The Hindu Business Line : The spirit of Body Shop

The brand The Body Shop, though now owned by cosmetic major L'Oreal, is synonymous with Dame Anita Roddick, its founder and visionary. The two are so intertwined that when it was officially launched in India last week, L'Oreal was nowhere in the picture. Roddick did the honours, humoured the press and spoke on the future, both the brand's and hers.

In its 30 years of existence, The Body Shop brand has come a long way, making its way through 77 million customers in 51 different markets in 25 different languages across 12 time zones.

Its entry into India is relatively late, but its plans are ambitious - to have 50 stores in the next three years. Since June this year when the brand entered the country without much fanfare and opened five stores, it has found tremendous response from those who are familiar with the philosophy and products of Body Shop.

For India, The Body Shop has tied up with Planet Retail Pvt Ltd, its master franchisee in the country, which says it is committed to the business ethics the brand stands for. Planet Retail will franchise The Body Shop through another entity, Quest Retail Pvt Ltd. "We are also committed to carrying out the strong social and environmental beliefs of The Body Shop in our daily work," said Arun Bhardwaj, Managing Director, Quest Retail Pvt Ltd.

But what is it that puts The Body Shop apart? What is it that the brand has that others don't and puts it into a totally different category of products? The brand, like its founder, stands for `commerce with a conscience' and has been, in a sense, the epitome of ethical business practices.

For instance, The Body Shop's cosmetic products swear by tenets such as anti-animal testing, supporting community trade, defending human rights, and protecting the planet - core values that Roddick to date supports and would like to carry forward. Its slogan, ` Made With Passion,' may as well be the slogan of its founder too, for the passion she displays to the social causes she backs matches the involvement she has had in the Body Shop project from when she started the enterprise to support herself and her two daughters.

Creating cosmetics out of ingredients found in her garage, Anita started her little shop way back in 1976 with around 15 products. Having travelled widely in geographies as diverse as Tahiti, South Africa and Australia, she used the knowledge she acquired here for her unique recipes. While relating her life story, she says, "It was not 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 these."

Roddick also attributes the success of Body Shop to the perfect timing it had chosen to be launched. It 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." Her husband, Gordon, who had been away on a trek when she had started out, returned and came up with the idea of ` self-financing' more new stores, which translated into a franchise network across the world.

When Roddick was in India a few years ago, she had spoken to Business Line about opening in India only when she found the ideal community-rooted organisation to partner with. But now The Body Shop is no longer hers in terms of ownership. However, she still seems to be its ambassador and says she feels a " great chemistry" with those the brand has partnered with. She is also happy that they are committed to what the brand stands for and will give away one per cent of their sales to select NGOs working in development projects in the country.

Roddick is excited with the prospects of what the future is going to bring with it. Two of her future projects are, in a sense, linked to her experience with the brand. The $1 billion and more she made through the sale of The Body Shop to L'Oreal earlier in the year is going to be used for her pet causes — human rights, social justice and in concrete terms, the campaign against sweatshop labour and the rights of death row prisoners. Besides, where the cosmetics industry is concerned, Roddick would be doing for L'Oreal what she did at The Body Shop. She would be spending around 25 days in the year to help the company embrace a community approach for its purchase programme.

Roddick elaborates on what that would entail. It would mean putting in place a community trading business for L'Oreal, where the company would purchase ingredients harvested by family farmers for its products. "Be it honey, aloe, cocoa butter, these products are of incredible quality when procured directly from farms instead of the commodity market. In short, I would do for the cosmetics industry what I could not do when I was in Body Shop.

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 said.

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