The Body Shop was ‘woke’, but it’s time for it to die

Anita Roddick, who died in 2007, was in the best sense “woke” before the term was pressed into service. She was idealistic, restless, determined, imaginative and slightly hectoring. When she opened the first Body Shop in Brighton in 1976, she claimed she simply wanted to “make a living for herself and her two daughters while her husband was away travelling”, but she was fuelled by a notion of idealism, of selling ethically produced goods to customers who wanted to put a little more thought into their buying habits.

The future of the business as it approaches its half-century is now in doubt. FRP Advisory has been appointed as administrator to create “a more nimble and financially stable UK business”, its aim to stabilise the Body Shop as a beauty brand “relevant to customers and able to compete for the long term”.

I have my doubts.

There are more than 200 stores and franchises around the country. But, when any administrator talks about strategic vision or restructuring, cutting costs is top of the agenda, which suggests that closures and job losses are almost inevitable. FRP has talked of a “difficult trading environment”, and many analysts have pointed to straitened economic times and the rising cost of living. But that is only half the story.

Roddick was made a dame at the age of 60, in 2003, the final acknowledgement of her conquest of the establishment. But she was a genuine pioneer: she harnessed the power of two 1970s movements, environmentalism—the Ecology Party, which begat the Greens, won its first elected representation the year the Body Shop was founded—and the full flowering of second-wave feminism which preached that women could do anything. Roddick’s gift, apart from gritty self-belief, was to see that there was a market in this idealism.

She was right. Selling ethically sourced beauty products, rejecting anything tested on animals and promoting natural ingredients, she opened a second shop in 1977 and the business boomed. By the time Roddick and her husband Gordon floated the company in 1984, after only eight years trading, they had 138 stores, 87 of them outside the United Kingdom.

But that was 40 years ago. Nearly 30 million of us—of you—were not even born. Roddick’s success made an ethical dimension to purchasing so obvious, so natural in cosmetics that it is now absolutely standard. For example, testing beauty products on animals has been banned in the UK since 1998. Brands which advertise themselves as natural or ethical or responsible are sold in every supermarket. Because that element is universally available, those brands can compete on issues like cost, and that has left the Body Shop vulnerable.

With any mature business, you should always ask “What is it for?” If the answer is not easy or convincing, you have a problem. And that question has dogged the Body Shop for years. Some, Roddick among them, worried that the business lost its soul when it went public, and that its purchase by L’Oréal in 2006 reduced it to one brand among many others owned by the world’s largest cosmetics conglomerate. It had to compete against younger rivals like Lush (founded by one-time Body Shop suppliers) and Bomb Cosmetics, and there seemed no compelling reason for customers to stay loyal to Roddick’s creation.

We all have the retail equivalent of Proust’s madeleines, brands and stores and sensory experiences which trigger vivid recollections. For me, the Body Shop is a distinct kind of benign middle-class consumerism of the 1980s, of my mother buying henna powder and disposable plastic gloves, of a brightly lit shop front which exuded chokingly powerful scents. It’s a very warm, affectionate memory. But it’s four decades old and I haven’t been into a Body Shop for years.

Anita Roddick’s fate was to do something brilliantly but to make it such an obvious pitch that it became universal. We are all ethical consumers now, and we can salve our consciences anywhere. So why would we do it at the Body Shop?