confronting business today. What The Body Shop's experience suggests is that it may be time to come up with some new answers.

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Information, Please
Appealing to the hyped-out customer

A sense of electricity and passion is not, in fact, the first thing that hits you when you walk into a Body Shop. It's the smell. A wave of exotic aromas greets you at the door and draws you in. The shop itself is bright and airy, very orderly, but with a whimsical touch. Along the walls are neat rows of products with names like Rhassoul Mud Shampoo, White Grape Skin Tonic, and Peppermint Foot Lotion. What's odd is the packaging. It is almost defiantly plain. Indeed, one whole side of the shop is covered with rows of shampoos and lotions in identical plastic bottles with black caps and green labels.

What's odder still is that no one seems to want to sell you this stuff. The salespeople are pleasant enough and quite knowledgeable about the products, but if you want advice, you have to ask for it. Nor will you find any photographs of beautiful models or promises about the miraculous benefits of using this or that cosmetic.

There is, on the other hand, plenty of information. Containers have clear, factual explanations of what's inside and what it's good for. On the shelves are notecards with stories about the products or their ingredients. There are stacks of pamphlets with such titles as "Animal Testing and Cosmetics" and "What Is Natural?" In a corner is a huge reference book called The Product Information Manual, providing background on everything The Body Shop sells. In some shops there's even a television set playing a video at low volume about, say, the company's manufacturing operation or one of its causes.

All of this is, of course, deliberate. In an industry built around selling fantasy, The Body Shop prides itself on selling "well-being." As a matter of stated principle, it pledges "to sell cosmetics with the minimum of hype and packaging" and "to promote health rather than glamour, reality rather than the dubious promise of instant rejuvenation." As for the shops, they are designed to be self-service, though not in the usual sense. Salespeople are expected to be able to answer any questions they might get, but they are trained not to be forceful with customers. In a similar spirit, the company refrains from advertising its products. Anita says she'd be embarrassed to spend a lot of money on ads for deodorant and skin lotion.

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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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