Who is anita roddick

Its approach to beauty was radically different from the big players in the beauty industry. It was simple — ethically sourced and naturally-based ingredients from around the world, in no-nonsense packaging you could easily refill.

Products and beauty rituals made for every body, that made women feel good in their skin — never promising to make them look like someone else. They are neither first nor last among our objectives, but an ongoing part of everything we do. Over 40 years ago, this kind of approach was ahead of the curve. It had purpose — profit and principles working in harmony. She was knighted by the Queen in Apart from the OBE, Roddick received several awards and recognitions throughout her life. Roddick was diagnosed with hepatitis C in which she had gotten due to a blood transfusion she had while giving birth to her younger daughter.

Later on she also developed liver cirrhosis. Roddick died due to brain hemorrhageon 10th September She left her entire estate to charity. She did not propose exotic fantasy: she did promise that the ingredients had not been tested on animals, were not synthetic, and - long before the Fairtrade movement - that they had been sourced directly from the world's ground-level growers rather than commodity brokers.

Her lack of packaging was anti-waste - customers should return the plain bottles to be refilled; if she huckstered anything, it was the history of the ingredients and the anthropology of their cultivators.

Most franchisees were women, and they, as much as Roddick, made Body Shops unprecedented places: you would go in for brazil-nut conditioner Roddick trekked to research adornment rituals , and be made breathless both by the concentrated smells and the fervour for green issues and aid for the developing world.

Her balance of entrepreneurship and activism seemed even weirder in the mean, greedy s. The Roddicks took the business public in ; she later understood that that had been a serious mistake, since its success was thereafter calculated only in terms of profits and growth. Her protests about social change and alternative, egalitarian business methods did not seem to square with her new role as a pioneer female entrepreneur. Of course, there was a reaction.

By the s, she was the fourth richest woman in Britain, author of an autobiography, Body and Soul , and a reliable source of quotes on ethical consumption and of finance for pacifist, ecological and human rights causes, among them Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth and the Big Issue. She was routinely derided as being left and green only to promote Body Shop or herself.

In she successfully sued over a television documentary that claimed she had lied about animal testing; in Business Ethics magazine challenged her record on green standards and fair trade - and the share price fell. She felt no contradiction in joining anti-globalisation protesters who rocked the World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle, but they were less sure about the sincerity of an anti-multinationalist who headed a company with 2, outlets in 55 countries.

She began to edge away, standing down as chief executive. But she was also relieved to be rid of the old monster, possibly because she had been diagnosed in with hepatitis C, contracted through a tranfusion during Samantha's birth in It gave her cirrhosis of the liver, an appointment with a transplant, a sudden urgency about life and another chance to campaign, against ignorance of the disease. She was awarded the OBE in and made a dame in Gordon, Justine and Samantha survive her.

John Elkington writes: "I love her like fury, but it's like being trapped in a brown paper bag with a bluebottle," a relative commented of his wife - and that was Anita for me. Like all true entrepreneurs, she fired on all cylinders, all the time. Working close to her would have driven me mad, but working alongside her in an extraordinary nexus of ethical, social, environmental and international development movements has been one of the great privileges of my life.

I cannot remember when our paths first crossed, but I covered her work in my book The Green Capitalists, when she said: "There is something magical about small companies run by people whose thinking was forged in the 60s. You sit down and ask not only how the business should be run, but also what should be done with the profits. Skip to content Profile Avatar.

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