The Rise and Fall of The Body Shop

The Body Shop was once one of Britain's most prestigious cosmetics companies, worth £1.1bn at its peak, but last month, just 15 years after going public, it fell into insolvency. So how did he become so respected and why did he

fall

so hard and so fast? Before we begin, most of the information in this video comes specifically from these books, so I will place the book's source at the top left when relevant. This also means that the first skin life and death video will be coming soon, probably next month. about Anita Rodic, the co-founder of Body Shop, so subscribe.

If you know my fashion channel series, you know they are the best investigative videos I make, so it's worth subscribing if you haven't already. This video is already sponsored by Surf Shark VPN. Surf Shark VPN virtual private network keeps your online identity safe by encrypting all information sent between your device and the Internet. This keeps your personal data protected from large companies or cybercriminals. It also exchanges the actual data. location of your device with a new one that allows you to access content from around the world for my family. You may know that my partner is Turkish, so a VPN allows us to access content that simply isn't available here or even searching for videos like these. sometimes the news is geolocked, so it really helps those sites, allowing me to provide them with the best quality content.

I really have a lot to appreciate in vpns, so if you are interested in trying out Sur Shark for yourselves, I will open a QR. code on the screen now and I will show the surfshark dodeals underskin link as a link in the description with my underskin coupon code for 3 extra months free thank you surf shark for sponsoring this video so that the story of The Body Shop does not really begin in the trade retail or in an idea, but in social unrest, this really begins our story, actually, back in the late 40s, in a post-World War II world, almost 30 years before the work

shop

of

body

work and 20 years before the High Street existed in The consumerist iteration we know today is seen after the war ended, there was a sense of loss of purpose among the public, so much of its time had been taken up by the war and, as a result, Western audiences retreated to a fairly rigid structure. which you are probably familiar with in the media of the 1950s, exemplified by Dior's designs at the time, which interestingly proposed a mentality similar to the restrictive Nazi ideal of a woman, as it kept her restricted to the kinder children of Kusha and Kersa , the kitchen and the church, according to this book. the anti-capitalist book of fashion, naturally, given the pre-war, this was the exact opposite of the freedom that women had been promised.

People protested not only the idea that the style used too much fabric, as most report today, but also the idea of ​​restriction. and on a larger scale, they grew a discomfort in the future that they were being sold out, it wasn't long before this led to a disaffected youth which eventually led to the many countercultures of the 1960s, including the hippie movement, which really gained strength. After the public opposed the Vietnam War starting in 1965, I realize I'm greatly truncating history to get to this, but it was this desire for counterculture and the desire to reject projected beauty and fashion norms on women which resulted in many companies emerging. catering to this socially and politically motivated retail market, this is exactly what saw the founding of a company called The Body Shop in San Francisco in 1970 by two women in their 50s, Peggy Short and Jane Saunders, with the help of their friends Hank and Charlotte Libby. everything we know about the

body

shop

, they wrapped their products by hand, everything was done in the store, it was a type of natural body care without much makeup or forced sales, a serious push against the very structured rules of department stores or even from pharmacies. were popular in the late 60's and early 70's and naturally catered to consumer needs after they had recognized a problem and solved it, they grew very quickly into several retail stores, a mail order division and a wholesale division, all within 5 years, so this was not a small business at all, so it is curious that this body shop is, in fact, not the body shop we know today.

The body shop we know today was founded six years later, in 1976, by Anita and Gordon Rodic as a partnership that they literally built. the original body shop idea and applied the same consumer problems that Short and Saunders had reacted to, but for the British market this would later become a huge scandal; However, for now, the British public largely could not afford trips to the United States to understand what was happening. there, so this did not at all affect the founding of the British company The Body Shop before the public, although Anita and her husband Gordon knew they wanted to start a business.

Bic didn't really know anything about retail. she in this interview we didn't know that business schools existed, we didn't know the word brand, so in a way we were just kids, according to her two books, she had a lot of businesses before this, but because of the idea of ​​studying retail, I did not do it. It didn't really exist at this time, they were simply doing everything they could to make money and have time to spend with their family - in fact, if she hadn't needed to support herself when her husband went on a particularly long trip across America from the South and the North.

She probably never would have thought about starting the cosmetics business in the first place, but as circumstances were, she thought she could sell cosmetic products using the US Body Shop template while using the natural ingredients she had already found in her own personal travels. . the world, so things like cocoa butter, which the women of Tahiti taught him about its benefits, aloe vera and almond oil, as well as other ingredients uncommon at the time, it was exactly this very simple plan that had in mind when he made his proposal. Capital Bank, but they didn't take her seriously because she mentioned that she didn't know anything about business, so she was a woman from the early 70s who arrived with her children dressed unpreparedly, in jeans and a Bob Dillan t-shirt and without a business plan. or knowing projections about how she could provide a return on investment for the bank, she was rejected, at least that was until she bought a full suit, wrote a proper business plan, and bought her husband along with her, who helped her achieve a loan of 4,000 now with Money in hand after failing to make cosmetics in her kitchen in an attempt to save some money and failing to convince real cosmetic manufacturing companies to work with her then unusual ingredients and then in unusually small quantities, he hired a herbalist to develop the products and took up residence at 22 Kensington Gardens, which they painted dark green to hide the stains on the wall, and yet his first controversy would occur even before that he managed to open a store.

Shortly before the grand opening, she received a letter from two local undertakers who believed in the title. The Body Shop would interfere with her funeral business, naturally. Anita, not being a pushover, contacted the media specifically about her book Body and Soul. She records that she called the Brighton evening Argus and used it for the press, although, of course, she would probably be a victim today. The '70s and misogyny were already upon Rife, especially in business, so instead of bowing to it, she simply used it to her advantage by claiming that a gang of undertakers were trying to stop her as a poor defenseless woman who would soon be killed. she would be left alone trying to open her small business.

Of course, this was a story that they were definitely going to publish and it had an incredible effect both because of its eye-catching story that gave media attention to the opening of a new business and because it avoided the threat of the local businessman, so it was actually just a double victory. For her they finally opened on March 27, 1976 with 25 products for sale, but to give the illusion of a larger set of options, since 25 is particularly few, she packaged them in various bottle sizes and promised that they would refill any bottle. that the client could embark on a brilliant but highly unusual and totally accidental marketing strategy that infused environmental activism into the store's launch.

As she sees, Rodic herself was personally an activist in her thoughts, as she had been since she was a child. but at first that wasn't really intended for the business, don't get me wrong, the ingredients used in her products were ingredients that she had found on her world tour and that she thought were good to market in support of communities and it was exactly these stories that she told in the store or that she had written on little information cards that enticed customers to buy, but that was not what she saw as her differentiator at first.

She thought her differentiators were, first of all, the ability to refill any bottle she brought to the store. stocking something that you knew would encourage repeat purchases, secondly, the ability to purchase smaller quantities of cosme ICS that were not previously conveniently available to the public, thirdly, the lack of sophisticated packaging that would make the product would seem to be better value for money and, fourthly, the fact that consumers would be able to browse the store without having to ask the cashier what they wanted, which was still the norm in cosmetics stores in mid from the 70s, as we discussed in my Sephora video, as one of their biggest disruptions in the industry. which they implemented in 1979, so Anita was actually 3 years ahead of Sephora in improving the customer experience in this way.

She knew her products were good, don't get me wrong, but instead of thinking of that as the store's differentiator, she saw herself more. As just the icing on the cake, while his passion for said product originates the cream in a nutshell, it seems he was simply lucky that his money-saving measures aligned with his personal ethos, meaning his brand of activism spread in the store environment in a way that resonated with customers and provided another incredible differentiator, even if she hadn't realized that yet, this was reflected very strongly in profits in order to make profits, they knew they needed to win around of $600 a week or £300, but by the end of the first day alone he had already earned £130, so almost half of his weekly goal was an incredibly successful first day that he knew would only increase by combining sales and repeat purchases.

Of course, it wasn't always easy and he had to open on Sundays, sometimes even taking the product to local schools or night institutes to try to meet half of his goals some weeks, but considering he knew next to nothing about retail of cosmetics, was doing exceptionally well when Gordon went on a trip in about 2 months. After launching, he had already hired his first assistant, a 16-year-old girl, and soon local newspapers were also writing about the business and its environmentally conscious values. Additionally, Rodic had the ability to continue to constantly innovate within its retail space within its product offering. and within her marketing, as part of which she had several innovative ideas, including her beauty baskets, which is a way to increase sales to consumers with constant flows of said new products that she would continue to experiment with in her home kitchen, all which was actually possible because she had reduced the cost of making it exponentially, she made the product herself thinking she went into the health food store packing everything in the same packaging, so there was never a huge cost loss if a specific product didn't it worked. innovated in marketing with experiential marketing first after it was too expensive to add fragrances before the purchase was complete so they simply encouraged customers to add their own fragrances in this same perfume bar where they had things like flower apple, jasmine and honeysuckle as options and even Outside the store, he sprayed Strawberry Essence perfume on the street to entice customers to come in, so you can probably tell Anita that it was really a necessity that pan creativity, but A new location was found in Chichester, not far from Brighton, and she was more than ready to take on the workload, but the bank doubted that most of companies fail on their firstyear and expanding too quickly is often the kiss of death for your business.

He wanted her to wait a year and so they wouldn't support her, instead she found financing at a part-time store. Helper and friend Adra, whose boyfriend Ian Mlin owned a local workshop, was the one who lent her the £4,000 she needed, but on the condition that he could own the entire company 50/50, she she wrote to her husband Gordon, who was co-owner, to inform him of the deal, but unfortunately, although she could see that it was a terrible valuation of the company, considering this was a time without instant communication and he was still in South America, she had already The deal closed when he could respond, it was a horrendous deal, too generous, but Rodic accepted simply because he needed the money and was impatient. opening a second store and eventually opening said store in September 1976, on the plus side at least it became a success very quickly and yet this wasn't the only bad decision I would make and would go on to make many more, it's just The thing is, she intrinsically understood that mistakes were an inevitability of her desire to experiment and take risks and, to be fair, Ian Mlin never really interfered with the business, so if she was going to take a chance on someone, this was actually it. the best person to do it and so, in the face of this, I would continue to take risks, for example, all within the same year, three important decisions were made.

Firstly, a small cosmetic herbalist company run by Mark Constantine was contacted to offer a partnership of sorts, not a business partnership but more of a symbiotic relationship where he would develop their products and they could work and grow together, soon after. After her husband returned home early from his trip because one of his horses died in Bolivia, together they moved all the bottling and labeling from the basement of the store into the garage of their house to use it almost as a logistics center sending products to the two stores as necessary, as it was the same distance from both, and finally, after Gordon formally began taking charge of salaries and accounts with the company, he read all the letters. that Anita had been receiving from business owners, they decided to consider the many frequent requests to Anita to start franchising a word they didn't actually know yet.

Franchising in this regard is a process where someone buys the rights to things like the logo, the name, the color. scheme and branded products and generally within his own retail store sells them on his behalf. Franchising generally for small businesses like The Body Shop is considered a fairly low risk strategy for both the franchise and the franchisor because the franchisee benefits from the brand. While the franchisor benefits from low expansion costs, it really is a win-win for both parties, especially in this situation where there is no parent company behind the brand and therefore they are now informed about the basics of What is a franchise?

Anita and Gordon decided to meet with an attorney to develop a formal franchise plan; However, this came with a major mistake because the Rodics simply did not know how to best run a franchise; They were too liberal in allowing anyone with a location and desire to open a branch. body shop to do it and then they were not given a set of standards to maintain consistency across all branches only in a desperation to expand to beat the recession, but they soon realized this was a mistake and instead turned Notoriously picky about who they would allow to start one of their body shop franchises, but what she wanted was a group of activist teachers and educators, specifically non-entrepreneurs, to own the body shops, they had to believe in the spirit of The company, although they were not good representatives, was another move by Rodic that kept his business lean and concise in a way that guaranteed quality among stores even during such rapid expansion, ultimately this meant that in just 2 years After launching, The Body Shop had expanded throughout England and even into Europe, where they saw their stores open.

The first kiosk in Brussels, then one in Sweden, Athens and even soon in Canada, but despite all this, the company was still growing mainly in its retail innovations, while its activist point of view had not yet affected the business outside the behind the scenes element where they were ethical. Their careers are secure, but that was really only because Rodic personally believed in it. Everything would change after they introduced their first PR person, Janice Raven, who was the one who led their reactive PR plan, raising public awareness about Anita's personal activism, connecting it directly to the brand, of course, the seats.

They were there, the green walls, the reusable bottles and the herbal products, but they hadn't yet crystallized as a marketing plan until Raven in 1978 had great success as a totally new way of looking at common cosmetics. marketing plan to find a consumer problem and market to that, this was something we have already discussed in my drunk elephant video with examples of armpit odor shamers suppliers for certain body hair and non-toxic cosmetics, but for The body shop specifically were benefiting greatly from the new consumer environmental problem, for example, they said animal testing was bad, which promoted their company as a solution to the problem of consumers being unethical;

In fact, The Body Shop aligned itself with countless charities and movements from that point on, most famously against animal testing, also fair trade and non-trade. They help everyone build that consumer trust in an authentic way, while encouraging them to try each product in its unique small-sized packaging and return when they discover that the one they liked didn't have anything in it. market like this and disrupted the founded cosmetics base, which is why the growth was so exponentially fast. She wasn't just selling moisturizers in convenient packaging, she was selling the idea of ​​kindness and humanitarianism and she wasn't a face even inside either.

In her business, workers were regularly given half a day to serve their community. She had encouraged and implemented developments not only of new products but also in human relations, packaging and recycling. They set up the first Child Development Center in the UK in 1990. They funded a waste management greenhouse. in which all waste would be filtered through different plants to absorb the effluent and reduce waste discharge into sewers. Trained staff to understand the different needs of all consumers. The differences in different body types, skin types, and hair types to provide information that in the '70s and '80s simply weren't widely available and because she specifically hired people who felt the same humanitarian emotions as her , created a genuine and safe environment for her employees to disagree with her, even the most junior employee received six special red envelopes that would be sent directly to her if they had any complaints.

There's actually a wonderful story a little later, in 1989, by a man named Peter Kyle in which he describes his personal attention to his employees and the kind of environment he created even for himself. As one of the lowest-ranked employees in the company, I can't go over everything, so I'll leave it here for you to pause and read if you want, but I'll also link to it below just in case. because it is an incredible insight into the power of humanistic leadership, which is a factor that cannot be underestimated in the course of the continued success of the business, leading to the emergence of multiple franchises around the world, including franchises in 1980 throughout the country and in Europe in Iceland.

Denmark, Finland and Holland, this in turn led the company to realize the new need for the company to reconsider its place within it. They opened a manufacturing and distribution facility to mass produce all of their many franchises and refocused their headquarters from a B2C model to B2B commerce. Of course, they were still doing both, but this reorientation of their business energy toward Business-to-business B2B would become an important factor in the development of the business from now on, as it was a major factor in the need for an even larger custom warehouse that would also act as the company's headquarters. company.

You see, the body shop was now very well established globally as anti-cosmetics, but up to that point the company, although financially successful, was not financially motivated and that had allowed them. taking incredible risks and talking about topics that no other cosmetics company was willing to discuss, but even this was about to change in April 1984, when the company decided to go public. They have been considering it for about 3 years at this point because they knew it would fundamentally change the company if they went public they would have no control over who bought shares and they knew these people would always demand profits they couldn't guarantee their shareholders would have the same ethical motivations as them. , but going public would also offer them significantly more money almost immediately and would allow them not to have to rely on loans from the Bank as they had previously needed with each expansion.

Of course, they went public and the BBC even apparently filmed the event starting as a perceived low valuation of 95 per share and eventually rising to £165, all in the space of a single day, valuing the company at £8 million or $1 million after the sale, netting Anita and Gordon personally $1.5 million or $2 million on that day alone, which equates to around £6 million or so. $6 million today, the way they got around their concern about humanistic loss of control was pretty clever. Months before the IPO they had informed all their staff about what would happen and openly encouraged them to buy shares, as is implicit in their books.

They were already receiving dividends, but this is obviously more concrete and allowed them to help the staff find the necessary investment and split the shares enough to retain a large amount of control. Of course, this money mainly went into the business. Internal environmental projects began. department and externally with charity work increasing to support causes such as animal welfare and even the fight against AIDS, which of course during the 80s was a pandemic and one of the most difficult initiatives to get others on board, although only as reference Richard Branson helped, he is the The man behind Vergin while Marks and Spencer Burton are Top Shop and the best man Tyra and Sock Shop also said no, although this was all fine at first, she was increasing the amount of money that he could donate to charities and the company was growing at an exponential rate, would soon come to greatly affect the business, in what he later recalled as his biggest business mistake.

The first problem was that stores had become too busy with random charity collection boxes, raffles and balloons, forcing them to refocus on just two big campaigns. per year in 1990 and then because these campaigns were so big the media saw that they were stealing from shareholders because they were spending on expensive activism when they should be using that as profit to give to shareholders, as a result it forced them to do it . to make the company more financially motivated to appease newly disgruntled shareholders, she hated it, disliked the cosmetics industry at the best of times, thought it exploited women's insecurities, sexualized children, and She had no sense of social responsibility, but now she had begun to see that her own business, which had been born from exactly the opposite, The Body Shop, had become everything she hated. after being forced to hire people like the CEO, a committee, and a president, all of them. of which, a very structured and rigid offering to help them generate the best profits, these people did it strong, don't get me wrong, and they saved the business, but in all that business, Brilliance lost its original motivation and feeling and eventually, She simply didn't want to do it anymore today what happened with the body shop is called cause marketing and it is effectively where a company aligns itself directly with a cause not because they believe it but because their customers react and buy more, we see this very obviously, in the rare Beauty impact fund today, as well as in companies that promote different values ​​in different countries, as seen here fromSamsung US versus at home in Korea, also obviously during any time there is social unrest, this becomes very evident, for example how many of the brands that spoke out on the issue of black lives matter still discuss it or fundamentally changed because of it, for example, there is, of course, and The Body Shop obviously wasn't doing it exclusively for the customer, but this became a big trend in marketing as she describes in her books and it was that false n which really put her off her own business after they were forced to refocus on just two campaigns a year, which seemed to discredit the original ethos in the public eye and because they were now such a major player in retail, not only in cosmetics, and were seeing a massive financial return thanks to activism, competition that previously didn't consider them a threat began to do so, which then led them to formulate their own cause marketing as a direct rebuttal to the body.

This resulted in a situation where the company was doomed either way, if they were ethical, they were bad for shareholders and if they were corporate, they were bad for their own business ethics. There seemed to be no way for the company to grow now without backlash and Although they continue to differentiate themselves based on ethical principles, most obviously with Greenpeace Save the Whales and Friends of Earth, with whom they campaigned shortly after going public, it was difficult for Without risking their money to appease this fear, they turned to expansion and this time they had their sights set on the United States, but already in 1987, when the Talks to expand in the United States, Anita Rodic knew this would be very difficult because she had knowingly used the concept of The Body Shop Us that she had seen in the late 60s for her own brand, as we discussed earlier in this video and, As she herself admits to doing in her books, this is not illegal at all and is in fact quite common in business. for imitators to emerge, in fact the owners of The Body Shop even knew about their store, they kept in touch with them for years and were not particularly bothered by it, they had different target markets, they spread the same messages and the good companies to They often receive imitators.

And furthermore, it is this type of innovation in business that is important, you take a good idea and simply make it better. It happened with the concept of supermarkets, very famous in department stores, cosmetics stores, as we discussed in my Sephora video, and even recently. I have seen this in companies with the incorporation of self-service stores and even in drunk elephants who started by copying a bar of soap called The Wonderbar. Who themselves may have copied the body shop Hao clay bar that was available even before Wonderbar. This is simply part of healthy competition, but the problem was that Rodic's business, firstly, had no experience in the American market, something very difficult for the British to decipher, and secondly, they had grown much more than us, but now they couldn't expand.

United States with another brand of the same name, if only for legal reasons, but because they knew that this would cause a big scandal, which happened later. They were able to get ahead of themselves and paid the short owners and Saunders, then in his 70s, $3.5 million for the exclusive rights to the name, buying the rights to the name in both the US and the United States. . Japan converted all of their stores to body time over the next 5 years, so while this was well anticipated and well avoided at this time, this was not the only problem they would have in the US, as will be seen. the moment they were ready to launch.

In the United States, the following year, in 1988, Estee La had already opened an environmentally conscious division called Origins. The Limited, a clothing company, was about to open a line of stores called Bath and Body Works and, of course, Body Time was also transitioning its stores to the new name, all of which compete directly with the concept of body shop retail and most were born directly out of the need to compete directly against the body shop in the cause marketing space, but at least they were more corporate, at least that was a differentiator between them. and the body shop or not, not really, because the body shop had been strongly advised not to do their strong differentiating political messages in the store, they didn't really have a differentiator to influence the US market, so while in Europe they had the entire market cornered, this would not be the case at all in the United States and they would actively fight to gain market share as in 1990 even more competitors appeared including h2i plus good Bodys and Garden Botanica which meant that As The Body Shop franchises began to be built across the country, although at first they were very successful, soon the novelty wore off and they could no longer guarantee that their target market would go to their stores instead of their competitors, although in addition Of all this, what made this expansion in the United States especially bad was the lack of publicity they never had.

I needed it sooner because their activism effectively did it for them, but as Bath and Body Works were advertising and they were advertising a lot and The Body Shop franchises were opening at a significantly slower pace. Bath and Body Works just completely dominated, the only saving grace for Rodic was that in the early '90s it seemed like a problem contained in America, by 1990 they had 320 stores in 37 countries, including 22 in the US, plus of 170 in Britain and then by 1991 they had 600 stores around the world, including 12 in Japan, and they were hopeful. to grow to a thousand stores around the world by the Millennium and at least in the United Kingdom.

Anita was still praised for her innovative retail ideas and her humanitarian stance, but business experts had become seriously concerned. The Body Shop had never really gone through a period of difficulty. was growing from strength to strength, and because Anita ran the company was especially short-sighted and focused more on promotion than finances, business analysts and shareholders alike became gravely concerned. Anita had a particularly simplistic view of retail, only buying and selling good products, but while this was true in the early days when her company had grown so colossally that it was no longer as simple as what had previously been under her control. was beginning to come out of it, which caused in 1992 its shares, which had previously reached a high of £362 for the same amount.

The first time fell and fell very, very hard, scaring shareholders who thought they had invested in it. which was then said to be an AIS Recession Proof business, meanwhile the company didn't really do anything to combat this, they just kept pushing for the causes they believed in. including now also pushing these causes in the US, where they registered all American stores as voting locations, openly opposed the Persian Gulf War, and started the "have a heart" campaign to encourage others to oppose the US intervention in the Persian Gulf and as a result the company eventually gained US market share, which by 1993 meant they had 20 US stores;

However, while this seemed promising on the surface, things were about to get significantly worse now the sources don't agree on the timeline for this and their books aren't chronological to really know what. she thinks, but as I understand it, in early 1992 The Body Shop was approached by Channel 4 to produce a documentary about the company, the company saw it as a good free promotion and so gave them absolute cooperation, total freedom to explore the company and find its history. However, when the documentary aired in May 1992, it was evident that they had published a story purporting to show that The Body Shop was fake and that their products were, in fact, tested on animals no better than their competitors, who did not do so. such a claim, obviously the program called dispatches was terribly damaging to his public perception, he effectively claimed that the body shop as a concept was a lie, his stock fell overnight from P270 to P160 and because customers Now they felt lied to or betrayed, is the word used in a need.

For his book, sales also plummeted at the same time that a man named John Entin, a two-time Emmy Award-winning writer and professor of journalism at New York University with 20 years of experience working with ABC and NBC, arrived, who according to a rodic made it her personal goal to take down the body shop, she claims she contacted the Financial Times, Vanity Fair, the FDA, ABC and many more publications to try to sell a story exposing the body shop for a large amount of things that questioned their trade, not the plagiarism of the aid program. from the Body Shop store in San Francisco in 1970, the misleading origin of its ingredients and that they had been tested on animals.

This is the exact article she had attempted to publish in Vanity Fair. You can pause to read if you wish. but Anita in her books stated that none of these accusations in said article and potentially the others prefer this to be true. Unfortunately, Anita and Gordon had contacts in these places to convince them not to publish this story, but in the meantime, he was extremely persistent. In fact, Gordon had taken Channel 4 to court over liability claims to refute claims made in the dispatches as false and they actually won the case in July 1993, thereby proving in court that these claims were defamatory. , but that wasn't really the case.

To stop the barrage of hatred that had begun from this, by August 1994 Tin's campaign was gaining strength and saw some of his shareholders begin to sell their shares, following the example of the American ethical investment fund Franklin Research and Development which sold 50,000 shares due to allegations shortly after this, the Financial Times published a story about factory emissions that had leaked into the sea, which she claims is unusual in business to have been an accidental spill of shampoo, although he says the absence of that fact made the item seem comparable to an oil. spill which she claims was far from it, although we know from later testimony from a government official that the spill was not disclosed illegally and was intentional, however, furthermore, after this Financial Times article, she claims that almost 150 articles from various magazines in a fortnite about said happening and that they felt that they were no longer competing with their competitors but now in the public eye they competed with perfection and yet the real damage was still to be done in September 1994, John Tin, whom she called a stalker in her book, managed to publish the article that she had long been refused to publish in Vanity Fair ABC Etc, now in business ethics, which was a magazine that published the article.

The destroyed image is the body shop too good to be true. The article is no longer available online, so I contacted John tine directly. to access it as his website says and I received the article as well as several other documents. I think it's important at this point to point out that everything I've told you so far has been from Anita's perspective. Anita's books. Anita's articles. Interviews. with Anita Etc, which remains one of the few accessible sources of information about the body shop because, as she says in her book, much of it was removed, including Channel 4 documentary dispatches, because it was considered defamation and, furthermore, at that time they had many lawyers at The Body Shop who were very protective of their name;

However, in the interest of being impartial, I read the article, as well as all the other articles you sent me, and it is very interesting to hear that many of the people we have discussed so far gave you a totally different perspective on the company. I'm going to leave the article here in full so you can screenshot it and read it if you want, but in summary, Mark Constantine, your chemist. With Janice Raven, his main PR person, he claimed that none of the narratives made by The Body Shop were truthful at all; in fact, Mark provided the ingredients and Janice wrote the story based on the places Anita had been, regardless of whether the story had been true.

The article says it was a supported cause marketing tactic because boots, brands and dispensers were entering the natural cosmetics space and needed to differentiate their product. They also said that the products would endin the hands of franchises, which seems to suggest that the products are not safe, they claim that the products are more chemical-based than the company let on, although he says this may have been in the early days because Constantine and Rodic simply They did not know better that product development was known to take shortcuts during testing when necessary for holiday periods, resulting in moldy products being sold in their stores, which 46.5% of their ingredients were actually tested on animals, although I personally think this is worded in a way that needs more research personally, so I take it with a grain of salt and many more accusations, as you can see for yourself, from not being willing to help owners of franchises to lying about the size of their ethical trading program and even their environmental protection policies such as recycling, unfortunately I am not in the position nor is there anyone now?

It has taken so long to truly verify Tin nor Rodic's claims about the operation of the business. I received Tin's audit of all his claims, all the evidence he has and more in a Word document outlining his exact sources and they really seem credible and also business ethics in a letter to the publisher Advisory board members claimed that his article, although funded by Vanity Fair and killed because the body shop threatened to sue them, was thoroughly verified with publicly accessible documents, documents obtained with more than 100 in the registry of privileged interviews and documents obtained by the Appropriate Authority and I honestly also like It seems strange that in the face of all these accusations the workshop has not sued since they had threatened to do so against both Vanity Fair and business ethics. but I'm not a legal expert to understand why they didn't do it.

What becomes clear from this article, however, are the points on which the two seem to agree: firstly, that ethical activism was used as marketing conceived by Janice R, secondly, that the body shop was not perfect in any of the statements they made and that the idea was taken from short and Saunders, although in fact it was brief and Saunders came forward after the article. He went live to say that Tin had twisted his words. I'll link tin's email in the description box of this video in case you want access to the full documents, but in our timeline, as I often say, it's not really the truth in marketing that matters, but rather our perception.

The truth and end result of this article and the consequences of it was that it was terribly damaging to the public perception of the company, so now all of its ethical claims, origin production business acumen and even its humanistic nature were Of course, the workshop knew that they were not perfect, but they also knew that it is better to try to achieve positive change than not to care at all, but the problem was that They had worked hard as activists and were giving a spirit of home care in each purchase. the controversy directly contradicted the foundation the company was built on and now, instead of being compared to other companies that did little to nothing to help, they were now being unfairly compared to Perfection from then on, regardless of how hard they tried to stop it.

No matter how many charities came to their defense, the articles denouncing The Body Shop kept appearing, it didn't matter if the stories were false or not, it was the repetition that gave it weight, it was the repetition that caused the workshop to be cancelled. In 1995 they lost Mark Constantine, his herbalist of 20 years after he started his own shop called Lush, you may know. By 1998, The Body Shop's stock had hit an all-time low and in 1999 they suffered their first layoffs from the company. was founded advised by a new CEO during a restructuring they allegedly began looking for options to sell the company or even buy out its shareholders at this point to recover it as a private company even as it has now expanded to 18800 stores worldwide and it Instead, he was more personally famous than ever, although they reorganized his position in the company and, in 2000, shortly after undergoing a rebrand that made them look much more corporate than ever, Anita was wondering if she wanted to get involved with The company in It was not long before Rodic confirmed herself as the company's largest liability in an interview with the BBC after she, while still associated with the company as its largest shareholder along with her husband, with 26%, although this number greatly affects the VAR depending on the source.

She began criticizing her own company for products that were useless and expressing her displeasure over products that were selling well but had not been approved by her; Soon the public also tired of her activism, especially in the United States after she spoke out about allowing freedom. Speech after the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers and fell into the biggest risk of C marketing, but she couldn't help it, you see, she really believed that enlightened capitalism was the way to go and now that the year 2000 has passed, any company that does it does not do it. aligning themselves politically would make it difficult for them to operate and to be fair, looking at the current market, she was right, the market we have now almost forces Brands to talk about social issues, such as mental health, queer rights, lives Of black people I care too and Even the current wars in Ukraine and Gaza divide consumers based on the correlation between individuals and the beliefs of the company, regardless of whether the company really believes in it or not, today's customer You're really voting with your dollar, so she was right, but they almost did.

No matter, The Body Shop was already in trouble, probably not making a profit between 1996 and 2002, they had countless increasing liabilities from having too many stores, too low a margin, especially in the United States, too high distribution costs, a branch of obstructed product development. loss-making manufacturing plant an expected sales expectation in new markets that were not sustainable for its franchise owners multiple manufacturing plants were operating around the world to try to meet demand from franchises that regularly underperformed, among many other logistical issues that were becoming clearer that they couldn't get out of all the controversy, which was greatly helped by another Tin article from issue 22, I believe, in which she spoke to Anita's friends, Alma and David Duner McDaniel, with whom she was in San Francisco in 1971, as she says in her autobiography when Rodic discovered the original body shop and said that they actively and consciously used the original body shop idea, even copying brochures and product names that, Although this information was available to the public, he now considered that this information coming from close friends and John Entin was also undoubtedly even more damaging to public perception.

The Body Shop was already in trouble, having probably not made a profit from 1996 to 2002, and it was becoming increasingly clear that there was no turning back from the controversy in 2002. Anita Rodic Now 52, ​​she had just resigned from her own company , they had stopped including it in business decisions and did not take it seriously. She even told a Daily Mail reporter that she thought perhaps the company would be better off without her. Later that year, Anita and her husband Gordon announced that they were greatly reducing their RIS management rules, introducing Adrien Bellamy, previously co-president, as the new CEO charged with curating The Body Shop Us franchises, while American boss Peter Saunders took over as CEO almost immediately, The Body Shop went into damage control.

Peter Saunders began an initiative to revitalize the company by attracting more affluent shoppers and modernizing the stores to make them more corporate and standardized, but interestingly, they knew that their value to the remaining customer was still activism even though it had caused all their problems and, Therefore, to maintain her brother's original vision for the company, they began to regenerate it in a more sustainable and honestly less risky way, including keeping Anita in promotional materials like this, this of course did not stop Anita from speaking in against the company. but by this point they had already publicly distanced themselves, so her criticism had a less negative impact than before and it wasn't as if her criticism was mean at all, she just wanted the best for her own company, so that's how it was.

However, as damaging as it was, the one thing they couldn't control was Rodic selling her shares, meaning that on June 9, 2006, Rodic sold the body shop for $1.1 billion to L'Oréal. This was a problem that L'Oréal put to the test. about animals and didn't seem to have the same type of ethics that the original brand represented. The media called out Anita for selling herself only for money and not caring about ethics, as she had claimed that L'Oreal shares even fell 7.2% in just 3 months of the acquisition, of course, Anita analyzed this by saying that He believed they couldn't change that aspect of the business because that was what they were buying, it was the DNA of the shop, but that wouldn't stop a global boycott of the brand that customers had simply lost trust in, really their only shred of hope. it would be if Anita bought it back from L'Oreal, which was seen as an option at the time;

However, hope was quickly lost as on September 10, 2007, Anita died. at home from an unknown brain tumor, of course, this appeared in the media around the world and, although in reality the company no longer had anything to do with it, the founder and the founder's story, especially in cosmetics , is an incredibly powerful marketing tool when Anita was alive. They probably would have done everything they could to put more distance between the company and her because she was so provocative and risky, but now that she had passed away they did what most companies do in such a situation and deified her memory in the media by remembering her for her humanitarian work and their activism in a way that generally allows the company to benefit greatly with little risk.

Think Carl Loffeld at Chanel or Jonathan Code at Alexander McQueen. In theory, this strategy is usually beneficial for the company, but in practice this was not the case. They fit with their customer base who were already emotionally attached to the company and specifically to Anita. It was not a victory that lasted long. Her new campaigns like this one from 2011 to stop human trafficking because it was from L'Oreal just seemed condescending. It seemed fake and lacked that humanistic angle that the body shop was so famous for, and to be fair, it was all of those things. I'm pretty sure by now they had stopped recycling the bottles if you bought them back at the store.

They used to do this on hair combs, they also stopped refilling bottles in the shop for customers, so they quickly removed all these environmental elements that meant the shop even individually was doing well, so it was fake , lacked that. humanist angle and this really seemed like a last ditch attempt to return the company to profitability which it hadn't had since 1992 and now with the dying High Street, a huge number of unprofitable stores and a ridiculously ridiculous amount of competition holding them back, it was It really was the final nail in the coffin, as it slowly but surely alienated its loyal customer base during the time it took 10 years before L'Oréal cut its losses by selling the company to nura and Co for the same $1,100. millions for which they had bought it. it's actually a 200 million dollar loss when adjusted for inflation under Natura to try to combat them as loss makers they underwent a rebrand but mainly they did it with the packaging and promotion which now looks like this , but actually, in my opinion, I think I kind of missed the point, other than the fact that Anita herself was already against the idea of ​​anti-aging, something that for some reason the workshop started marketing, as can see from this packaging, other than there wasn't much wrong with this guy. of the packaging or the color scheme only visually in terms of the body shop.

I mean, Sephora still sells similar packaged products to this day. In my opinion, it seems that the body shop has lost its competitive advantage and perhaps because its differentiator is or was risky neither L' Oreal nor Natura seem to want to recover that instead of just choosing the safe option, but the problem is that now First of all, they have an incredible number of competitors in the space marketing products that are vegan or not tested onanimals, etc., that is now. the norm is not a differentiator, so standing out from that crowd is an incredible feat, especially when they don't have a differentiated product or at least they no longer advertise that they have a differentiated product and secondly, and perhaps more importantly, they seem to have completely lost their activist defeats, as I just said things like animal testing, as well as things like AIDS awareness, fair trade and saving whales, these are no longer controversial topics, the vast majority of cosmetics now align with at least one of these. usually through vegan products, but a big part of that original appeal of the body shop was that it brought attention to all of these really small Fred problems or problems that weren't talked about, which added up to become a big social problem back in the 80's. they talked about AIDS at a corporate level, few talked about fair trade or animal testing, but the body shop was and therefore it was very talked about and special and to be fair, not is that they are not doing anything just by looking at their Instagram, you can still see them campaigning, but in my opinion there is a missing connection here with authenticity because these are literally the same topics that everyone else is discussing as well as the body shop , have been discussing things like refillable bottles and animal testing for literally decades.

It's not a feeling that the shop is bringing these issues to light and instead it feels more like they are reacting to consumer demand who are raising awareness about less unpleasant topics. The body shop today is not aligned with the modern problems they have. As far as I know, they didn't talk about things like the wars in Ukraine or Gaza and if I remember correctly, they weren't at the forefront of the vaccine conversations during covid or even during the black lives matter issue, yeah they made statements about the last two Co. and BLM, but corporately and not in a timely manner, whereas in contrast, under rodic, she would actively look for problems to help with and it's not that there is a lack of problems, nowadays in UK household income is at its lowest level. in England they are few and the number of homeless people is increasing extremely rapidly in Asia antifeminism is rif and countries like Korea and the Philippines do not have discrimination laws in the United States all the discussion about the right to bear arms as well as the combination of State and religion that is now affecting Native American rights, religious freedoms and women's rights in Australia, the rental crisis and globally even things like homophobia, xenophobia and racism are incredibly common.

We, as consumers, are now more aware than ever of these global issues and you, watching this, probably knew or had opinions on all the topics I just mentioned, but there are much worse things happening than we, as the public, simply We don't know yet and these are the things that Anita would fight, as well as all the big problems, so why if that? was always her key differentiator for the body shop, why don't they help like before? It's not that they're not doing anything - to be honest, they're doing more than most - but they just seem to be overlooking the fact that customers knew from the body shop that the reliable humanist opinion on where to look for activism just disappeared now. .

I'm not saying they have to go out of their way to meet the world intact and promote themselves as helping all small groups of people. which Anita once claimed because we know from the John debacle and time that that is terribly risky even if it were true, but aligning yourself with a really important cause could help the false feeling we currently have with the body shop because even if it comes with losses or even breaking even, they currently have a major public image problem and that desperately needs to change if they want to make a comeback, but here is what I just presented, that idea, that concept as something that I have noticed or that we have all noticed. realized the body shop, but Nita foresaw it back in 2000 and abandoned her book business, since it is something unusual among us, people respond to a redefinition of the business in which the human being comes into play and I have learned over the years.

For our people to consider social and environmental values ​​as part of the body shop's DNA, they lose it at their own peril, and to give them credit, that's exactly what they did, and it took a risk as a result. The Body Shop just isn't special anymore, there's no reason for us to buy body shop products instead of Lush for example, and obviously this just led to a drop in sales, a drop in profits and finally in November from 2023, it was sold to the Aurelius group for just £27 million before. just 4 months later, in February 2024, the liquidation was announced due to the timing of the liquidation appearing to have been planned, perhaps before the purchase.

Within 3 months, they had sold many of their loss-making branches around the world, including France and Germany, and discounted heavily during the holidays. season in what seemed like simply an attempt to offload some of the shares and offered their Canadian subsidiaries as collateral to try to attract new sponsors, they said in this Financial Times article that was not the plan, but considering that in the United Kingdom , Germany, Canada, Denmark and Belgium have all announced their bankruptcy in just 3 months and it really looks like they will soon do so in the US and Australia as well. It's suspiciously quick after the sale for me to think it was unplanned, though, even though this may seem that way.

In my opinion, this is the end of the body shop. I think they will use this time to evaluate their resources very deeply and consolidate their assets to rid the company of some of the debt before reorienting the strategy to one that is better. In my opinion, online on a much more profitable retail platform, I think they will then sell the workshop as intellectual property and then whoever buys it will have to reevaluate the perception of the brand because, as I pointed out before, it is no longer special and No change of bottle will fix that, so that will be another important factor in the end.

There is no guarantee that liquidation will save The Body Shop. No, far from it because there really is a lot of work to do to get them back, but I really hope this is not the end. It is very sad to know that the business of the famous and influential Anita Rodic has gone into liquidation. shortly after her death, but frankly, L'Oreal and Nura just didn't seem to understand what they were taking on, they just didn't have the activist drive to execute it during the break even if they had to, as I said at the beginning.

In fact, I'm planning Anita Rodic's first life and death video soon, so if you know that format from the beginning of Stitch, you know that it will be good and revealing about her personality because she is a fascinating person, but in the meantime, for the business. I really hope they bring in some young people who can help improve their company, not some corporate entrepreneurs who aren't willing to take risks, but some young activists who understand the balancing act the workshop is looking for. All in all, even if the body shop was not as honest in its operations as they once claimed to be, it really was hugely influential to the retail trade and in the end it seemed like it was a long, hard 30 year

fall

from grace that could have been saved by acting according to some of his own founding principles, but instead his biggest risk was not taking any risks.

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