Chapter4. The Body Shop -Reading

i started the body shop in 1976 simply to create a livelihood for myself and my two daughters, while my husband, gordon, was trekking across the americas. i had no training or experience and my only business acumen was gordon’s advice to take sales of £300 a week. nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that's exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking. running that first shop taught me business is not financial science, it’s about trading: buying and selling. it’s about creating a product or service so good that people will pay for it. now 30 years on the body shop is a multi local business with over 2.045 stores serving over 77 million customers in 51 different markets in 25 different languages and across 12 time zones. and i haven’t a clue how we got here!
it wasn’t 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 ideas like these
i am aware that success is more than a good idea. it is timing too. the body shop 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, by which time gordon was back in england. he came up with the idea for 'self-financing' more new stores, which sparked the growth of the franchise network through which the body shop spread across the world. the company went public in 1984. since then, i have been given a whole host of awards, some i understand, some i don’t and a couple i think i deserve.
businesses have the power to do good. that’s why the body shop’s mission statement opens with the overriding commitment, ‘to dedicate our business to the pursuit of social and environmental change.’ we use our stores and our products to help communicate human rights and environmental issues.
in 1993 i met a delegation of ogoni people from nigeria. they were seeking justice and reparations against the giant oil multinational shell that was ravaging their lands through oil exploration and production. working with other ngos, we turned their campaign into an international cause celebre. tragically, the ogoni’s key spokesperson, ken saro-wiwa and 8 other ogoni, were executed in 1995 by the nigerian government. but our campaign continued and eventually 19 other imprisoned ogoni were released. in 1997, after 4 years of unrelenting pressure, shell issued a revised operating charter committing the company to human rights and sustainable development. a year later, they launched their ‘profits and principles’ advertising campaign declaring their recognition of the interests of ‘ a much wider group of stakeholders in our business’. i like to think we had a hand in getting shell to think about what it really means to be a corporate citizen.