Bath Gloves With Loop

OverviewAnita started The Body Shop on 26th March 1976 simply to create a livelihood for herself and her two daughters, while Gordon was trekking across the Americas. She had no training or experience and her only business acumen was Gordon's advice to take sales of £300 a week. Anita saw entrepreneurship as a means of survival, and firmly believed it nurtured creative thinking. Running her first shop taught her business is not financial science, but all about trading: buying and selling and about creating a product or service so good that people will want to pay for it. Testament to her firmly held business beliefs, over 30 years on The Body Shop is now a multi-local business with over 2,200 stores in 55 different markets. And she always claimed she didn't have clue how she got there. It wasn't only economic necessity that inspired the birth of The Body Shop. Her early travels gave her a wealth of experience. She had spent time in farming and fishing communities with pre-industrial peoples, and was exposed to body rituals of women from all over the world. Also the frugality that her mother exercised during the war years made her question retail conventions. Why waste a container when you can refill it? And why buy more of something than you can use? She behaved as her mother had in World War II. The Body Shop reused everything, refilled everything and recycled all they could. The foundation of The Body Shop's environmental activism was born out of these ideas. She was aware that success was more than a good idea. It was timing too. The Body Shop arrived just as Europe was going 'green'. The Body Shop has always been recognisable by its green colour, but it was the only colour that they could find to cover the damp, mouldy walls of the first shop. She opened a second shop within six months, by which time Gordon was back in England. He came up with the idea for 'self-financing' more new stores, which sparked the growth of the franchise network through which The Body Shop spread across the world. The company went public in 1984. A whole host of awards came her way, and as Anita famously claimed; some she understood, some she didn't and a couple she thought she deserved. Anita believed that businesses have the power to do good. That's why the Mission Statement of The Body Shop opened with the overriding commitment, 'To dedicate our business to the pursuit of social and environmental change.' The stores and products are used to help communicate human rights and environmental issues.