Today, Anita spends about two months every year travelling the world
picking up tips for natural ingredients to go into Body Shop products.
‘Women in other societies know that these well tried and tested ways work
and do not need a scientist or advertising agency to sell them.’ When Anita
gets back from a trip abroad she will regale managers with tales of her
adventures. Walls in warehouses and factories are hung with words and
images and displays of Third World art.
When she returned from her travels, Anita married and opened a restau-
rant with her husband, Gordon. He too got the wanderlust and set off on a
horse-back ride from South America to New York that was to take him two
years. She did not feel that she could cope with the restaurant on her own
and decided to open a shop instead, selling skin and hair products made
from the natural recipes gleaned on her travels.
‘You cannot call this shop The Body Shop’
Starting with a bank loan of £4000, Anita Roddick opened the first Body
Shop in Brighton in 1976 with a blaze of publicity. She was jammed
between two funeral parlours, who wrote her a letter saying, ‘You cannot
call this shop The Body Shop’, because the coffins would pass twice a day
and they were expecting some cute photographer from Shemagazine to
take that happy snapshot of the week. Her response was straightforward,
as she recalls: ‘I have always been petrified of headmasters and solicitors,
but I think that the two most talented things that I have ever done in my
life were to ignore those letters and then to use that to promote the
company. So what I did was quite simple, and I think it should be standard
practice for any young company setting up: the anonymous phone call! I
rang up the local Evening Argusin Brighton and said to them,
Do you know what is going on in Kensington Gardens? This poor woman on
her own, with a new baby, whose husband is trekking across South America
on a horse, is being intimidated by two Mafia undertakers. Her little shop is
called The Body Shop ... – I mean, I had written the story over the phone
and we got our first free editorial. We have never ever paid for an advert
since.Many of the features which made The Body Shop different came about
because of lack of funds in those early stages. The company could only
afford 20 products to begin with, which was not enough to fill the shop. So
making each product in five different sizes gave a wider range straight
away. There are now over 300 products, but they can still be bought in five
different sizes – customers like to be able to try the small sizes first. The
Body Shop still uses the cheapest bottles, referred to in the early days by
The referral and influence market domains 291