Business Daily from THE HINDU group of publications
Wednesday, Sep 12, 2007
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Business Daily from THE HINDU group of publications Wednesday, Sep 12, 2007 ePaper |
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Marketing
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People Radical in business and politics
Anita Roddick
Preeti Mehra New Delhi, Sept. 11 If there has been anyone who has changed the definitions of doing business, it is Dame Anita Roddick, founder of the global brand Body Shop, who died from a brain haemorrhage on Monday. She successfully managed to combine ethical business practices with her passion for environmental and political causes. So much so that the 64-year-old entrepreneur was known as much for her involvement in defending human rights and supporting community trade, as she was for successfully rolling out her 2,000 stores for 77 million customers in 53 different markets in 25 different languages across 12 time zones in a matter of 30 years. Though no longer the owner of the brand that she divested for over one billion dollars to cosmetic giant L’Oreal last year, she was still its brand ambassador and part time consultant to the French major. For L’Oreal it was a bonanza to have the brand that was the icon for ethical product sourcing and anti-animal testing values in its portfolio. Along with it came Dame Roddick herself, who promised to change the face of the conventional cosmetic industry as well. At the launch of Body Shop in India last year, she had revealed to Business Line that on her agenda was spending around 25 days in a year to help the French company embrace a community approach for its purchase programme. “I would like to ultimately see the entire international cosmetics industry buying from family farmers and, hence, participating in developing the social indices as well,” she had said. Anita Roddick’s passing away will surely be a sad loss for L’Oreal as for her hundreds of employees who have embraced the passion and values the brand shop stood for. “The politicism of the Body Shop has always been its DNA - the shops became our billboards,” she had said in an interview. However, her loss would be felt even more acutely by all those millions who swear by human rights and would like to see the end to business generated through sweat shops across the world. Besides, she had dedicated her $1 billion fortune to her pet causes — human rights, social justice and in concrete terms, the campaign against sweatshop labour and the rights of death row prisoners. By her own admission in an interview post the Body Shop sale, she said, “I’m getting more radical”. The radical Dame Roddick will be missed, not only by her husband and two daughters, and the business community to which she gave a new face, but by the global campaigners who would have now had more of her time and energy.
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