The founder of The Body Shop has died - but not before helping to move exhausted industrial capitalism towards a new life as 'capitalism without growth', writes James Heartfield.
'Mostly, I tell stories', Anita Roddick once said. 'I just sell some stuff on the side to make some money.' Roddick opened the first of a chain of cosmetic and toiletry outlets, The Body Shop, in Brighton in 1976. Last year, she and her husband Gordon sold the global chain of 1,407 shops to French cosmetics giant L'Oreal for £256million.
Roddick, who died yesterday, was once a civil servants union shop steward: she was from the left, not the right, but ended up pioneering the green capitalism that dominates today. She had an instinct for the way that the culture was changing in the 1980s. The Body Shop appealed to a customer who was more focused on personal life, and wanted to 'spoil herself' with bath oils and scented soaps, seeking a bit of refuge from an uglier world of competition.
But Roddick's winning formula was to tie the inward focus to broad ethical propositions. The Body Shop's cosmetics were the first to be marketed as 'not tested on animals' - summoning up a picture of L'Oreal shampoo being drip-fed into some prostrate beagle's eye. This was the birth of 'ethical shopping' - the idea that, even if you did not feel like getting involved with a big campaign, you could still do something useful just by buying the right things.
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