She Turned These Five Core Values into a $900 Million Empire
And offers a blueprint for building your own business
Talk about am unusual start in life …
Anita Perella was born in a bomb shelter in Littlehampton, Sussex, in 1942. She was the daughter of Italian immigrants who had recently arrived in England from Naples.
Her mother steered Anita toward a profession in teaching, but she had a craving for travel.
So she spent a year in Paris working in the library of the International Herald Tribune and another year in Geneva working for the United Nations. But Anita gave up employment to travel the world or, as she calls it, "the hippie trail."
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 with it’s own restaurant.
In 1976, Gordon decided to fulfill a long-standing personal goal: to ride a horse from Buenos Aires, Argentina, to New York. Anita sold their BnB 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 explained.
To support herself and her daughters in his absence, Anita got a $6,500 small business loan and then hired a local herbalist to create a line of all-natural cosmetics based on what she learned during her “hippie” travels.
In 1979 Anita opened The Body Shop in Brighton, sandwiched between two funeral parlors. Anita operated on a shoestring budget. She painted the shop green because it hid the damp spots on the walls. She offered discounted refills to customers who brought back their empty containers and used minimal packaging to keep costs as low as possible.
To spread the word about her new shop, Anita relied on interviews with the local media but rarely mentioned her business at all.
Instead, she talked about her core values. Those interviews quickly generated a buzz. Within a year, Anita’s business had grown so large that she opened a second store.
By the spring of 1977, The Body Shop had become so popular that Anita began selling franchises. And by the fall of 1982, new Body Shop stores were opening at the rate of two per month.
Her Core Beliefs
Of her core mission, Roddick said, “I didn’t want to be a cosmetic diva wearing high heels and make-up, prancing around at the celebrity functions. We were rooted in family and community.”
The company was one of the first to prohibit the use of ingredients tested on animals and one of the first to promote fair trade with Third World countries. Anita operated The Body Shop on five core values:
1. Against animal testing
2. Support community trade
3. Activate self-esteem
4. Defend human rights
5. Protect our planet.
The Body Shop’s simple ethical message and promotion of environmentally friendly consumerism helped grow a very strong brand, one recognized around the world. Today there are now more than 3,000 Body Shop retail outlets in 52 markets serving more than 75 million customers.
Anita sold the company for £625 million – over US$900 million – to French cosmetic giant L'Oreal in 2006.
Her story shows how it’s possible to turn a simple idea, driven by core values into an empire.