Male: The daughter of Italian Jewish immigrants, Anita Lucia Perilli was born in a bomb shelter in Littlehampton in 1942. This wartime baby grew up to fight on many fronts, not with bombs and bullets but with body bottles and cosmetics. The founder of the Body Shop, Dame Anita Roddick, was one of the few business entrepreneurs who really made a difference. The empire she founded began at one small shopping in Brighton in 1976 and sold just 15 products and there were products for social and environmental responsibility.
Anita: I was not interested in running a dime a dozen cosmetic company. I was not interested in seeing other wide businesses around which are about private greed. I wanted to show more developed to motion than fearing greed within this—it was an experiment.
Male: From the very beginning, the Body Shop did things differently. The product was actively against animal testing and active reform human rights. Unlike many business enterprises with a conscience, this one flourished. At 2004, that one Brighton shop front has grown to a 1980 shops with 600 products and more than 77 million customers globally. It was voted in the top 30 brands in the world and the second most trusted brand in the UK.
As the company success continued, Roddick began to move away from the more hands-on side of the business devoting a self to travel the world, researching new products and communities to do business with. Roddick was scaling on the criticism of the illusions sold by the beauty industry. Even though critics pointed out she had made her fortune in her great business.
Anita: The products which you can now pick up in any shelf which are now sort of like £95.00 for a couple of meals, more expensive than gold. The notion that you can apply yourself to a woman my age and this is what 57 looks like and it will get rid off your 30 years of environmental 40 years of environmental abuse and psycho with whatever and it’s ludicrous.
Male; Roddick once said would be obscene to die rich and in 2005 she announced in an interview with The National Post newspaper that she intended to give away her 51 million-pound fortune but she would not be turning her back on the Body Shop which remain dear to the heart.
Anita: Secret was the fact that we had another agenda not just making products for the skin and hair, we have a very progressive political agenda. You know we can't turn these shops into action stations. We campaign on human rights. We changed the law in this country on the issue of animal testing within the cosmetic industry and 12 million of our customers around the world put their thumbprint to defend human rights workers. So that made us more interesting.
Male: And then in March 2006, there was once biggest astonishment to light a little controversy when Roddick sold the Body Shop to multi-national cosmetics company L’Oreal. Not only did the L’Oreal use animals to test its products, it was also affiliate to with companies like Nestle which had faced combination for allegedly unscrupulous business practices in the third world.
Roddick defended the sale, comparing the Body Shop with Trojan horse that could inflict more change for the better by working inside the enemy’s camp.
Anita: This is petrified by a consumer vote, when customers say not only are we—will boycott but we will campaign, we will legislate, we were find against your behavior. What businesses should be doing is bringing the non-government organization, Oxfam, Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth as advisers. They should also be bringing in the poorest active advisers because they know and we all know that the biggest cathasthropy out there is poverty, economic poverty.
Male: Roddick contracted Hepatitis C from the blood transfusion in the early 1970s. She was managing her illness but in September 2007, she died suddenly from a massive brain hemorrhage. The legacy however, lives on.
Anita: If we’re serious about corporate social responsibility, we are stepping out of line with the prevailing version of the free market economy.
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