Body Shop's founder bows out, leaving the high moral ground

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Name: Anita Roddick

Born: Littlehampton, England, 1942

Lives: Littlehampton, England

Famous for: creating the Body Shop

Why in the news: stepped down this week as chief executive after 22 years

Least likely to say: Here's one I tested on Fido

The Body Shop is really a big sweetie shop for grown-ups: a cunning adaptation of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory. It's all about buying peppermint foot lotion, raspberry ripple bubble bath, fuzzy peach shower gel, coconut shampoo and strawberry soap, and feeling good about it while you're at it.

In 1976, when Anita Roddick's husband was doing his John Wayne thing of crossing South America on a horse, she stayed at home in Littlehampton with her two small children.

Before Gordon Roddick went west, he rented a shop in Brighton for Anita to sell her experimental lotions in.

She called it the Body Shop, not in reference to the human form, but because she'd seen the name over a garage that specialised in panel-beating. She had invented 15 products, most of them based on cocoa butter and sold in urine sample bottles. Recycling was uppermost in the Roddick ethic early on.

Six months later she opened a second shop. Gordon's horse (minus Gordon) fell off an Andean cliff and Gordon came home.

The second shop was successful, too. Anita made more potions and lotions. So successful did the shops become that the Roddicks were able to open many, many more Body Shops by going into franchise. All over Britain people went to work smelling like fruit. Toiletries had become fun.

That was the early 1980s - the era of the Iron Lady, suits with shoulder pads you could launch a spaceship from, big greedy business deals and inflated property prices, when broom cupboards in Knights bridge were turned into "studio apartments" and sold for record-breaking sums.

Now you didn't have to go out on the streets and do all that tedious protesting for civil rights in Derry, Vietnam, Prague or wherever. You just went to The Body Shop instead, a place that had copped political correctness before the expression was coined.

The Body Shop mission statement includes the ethos that it "will passionately campaign for the protection of the environment, human and civil rights, and against animal testing within the cosmetics and toiletries industry. And we will dedicate our business to the pursuit of social and environmental change."

All that and refillable bottles, too. All you have to do is buy the products.

Every bottle carries baggage. Honey Cream Cleanser comes courtesy of the Tungtelya Shea Butter Association of Women's Groups in Ghanaian villages. Watermelon Sunblock? Contains sesame oil that's bought from the Juan Francisco Paz Silva Co-operative in the Nicaraguan village of Achuapa. Seaweed and Peony Shampoo wouldn't be possible without agave extract, traded from communities in the Mezquital valley north of Mexico City.

Anita resembled a type of modern missionary; preaching and caring. "When you take the high moral road," she is quoted as saying, "it is difficult for anyone to object without sounding like a complete fool." Or a begrudger. For years the Roddick empire enjoyed near-lionisation in the media.

There's a product in the Body Shop called Six-Ball Massager. It comes, the handy little leaflet (printed on recycled paper) tells us, from Timer Productions in southern Siberia. They "ensure that their workers receive fair wages. They also negotiate land rights on behalf of the workers and provide a financial assistance fund for anyone in great need."

It's ironic that the Body Shop should be supporting a union in far-off Siberia, when they infamously do not have a union for their own workers. "Trade unions, who needs them?" Anita quipped 10 years ago at an Irish Marketing Institute conference. "Unions are only needed when the management are bastards."

By the early 1990s there were 600 Body Shops worldwide, employing more than 2,000 people. Statistically, there's a fair possibility of a few old bastards turning up somewhere. Readers may remember the employees of the Grafton Street branch, who were made redundant in early 1992. It just so happened that among them were the two young women who led the union.

"We will never be discouraged. We will be happy. We will ensure that every problem is resolved quickly." These resolutions come from the Body Shop's customer charter, given to all staff. They took it to heart and went out on strike.

Worldwide, the Body Shop wasn't smelling quite so sweet any more. Huge success had turned it into a multinational company that had come far from 15 home-made products sold in urine sample bottles. Yet there wasn't a corresponding management structure.

The media began following up some of the sources of Anita's products. There were damaging stories of child labour in India, and shampoo factories polluting local rivers. In 1994 sales in the US went into reverse, losing £20 million to date.

Customers worldwide were staying away, buying similar types of products in chains like Boots and M&S and the American Bath & Body Works: cheaper products which don't preach. For a no-frills operation, Body Shop prices have never been noted for being particularly cheap.

This week Anita Roddick declared that she didn't know how to run the Body Shop and had no idea what her job was supposed to be. She has moved from her position of chief executive to that of joint chairman. Her husband, the other joint chairman, mused on their change in fortunes: "There was an arrogance that the cultural imperialism would be accepted."

Nobody mentioned high moral grounds.