Page 41 - Great Elizabethans

THE BODY SHOP
But while Gordon was away, Anita needed to earn money for herself and her daughters – so, with a £4,000 loan from the bank, she opened the first The Body Shop in Brighton in 1976. Wedged between two funeral homes, it wasn’t the best place for a shop selling beauty products! The walls were so damp that she painted them dark green to disguise the mould – the colour that later became The Body Shop’s hallmark – but she made sure that it was welcoming to customers, and smelled lovely.
It was important to Anita that her soaps and lotions were environmentally friendly in every way possible. At the time, almost everyone making products like Anita’s tested them on animals to be sure they were safe for humans to use. Anita utterly refused to use animal testing, which was a revolutionary decision. She also insisted that the people who supplied ingredients for the products must be paid fairly, and she asked her customers to bring containers back to be refilled – partly to save resources, and partly because they were short of bottles!
Anita never allowed anyone to tell her she couldn’t make a difference. As she said herself: “If you think you’re too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito.”
PRINCIPLES BEFORE PROFITS
The long hours in her mother’s café had prepared her for the hard work of running a shop. The Body Shop was such a success that Anita soon opened another. When Gordon came home, he suggested letting other people open branches of The Body Shop in other places – something called ‘franchising’ – and the business took off.
Anita never wanted to be a huge business success – not if that meant mistreating the environment, or her workers, suppliers or customers. She certainly didn’t expect her shop to become a chain that would be known and loved around the world. But by 1990, Anita was the fourth-richest woman in Britain. In 2003, when she stepped down from running The Body Shop, it had almost 2,000 stores worldwide, selling beauty products to over 77 million customers.
When Anita died in 2007, she was remembered as an activist who gave huge sums of money to counter global warming and to fight injustice, and also as a brilliant businesswoman who always put principles before profits. She changed the way millions of people thought about what they bought.
As well as The Body Shop, Anita helped set up The Big Issue, the magazine sold by homeless people, and founded Children on the Edge, a charity that helps children affected by war and disability. Her own foundation also gave away millions of pounds to organisations like Greenpeace and Women’s Aid.