Brand Profile: The Body Shop

Anita Roddick, (23 October 1942 – 10 September 2007) was a British businesswoman born as Anita Lucia Perilli in a bomb shelter in Littlehampton, Sussex, in an Italian immigrant community. In 2003, Queen Elizabeth II appointed Roddick a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

In the early 1970s, Anita Roddick visited a shop called The Body Shop in Berkeley, California run by Peggy Short and Jane Saunders. This inspired her to open her own shop back in the UK. In 1987, Anita purchased the naming rights from the original Body Shop. Its stock was floated on London's Unlisted Securities Market in April 1984, opening at 95p. After its full listing on the London Stock Exchange, the stock was given the nickname "The shares that defy gravity," as its price increased by more than 500%.

          The company created a doll in the likeness of Barbie but with a lifelike voluptuous figure and luxuriant red hair, that came with the tag line, "There are 3 billion women who don't look like supermodels and only 8 who do" Her name was Ruby, a real-life size 16 plastic doll that Mattel thought looked too much like Barbie.

In 1993, She told in an interview to Third Way Magazine:-

"The original Body Shop was a series of brilliant accidents. It had a great smell, it had a funky name. It was positioned between two funeral parlours--that always caused controversy. It was incredibly sensuous. It was 1976, the year of the heat wave, so there was a lot of flesh around. We knew about storytelling then, so all the products had stories. We recycled everything, not because we were environmentally friendly, but because we didn’t have enough bottles. It was a good idea. What was unique about it, with no intent at all, no marketing nous, was that it translated across cultures, across geographical barriers and social structures. It wasn’t a sophisticated plan, it just happened like that."