Anita Roddick: Ractical Chic

Drat. We fell for it. A lady who's built a brand purely on the free media publicity of her attacks on Big Business is best ignored, one would think, lest we end up becoming another instrument in her hands.

But now that we've fallen for it-and find ourselves talking to Anita Roddick at green activist Vandana Shiva's eight-acre organic farm 16 kilometres from Dehradun, Uttaranchal-it's a good thing that we have. For, there must surely be something compelling about her products-and how she sells them. Compelling enough, in fact, for every business analyst to think about.

The Body Shop that she opened in Brighton, UK, in 1976 to sell body-care products has grown into a 2,010-store global chain, with around 5,000 employees, selling a product every 0.4 seconds and serving around 77 million customers worldwide. The 2001-02 turnover: £380 million. Now, that's BIG. All because she was doing something that Big Business wasn't.

'Moribund', 'Dysfunctional', 'full of nomadic CEOs'-these are some of her descriptors for the Fortune 500. Roddick is 60 now, but isn't ready to mellow yet. "Their bottomline," she says, of the offending 500, "does not include rights, social justice, hidden costs of the environment-only profit and loss."

And her own mission? "I'm more interested in survival, penetrating markets, looking for and sourcing community trade ingredients," she says, "that's what keeps my company breathlessly alive."

The Body Shop Factsheet

Anita (L) and Gordon. T. Roddick: Green couple The Body Shop founded: 1976 No. of stores: 2,010 A Body Shop product sells every: 0.4 seconds No. of customers: 77 million Fraction of The Body Shop stores run by franchisees: 1/3 Employees: 5,000 Products: 1,000 The company's gross turnover (2001-02): £379.6 million Worldwide Retail Sales (2001-02): £691.8 million Profit (2001-02): £5.4 million Shares held by promoters: 24% Share equity of The Body Shop: 200 million shares The Body Shop Best-Sellers: Vitamin E Moisture Cream, Tree Oil Range, Banana Shampoo

Breathless

The high-priestess of 'socially responsible business' is in India to conduct a programme on 'sustainable business through ethics', and her audience at the farm hangs on to every suggestion of hers. "Take three children each from different strata," she advises them, "and make them work in a sweat shop... show this as a tv documentary and the awareness is bound to spread."

Also to be spotted at the camp, in a blue sweat shirt and jeans, is Vinita Jain, chairperson of Bio Veda Technologies, the Delhi-based marketer of Biotique, a Rs 140-crore bodycare brand. Like the others, she has also paid Rs 5,000 for the five-day course, though she probably hopes to gain more than just the knowhow-an alliance with The Body Shop. "Like The Body Shop," says Jain, "we don't believe in animal testing." And she sees Biotique as working for the farmers who grow the herbs she uses. Two good reasons for Jain to propose playing host to Anita and her business partner husband Gordon T. Roddick on their return to Delhi.

At the moment, sourcing is the only reason that The Body Shop has India on its map. The company procures wooden massage rollers, cotton products and hair accessories from Teddy Exports-set up in 1991 for the welfare of the local community-in Tirumangalam near Madurai.

Roddick, though, would rather talk about the big issues: rising female foeticide, for instance. In her holistic worldview, everything on the planet is relevant to business. Because everything on the planet is relevant to her target audience: consumers who're willing to pay to go green. In a sense, it's a bet that can't go wrong. As Greenpeace and other ecological, social, ethical and human rights groups sharpen their campaigns, The Body Shop expects more and more people to switch to brands that can be trusted to conform with such finely evolved sensibilities. The Body Shop can be trusted. Because Roddick is who she is.

What Motivates Her? Determination. Where'd that come from? Her status as an 'outsider'. And how people reacted to it. "We were the first Italian immigrant family in a tiny working-class town in England who stank of garlic and looked different," she remembers, vividly, of her childhood. "My mother taught me how to sabotage-as she hated the Catholic priest who did not want to give my dad a proper burial, and so she sent me and my sisters soaking in garlic to subdue the incense in the church."

It's a spirit that would never abandon her. "Later," she notes, "I sabotaged the cosmetics industry."

Sabotage

People who have tried replacing the profit-motive with the principles-motive in the past have almost invariably met with failure. What sets The Body Shop apart?

Genuine commitment to the idealism. "I think we've lived up to our principles," she says.

The packaging and so on was all homemade cheap, and it lent authenticity to the brand idea. Roddick's own reputation as a near-militant green was enough to dispense with the need for a marketing department-which it didn't have for 17 of its 26 years of existence. She opted for low-cost "guerilla marketing" techniques, such as loading messages on to company trucks, billboards and comic books. Believable messages, without any trace of the anorexia of Barbie-world advertising. Perhaps the most important part, though she doesn't quite say it, was her intelligent use of the media glare.

It's not always fun, particularly now that the company is indeed a large enterprise, with all the management complications that come with it. In December 2000, a group of franchisees in the US slapped a lawsuit on The Body Shop for favouring its company-owned stores at the cost of the franchisees. It was a supply-chain problem, says the husband, a result of wanting to be a retail company-closer to the customer-rather than a manufacturing one.

Every now and then, someone springs up to denounce the whole game as a gigantic sham, alleging that she uses much the same synthetic ingredients as any other big company. Roddick responds arguing that to make the products '100 per cent natural', she'd even have to avoid water. And since there is water in most of her products, the law mandates a preservative. "So I'm not a purist, really," she says.

Yet, while the rhetoric still sounds as gripping as ever, the fact is that The Body Shop has been unable to escape corporatisation. Today, the Roddicks are non-executive members of the board, jointly owning just 24 per cent of the company's equity. The Chairperson Andrew Bellamy and CEO Peter Saunders are both "very capable" hands, as she says, but it's also true that the company is no longer the hot-house it once was. The brand's USP is at threat from its own success. Roddick is resigned to that, so long as the founding idea doesn't lose force: "Challenge everything."