Anita Roddick opened her first Body Shop cosmetic store in the UK in 1976. In short order, she received a letter from a local solicitor. This lawyer represented two nearby businessmen who winced at Roddick’s name choice for her new shop. Auto repair specialists? No, they were nearby funeral parlor proprietors. But, Anita Roddick was not made of cut-and-run stock. In 2003, she told BBC Online readers that she retaliated by getting “an article in the Brighton Evening Argus. I rang them up and told them I was being intimidated by Mafia undertakers.” And did she get publicity!
Not long ago, Anita Roddick passed away at age 64, after suffering a stroke. She was one of the top female executives in the world. Roddick — or Dame Anita as she was recognized in British peerage — was a strong advocate of social causes. She was also a hard-headed businesswoman who knew how to make “green consumerism” profitable.
Roddick had an iron constitution. After the birth of her second child in 1971, she had contracted hepatitis C from a tainted blood transfusion. The disease went undetected until 2004. Over those years, she was energy personified. According to The Telegraph, “she shot rapids in the Yukon, a month before she died.”
Positive Force
After her death, management guru Tom Peters paid tribute to Roddick on his website: “She challenged all of us to consider our business . . . a force for positive, broad-based social change … . The right thing is also the profitable thing.”
Dame Anita was born Anita Perilli, the daughter of Italian immigrants. The family owned a little café, where she clocked time working on weekends. Not accepted for drama school, she took off to Tahiti and Australia and studied cosmetics customs used by “primitive” natives … . Some primitives! Today there are 2,000 Body Shops in fifty countries. The business went public and was ultimately bought by L’Oreal for $1 billion plus.
Though Roddick chased environmental ideals, she was a rock-solid pragmatist about the goods: “Moisturizers moisturize, fresheners freshen and cleansers cleanse. End of story,” was a Roddick mantra quoted in The New York Times. No conjurer in her potions, she still knew how to take risks. She was a hundred crows’ feet ahead of the pack in seeing applications for food oils and grains like oatmeal in cosmetics.
Roddick lived and loved business from the ground up. And that ground was rock solid. Among the other morsels she shared with her BBC Online would-be entrepreneurs:
“Don’t ever go to the bank manager with your kids.”
“Don’t always trust CVs (resumes) — always, always check references.”
“Be frugal … . Don’t waste your money.”
“Don’t neglect your stock. The back-end of the business is less interesting but you’ll find stock will disappear if you don’t look after it.”
“Make sure the window looks amazing.”
Staying Focused
Roddick may have seen the big picture, but she never lost sight of the fine fine print. A former communications advisor to her noted in Management Today, she was “highly organized” and that included knowing “what shop was opening in the Philippines.”
Though Roddick could global-spin with the best, she resisted dreams of “empire.” She once told journalist Martyn Lewis: “I never think big, I just think better, or more exciting. The nature of size is no interest to me at all.” By the way, should you think commanding stature is the sure ticket to business success, file this stat away: The wispy Ms. Roddick scarcely measured five-feet tall!
As a young associate, retailer Annette Boulter whizzed down to a local ice cream shop with Roddick one day. Asked what flavor she wanted, Boulter made the mistake of answering vanilla. “A moment later she came back to the car and, with disgust in her voice, she muttered to me: ‘They don’t do vanilla.’” Neither did Roddick. Her most important legacy: Stick with the cutting edge no matter how much it scratches.
Her journey started as a kid with that junket to Tahiti and ended a month after paddling white water. Constantly open yourself up to the adventure of life and apply what you learn with discipline. That’s the fingerprint of business imagination with staying power.
Mackay’s Moral: Convictions can ring the till, if you innovate with proven basics. The Body Shop that started hippy became a hopping mainstream success.
Harvey Mackay is president of Mackay Envelope Corp. and a nationally syndicated columnist.
