Small Feet, Big Impressions - Anita Roddick

By: Daksha Verma

“If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito.”- Anita Roddick

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LIFE BEFOREHAND.

Born  Anita Perella, Dame Anita Roddick, (23 October 1942 – 10 September 2007) was the third of four children in one of the few Italian immigrant families in Littlehampton, England.

Her mother forced her into the teaching profession, but Roddick's craving for adventure was too strong to keep her in the classroom.

She hit what she calls "the hippie trail," traveling through Europe, the South Pacific and Africa after working for a year in Paris in the library of the International Herald Tribune and another year in Geneva working for the United Nations.

During her journeys, she became acquainted with the rituals and customs of many Third World cultures, including their forms of health and body care.

When she returned to England, she met Gordon Roddick, a kindred bohemian spirit who wrote poetry and loved to travel as much as she did. The couple married in 1970, and shortly thereafter, opened a bed-and-breakfast hotel and later started a restaurant. In 1976, Gordon decided to fulfill a long-standing personal goal: to ride a horse from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to New York. Admiring her husband's pluck, Anita agreed to sell their restaurant to finance his trip. "It blissed me out to have a partner who said ,”I've got to do this.’I've got to be remarkable,” " she explains.

THE IDEA POPS.

In order to pay for her daily expenses and daughters school fees in her husband's absence, she decided to open a small shop wherein she incorporated all the knowledge that she gained during her travels into products that contained natural ingredients. With her husband’s help, she obtained a $6,500 loan, contracted with a local herbalist to create her all-natural cosmetics, found a site in the seaside resort of Brighton, and opened her first Body Shop.

FRUGALITY.

Her shop was set between two funeral homes. She painted the shop green because it hid everything, even the damp spots on the walls. Since she did not have enough bottles, she offered discounted refills to customers who brought back their empty containers, and used minimal packaging to keep costs as low as possible. She came up with a selection of perfume oils to scent the customer’s purchases (which were fragrance-free) because it was cheaper than adding expensive perfumes to every bottle of shampoo or lotion.

CLEVER PROMOTION.

Anita Roddick displayed a natural talent for garnering free publicity. The morticians who ran the funeral parlor next to her first shop complained that her store's name would hurt their business. She leaked a story to a local newspaper saying the undertakers were ganging up on a woman shopkeeper just trying to get by. It worked: People streamed into the store to see what all was going on.

Later on she advertised through promoting her social causes and in-store pamphlets.

THE COMPLETE OFFER.

The combination of unique products, good public relations, a highly trained staff and a well-defined sense of values quickly generated a buzz. Word spread, and within a year, Roddick's business had grown so large that she opened a second store. When Gordon returned in the spring of 1977, The Body Shop had become so popular that the Roddick’s began selling franchises.

THE END.

Anita Roddick's story remains one of the great entrepreneurial, if not cautious, tales of the late 20th century. She grew a single shop into an international empire and proved that a company can gain loyal customers and succeed by simply providing product information rather than employing high-powered advertising and high-pressure selling.

The Roddicks stepped back from running day-to-day operations and installed managing director Stuart Rose, who promptly restructured the company, bringing in other professional managers, installing tighter inventory control and streamlining processes. At the time, Roddick seemed ambivalent about the new course and railed at the administrative bureaucracy she was forced to adopt. "We've gone through a period of squashing one hell of a lot of the entrepreneurial spirit," she told Fortune magazine. "We're having to grow up; we have to get methods and processes in. And the result of that is a hierarchy that comes in-and I think that's antiproductive."

The changes failed to have the desired effect, and sales continued to decline. After a dismal first quarter financial performance in 1998, Roddick ceded her post as CEO to Patrick Gourney, a professional manager from a French food conglomerate, and farmed out her flagging U.S. franchises to the Bellamy Retail Group.

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“Dysfunction is the essence of entrepreneurship. I've had dozens of requests from places like Harvard and Yale to talk about the subject. It makes me laugh that ivy leaguers are so keen to "learn" how to be entrepreneurs, because I'm not convinced it's a subject you can teach. I mean, how do you teach obsession? Because it is obsession that drives the entrepreneur's commitment to a vision of something new.” - Anita Roddick.

Adapted from: www.entrepreneur.com