I’ve been meaning to put together this post about Anita Roddick born 23 October 1942. She was the founder of the Body Shop who I was thrilled to meet at her talk/book signing here in Los Angeles in 2004. Notably, this seemingly unsophisticated multimillionaire spoke about how her goal was to give away her money, and how she did not want to die with material wealth. Afterwards, we discussed her work with the Ogoni people of the oil rich Niger Delta and communicated via email upon her return England. She was an obvious systems thinker whose views on human rights, social responsibility, the environment and water issues resonated and have remained influential to this day.

“This is no dress rehearsal. You’ve got one life, so just lead it and try and be remarkable.” ~ Anita Roddick

Her website was an almost daily destination, therefore, on September 10, 2007, it was heartbreaking to be greeted on the frontpage by news of her death from a brain hemorrhage. That day, I wrote the following in comments:
To Dame Anita Roddick – The honorary Ogoni.
With a heavy heart, I heard the news of Anita Roddick’s passing. This is utterly heartbreaking. I was on this site last night to forward the link to her tribute to Ken Saro Wiwa.
Anita did so much to bring light to the plight of the Ogoni and she will be sorely missed. My thoughts and prayers go to her family and loved ones. The world has lost a great visionary and philanthropist. Godspeed Anita. I wish I could witness your dance with Ken Saro Wiwa and the rest of the Ogoni who easily embraced you as one of them. Rest in Peace.

Anita Roddick: Corporate Social Responsibility?

Anita Roddick was a socially conscious entrepreneur and activist who advocated human rights, earth rights, animal protection, fair trade, and ethical consumerism. She worked with indigenous communities around the world, and in the Niger Delta for example, she was made an honorary citizen.

Born in England to Italian immigrant parents, she saw herself as a natural outsider drawn to other outsiders and rebellious types. At age ten, after learning of the Holocaust, her thirst for social justice was activated and she never looked back. After marrying Gordon Roddick in 1970, they opened up their first restaurant, then in 1976, looking to create a means of livelihood for her young family while Gordon traveled for two years, she started The Body Shop.

The Story Of Anita Roddick

Stunningly lovely interview with Anita Roddick telling her story from the pure entrepreneurialism of hand made and labeled products sold in a small store called The Body Shop (between two undertakers) through to the sense of powerlessness in the face of the WTO. Watch to the bitter end, an inspirational moment in the movement that is Fair Trade from the legend that is Anita Roddick.And a serendipitous moment in the rise of the World Fair Trade Organization and the Birth of the Sustainable Economy.

Anita Roddick Interview

I started The Body Shop in 1976 simply to create a livelihood for myself and my two daughters, while my husband, Gordon, was trekking across the Americas. I had no training or experience and my only business acumen was Gordon’s advice to take sales of £300 a week. Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that’s exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking. Running that first shop taught me business is not financial science, it’s about trading: buying and selling. It’s about creating a product or service so good that people will pay for it. Now 30 years on The Body Shop is a multi local business with over 2.045 stores serving over 77 million customers in 51 different markets in 25 different languages and across 12 time zones. And I haven’t a clue how we got here!

It wasn’t only economic necessity that inspired the birth of The Body Shop. My early travels had given me a wealth of experience. I had spent time in farming and fishing communities with pre-industrial peoples, and been exposed to body rituals of women from all over the world. Also the frugality that my mother exercised during the war years made me question retail conventions. Why waste a container when you can refill it? And why buy more of something than you can use? We behaved as she did in the Second World War, we reused everything, we refilled everything and we recycled all we could. The foundation of The Body Shop’s environmental activism was born out of ideas like these

I am aware that success is more than a good idea. It is timing too. The Body Shop arrived just as Europe was going ‘green’. The Body Shop has always been recognisable by its green colour, the only colour that we could find to cover the damp, mouldy walls of my first shop. I opened a second shop within six months, by which time Gordon was back in England. He came up with the idea for ‘self-financing’ more new stores, which sparked the growth of the franchise network through which The Body Shop spread across the world. The company went public in 1984. Since then, I have been given a whole host of awards, some I understand, some I don’t and a couple I think I deserve.

Businesses have the power to do good. That’s why The Body Shop’s Mission Statement opens with the overriding commitment, ‘To dedicate our business to the pursuit of social and environmental change.’ We use our stores and our products to help communicate human rights and environmental issues.

As the Body Shop grew, Anita continued traveling and campaigning for human and environmental rights.

In 1993 I met a delegation of Ogoni people from Nigeria. They were seeking justice and reparations against the giant oil multinational Shell that was ravaging their lands through oil exploration and production. Working with other NGOs, we turned their campaign into an international cause celebre. Tragically, the Ogoni’s key spokesperson, Ken Saro-Wiwa and 8 other Ogoni, were executed in 1995 by the Nigerian Government. But our campaign continued and eventually 19 other imprisoned Ogoni were released. In 1997, after 4 years of unrelenting pressure, Shell issued a revised operating charter committing the company to human rights and sustainable development. A year later, they launched their ‘Profits and Principles’ advertising campaign declaring their recognition of the interests of ‘ a much wider group of stakeholders in our business’. I like to think we had a hand in getting Shell to think about what it really means to be a corporate citizen.

In September 2001 I joined forces with The Body Shop and Greenpeace, and many thousands of other organisations and individual consumers in an international campaign against Exxon-Mobil (Esso), the world’s largest oil and gas company, and ‘No 1 Global Warming Villain’. This is the company that refuses to accept a direct link between the burning of fossil fuels and global warming, and that has turned its back on investing even a single penny on renewable alternatives, such as wind and solar.

For Anita, it was all well and good to expose human rights and environmental issues, but she was also keenly interested in presenting solutions that were fair and sustainable.

For me, campaigning and good business is also about putting forward solutions, not just opposing destructive practices or human rights abuses. One key area where my business and personal interests naturally combine is through The Body Shop community trade initiatives. It all started in 1989 when I attended the gathering at Altamira of Amazonian Indian tribes protesting against a hydro-electric project which would have flooded thousands of acres of rainforest, submerging native lands. There had to be something practical I could do to help these people preserve their environment and culture. Nuts? Specifically brazil nuts, which the Indians gathered sustainably from the forest and which when crushed produce a brilliant oil for moisturising and conditioning. This first trading relationship with forest people, unused to any real commercial activity, was fraught with pitfalls and dangers. But 13 years on we’re still trading with them and have even set up a Green Pharmacy project producing remedies based on traditional knowledge of forest plants – reducing dependency on inappropriate and expensive modern pharmaceuticals. Every year I travel to a number of our projects. In November 1999 I visited our long-term partners Teddy Exports in southern India and GPI in Nepal and our new partners, the Chepang indigenous people who grow herbs for our Ayurvedic range. In January 2001 I visited the 130 sesame seed oil farmers in Nicaragua who receive a fair and stable price for their seed. As a result the farmers have built up a sustainable business that as well as offering marketing clout, runs a subsidised store, a credit union, and employs a Cuban agronomist specialising in organic methods. The deal with The Body Shop isn’t going to make the farmers financially rich, but it does enable them to maintain their chosen way of life and through co-operation achieve autonomy. I’m immensely proud of our efforts to make fair or community trade relationships more mainstream. The Body Shop now has 29 such projects in 23 countries and we aim to develop more.

After leaving the Body Shop, Anita continued her fight against injustice, and in 2000, published her autobiography, Business as Unusual and the next year, edited a collection on globalisation and the power of the World Trade Organization.

With the launch of her personal website in 2001, She started brainstorming imaginative ways of using media and technology as tools for activists to connect, collaborate and create community around shared ideas.

The most exciting part of my life is now – I believe the older you get, the more radical you become. There’s a Dorothy Sayers quote I love, “A woman in advancing old age is unstoppable by any earthly force”. In November 1999, I flew to Seattle to speak out against the role of the World Trade Organisation and witnessed the ‘Battle of Seattle’. I’m fascinated by the publishing industry: in 2000 I published my autobiography Business and Unusual and in 2001 I edited Take it Personally, a collection of provoking thought pieces to challenge the myths of globalisation and the power of the WTO.

I launched my own website www.AnitaRoddick.com in 2001 and an activism portal www.TakeItPersonally.org in 2004. I am overwhelmed by the potential of the web to link like-minded people and move them to mass-action. We are excited to experiment in other media too — perhaps subversive billboards, or a television program, or other print projects. As someone once said, we are only limited by our imaginations.

Two of my greatest passions now are the campaigns we’ve undertaken as part of Anita Roddick Publications. One focuses on sweatshop labour by multinational corporations. We’ve joined forces with the National Labor Committee on this and helped foster creative resistance that has made some noticeable inroads. And we’ve joined with a group of human-rights activists to free the American political prisoners known as the Angola Three. These three men, who were black political activists in the 1970s, have served over 35 years in solitary confinement in Angola prison for crimes they did not commit. It is my intention to do whatever it takes, for as long as it takes, to see that their story is told and they are set free.

With The Body Shop and Anita Roddick Publications, I will continue fighting for human rights and against economic initiatives and structures that abuse and ignore them. That’s a tall enough order to keep me busy for the next 30 years.

Certainly, were she alive today, Anita would have harnessed the power of social networks to call attention to global issues and to rally activists from all corners and persuasions, around the common purpose of working together to find long-term solutions.

We may no longer hear the voices of great women like Anita Roddick and Wangari Maathai, yet, stories of these courageous and selfless souls have never been more relevant and will continue to inspire action for the greater good.
I am honored and deeply humbled to have met both amazing women – beacons of hope in the midst of doubt and apathy – from whom I’ve learned that entrepreneurship, social justice and earth rights are not mutually exclusive.

Anita Roddick, Body Shop Founder, Dies at 64
www.AnitaRoddick.com