Nothing Like a Dame

At 62, many entrepreneurs feel it’s time to get out of the rat race and put their feet up beside the pool. Not Anita Roddick, the founder of the Body Shop, one of Britain’s most successful global retailers.

“A woman in advancing old age is unstoppable by any earthly force,” she declares. “I love it.”

She has been fairly unstoppable all her life. The daughter of Italian immigrants in seaside Littlehampton, Roddick says that when she was 10, she was attracted — in the week her father died — to a book about the Holocaust: “That was the thing that kick-started me.” Soon after, Joan of Arc — “the saint of nonconformity” — became her heroine. In 1976, she carried that spirit into the first Body Shop, a tiny purveyor of natural skin- and hair-care products in Brighton. Back then, Roddick only wanted to create a livelihood for herself and her daughters while husband Gordon was busy trekking through the Americas. The Body Shop has grown to about 2,000 outlets in 50 countries, with an annual revenue of $680 million last year. That’s all the more remarkable because Roddick was outspokenly critical of the business world for its emphasis on wealth over job creation, and denounced as shallow and unimportant the beauty and cosmetics industry that was making her rich. No wonder people wanted to take her down. In the mid-1990s, an army of critics savaged her for alleged hypocrisy, charging that her principles-before-profits stance was just a marketing gimmick. But Roddick fought back, and the vast majority of their charges proved untrue.

Since stepping down as co-chairperson, along with Gordon, in 2002, Roddick has been spending about 80 days a year as a Body Shop consultant. The rest of the time she immerses herself in high-profile campaigns on environmental, fair-trade, human-rights and social-justice issues that, to her, were always more important than bubble bath and foot lotion. In addition to writing and lecturing, Roddick provides information and online protest petitions at www. anitaroddick.com. Two top concerns now are what she calls the “slavery economy,” in which developing-world workers are paid pennies for sweat-shop labor to produce cheap clothing for the West, and the solitary confinement of two of the “Angola 3,” Black Panther Party members held in Louisiana’s infamous state prison for a murder many say they did not commit. (Robert Wilkerson was freed in 2001.) Roddick was in Louisiana last year when Gordon contacted her with news that she was to be made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire — for “services to retailing, the environment and charity.” Anti-establishment she may be, but Roddick was delighted: “I’m happy for any bloody praise these days.” Roddick admits to “an overexaggerated sense of responsibility,” adding: “I have a deep sense that to accumulate wealth is obscene. And when the community gives you your wealth, I have a strong belief that you give it back. And there’s [also] a very selfish thing, which is that it makes me feel better.” She must be feeling good: in August, Roddick announced that she had donated $1.8 million to Amnesty International for a “school of activism” at the organization’s new Human Rights Action Center in London. “I forgot to ask my husband,” she laughs. No problem — he approves. Besides, who wants to stand in the way of an unstoppable force?