BusinessObituary

Dame Anita Roddick

Pioneering green entrepreneur who used the profits of her ethical beauty business to campaign for a better world

Dame Anita Roddick, who has died aged 64 after a brain haemorrhage, opened her first Body Shop in Brighton in 1976. The year is important. The beauty business was not then about bodies, which were merely the soaped tail end of the face and hair market, its lotions laboratory tested, industrially concocted and sold through chemists' chains or the phoney salons of department stores.

None of this connected with the 1970s change in how women wanted to pamper and present themselves. The Body Shop came from that radical sensibility that produced the self-help book Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973), much twaddle about sisterhood, and the notion, which Roddick traded on, that natural cosmetics could be feminist. She was always candid that nothing she made could stave off age or simulate gorgeousness, but you could have sensuous fun using it. She carried over that approach - a good time can lead to good works - to her business, and to her social and environmental campaigns.

It helped that she was dramatic, an actor hardly manqué. She was brought up the daughter of Gilda and Donny Perilli, Italian-Jewish immigrants with a cafe in Littlehampton, Sussex. Gilda later divorced Donny, and married his sunny cousin, Henry; she waited until Anita's 18th birthday to tell her daughter that Henry was her real dad. It didn't worry the girl - she was still an Italian who ate lots of tomatoes.

She went to a convent, then Maude Allen secondary modern school, failed to get into the Central School of Speech and Drama and, after teacher training college in Bath, taught English. Then a bold move: she travelled, taking jobs in Paris and Geneva to fund herself as far as Africa and the far east.

At the club Gilda ran back home, Anita was introduced to Gordon Roddick; they had a daughter, Justine, married in Reno, Nevada, in 1970, and wandered - before returning to Littlehampton to run a bed-and-breakfast and restaurant. How unserious their entrepreneurship was - and how far ahead of their times they were - is clear from Gordon's decision to take a gap of two years to ride horseback from Buenos Aires to New York.

His absence was her break. She had Justine, plus baby Samantha, plus a loan of £4,000 - arranged by Gordon because Anita, in her Bob Dylan T-shirt, had failed to convince the bank of her probity. Her premises in Brighton were so derelict that she joked that green became the Body Shop colour to camouflage the mould on the walls.

Roddick's 25 primary products were not so different from those of earlier cosmetic queens; it was the way she sold her Bedouin-recipe moisturiser that was new. She did not propose exotic fantasy: she did promise that the ingredients had not been tested on animals, were not synthetic, and - long before the Fairtrade movement - that they had been sourced directly from the world's ground-level growers rather than commodity brokers. Her lack of packaging was anti-waste - customers should return the plain bottles to be refilled; if she huckstered anything, it was the history of the ingredients and the anthropology of their cultivators.

She sold 50% of the business to a local garage owner to raise money for a second shop, and might not have gone much further than a few more, run by friends, had not Gordon ridden back, taken over the finances and suggested franchising branches. Most franchisees were women, and they, as much as Roddick, made Body Shops unprecedented places: you would go in for brazil-nut conditioner (Roddick trekked to research adornment rituals), and be made breathless both by the concentrated smells and the fervour for green issues and aid for the developing world.

Her balance of entrepreneurship and activism seemed even weirder in the mean, greedy 1980s. The Roddicks took the business public in 1984; she later understood that that had been a serious mistake, since its success was thereafter calculated only in terms of profits and growth. Her protests about social change and alternative, egalitarian business methods did not seem to square with her new role as a pioneer female entrepreneur.

Of course, there was a reaction. By the 1990s, she was the fourth richest woman in Britain, author of an autobiography, Body and Soul (1991), and a reliable source of quotes on ethical consumption and of finance for pacifist, ecological and human rights causes, among them Amnesty International, Friends of the Earth and the Big Issue. She was routinely derided as being left and green only to promote Body Shop or herself.

In 1992 she successfully sued over a television documentary that claimed she had lied about animal testing; in 1994 Business Ethics magazine challenged her record on green standards and fair trade - and the share price fell. She felt no contradiction in joining anti-globalisation protesters who rocked the 1999 World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle, but they were less sure about the sincerity of an anti-multinationalist who headed a company with 2,000 outlets in 55 countries.

She began to edge away, standing down as chief executive. Last year, the Roddicks outraged the finance pages and users of Jojoba cleanser alike when they sold the Body Shop to L'Oréal for £625m, of which they received £118m. That she intended to give it away, plus her own £50m or so, through the charitable Roddick Foundation, did not silence accusations of betrayal, though she was confident she could persuade L'Oréal to adopt her sort of ingredients.

But she was also relieved to be rid of the old monster, possibly because she had been diagnosed in 2004 with hepatitis C, contracted through a tranfusion during Samantha's birth in 1971. It gave her cirrhosis of the liver, an appointment with a transplant, a sudden urgency about life and another chance to campaign, against ignorance of the disease. She was awarded the OBE in 1988 and made a dame in 2003. Gordon, Justine and Samantha survive her.

John Elkington writes: "I love her like fury, but it's like being trapped in a brown paper bag with a bluebottle," a relative commented of his wife - and that was Anita for me. Like all true entrepreneurs, she fired on all cylinders, all the time. Working close to her would have driven me mad, but working alongside her in an extraordinary nexus of ethical, social, environmental and international development movements has been one of the great privileges of my life.

I cannot remember when our paths first crossed, but I covered her work in my 1987 book The Green Capitalists, when she said: "There is something magical about small companies run by people whose thinking was forged in the 60s. You sit down and ask not only how the business should be run, but also what should be done with the profits."

At the time, many thought she was new to the game of green capitalism. She wasn't: "Although some people may think we are recent converts, the reality is that these concerns were always there ... the Body Shop dates from 1976 and we were already featuring Greenpeace's anti-whaling campaign in 1977."

In 1988, Anita supplied the foreword for The Green Consumer Guide, which I wrote with Julia Hailes and which sold 1m copies around the world. We were building on what she and Gordon had done at the Body Shop - and what groups like Friends of the Earth had done in areas like tropical timber products and CFCs. "Don't just grin and bear it," she encouraged readers. "As consumers, we have real power to effect change. We can ask questions about supply and manufacture. We can request new or different products. And we can use our ultimate power, voting with our feet and wallets - either buying a product somewhere else or not buying it at all."

Anita helped us as we grew SustainAbility from 1987, advising business on sustainable development, but there was nothing special in that - she helped legions of people. Many thought her unreasonable, even crazy. But that's typical of people who change the world.

Yes, she could get up people's noses, castigating old-style capitalists as "dinosaurs in pinstripes," and yet selling the Body Shop to L'Oréal, in which one of her least favourite companies - Nestlé - had a stake. But what a woman, what a heart, what a sense of humour, what a troublemaker!

Deborah Bee writes: Anita was an odd mix of seriousness and mischief, utter self-belief and vulnerability. People made assumptions about her and simply got it wrong. The dippy-hippy, crazy, mouthy, square-peg-in-a-round-hole image conjured up by the business press became a routine pain in the backside for her - although she was all that, but in a wholly positive way.

This is the Anita I knew. Motivated by her mother's astonishing work ethic, she was always driven to work twice as long as anyone else - and at twice the speed. If she came to stay, by 7.30am the bin would have been sterilised, the wooden floor partially polished with hemp oil - "as an experiment to see what else hemp oil can do!" - and the contents of my makeup bag that weren't the Body Shop would be laid out for explanation. "What are you doing with a Clinique eyeliner?" And by the end of her visit my children would have learned several new swear words because she maintained that, as their godmother, that was her role.

She had no understanding of cynicism, which meant that if she saw an injustice she would never say, "Well, that's just the way the world is," but would do something about it. Never feted by liberals, she could never see two sides; there was right and wrong, and nothing in-between.

Anita was an instinctive trader. At the start of the Body Shop, she had no real interest in the cosmetics industry, but saw a business opportunity that made sense. Her stance against animal testing was not so much driven by a love of animals as by complete incomprehension of why animal testing was necessary in the first place.

Her political activism within the Body Shop sparked many campaigns that filtered around the world through her 2,000 or so stores. After she ceased being a shareholder, her mission was to dedicate the money she had made to the causes she believed in. I'm sure her biggest regret would be that she failed to die poor, that she didn't have the time to give her money away.

Last week Anita finished a DVD that tells the story of the Body Shop from her perspective. She wanted to "set the record straight," she said, "while I still have time." It's a celebration of the creativity and pioneering spirit that effectively changed the world of business. It is also an account of her regrets. When the Body Shop went public, the company expanded and made her very wealthy. But the targets set by the City meant that the organisation was forced to grow too fast. In retrospect, she wished she'd stayed small and had more control. She was also frustrated by a raft of City lawyers whose fear of litigation saw off many of Anita's best campaigns.

The sale to L'Oréal was almost universally perceived as a sell-out. Anita knew it was a controversial decision and agreed only on the understanding that the Body Shop would be ring-fenced within the L'Oréal group. She also truly believed that she stood a good chance of being a Trojan horse and having an influence on the way that L'Oréal does business. The fact that she made £118m out of the deal was lost on her. Most people would buy a yacht; she went on holiday with a file of good causes to argue over with Gordon.

Which brings us to Gordon. Anita and Gordon were a buy-one-get-one-free package. Throughout their 37-year marriage, they were always just a step apart, absolutely devoted to each other in a unique partnership that combined integrity, huge intelligence, creativity and extraordinary altruism. At the last count, they have been responsible for setting up three orphanages in Romania, an organic farm cooperative in Nicaragua, numerous health and education projects in India, a brazil-nut cooperative in Brazil, a healthcare initiative in Nepal, a shea and cocoa butter cooperative in Ghana, a soap-making factory in Scotland and more and more and more. To all the critics who say she was an opportunist, I say, how many orphanages have you built?

To have died so suddenly was, for Anita, a great way to go. As Sam always said: "My mum won't die, she'll explode."

John Morrison writes: By the time I started working with the Roddicks on business and human rights issues in 1997, Anita already symbolised what had never really been seen before: the CEO activist. The Body Shop's first human rights campaign came with Amnesty International in 1988 to mark the 40th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Next came campaigns on indigenous peoples, and then the support for Ken Saro-Wiwa and his struggle in Nigeria from 1993. The murder of Saro-Wiwa and other Ogoni leaders at the hands of the Abacha regime in 1995 was a personal blow to both Anita and Gordon - as well as the staff and customers of the Body Shop who had campaigned for their release.

The late 1990s maintained the focus on Nigeria (and campaigns against corporate complicity there), but also saw a wide range of global activities in support of human rights: when the company came to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the universal declaration, 3 million customers across 34 countries gave thumbprints to support imprisoned human rights defenders.

And it was in Anita's house that the concept of the Business Leaders Initiative on Human Rights (BLIHR) was first developed in late 2002, so that from the following May there was a body in existence to encourage responsible companies in this field.

· Dame Anita Roddick, entrepreneur and activist, born October 23 1942; died September 10 2007

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaKaVrMBwfo9pbmirlaV8cn6OoKyaqpSerq%2B7waKrrpminrK0esGuqqKmlajA