KEY POINTS:
Dame Anita Roddick once said: "If you think you are too small to be effective, you have never been in bed with a mosquito."
As one who expanded a business from one small shop in Brighton to 2000 outlets in 50 countries, she knew what she was talking
about.
The Body Shop based its merchandise on natural materials, searching the world for tribal people who used different ingredients to clean and polish the skin and hair. Sources as diverse as the Kayapo Indians in the eastern Amazon Basin, who used nut oil as a hair conditioner, and tea-tree oil used by Australian Aborigines, became part of the Body Shop range.
Roddick and her husband Gordon used the company's natural image to win over a generation of politically-correct consumers. Their approach to marketing eschewed big expensive advertising campaigns in favour of in-store promotions and posters that promoted women's self-esteem.
Contradictions were part of Anita Roddick's life. Railing against the industry that made her an extremely wealthy woman, the first sentence of her book Body and Soul reads, "I hate the beauty business. It is a monster industry selling unattainable dreams. It lies. It cheats."
As an anti-industrialist, she made no secret of the fact that wealth did not impress her. "Money doesn't mean anything to me. The worst thing is greed - the accumulation of money," she said last year. Ironically, the Body Shop sold to the French cosmetics group L'Oreal later that year for £652 million ($1.86 billion).
But money wasn't always so easy to come by. Roddick began her business on her kitchen table at her home in Littlehampton, West Sussex. Using whatever natural ingredients she could find, she hand-made lotions and potions, and packaged them in the cheapest containers she could source - the plastic bottles used by hospitals to collect urine samples. With the help of a loan, she opened the first retail outlet in Brighton in 1976, in a small shop sandwiched between two undertakers.
"They went purple with rage when I put the sign up," she recalled later. Fortunately Brighton council saw the funny side, and Roddick won planning permission.
The trademark green walls of Body Shop stores worldwide was the result of leaks in that first shop. "The green paint was the only thing that would cover the mould".
She could not afford to buy enough containers for her products, so encouraged her customers to bring their containers back to be refilled, and the recycling ethic of the company was established. A second shop opened in 1977, and a year later her husband Gordon hit on the idea of franchising to enable rapid growth.
Eight years after its setup, Body Shop was floated on the London stock exchange, a move Anita Roddick bitterly regretted. She claimed it turned the company into a "dysfunctional coffin", beholden to the financial bottom line. But her strong personal concerns about the environment and animal rights remained. The firm insisted that its suppliers provide regular written confirmation that no animal testing for cosmetics or toiletries had been carried out on the material for the five years before its use in a Body Shop product.
The Roddicks backed up their beliefs with action. They collected five million signatures on a petition against animal testing, and 12 million calling for action on human rights.
Roddick stepped down as chief executive of Body Shop in 1998, after profits plummeted following a huge expansion programme. Last year, she announced plans to give away part of her fortune, to recipients who "show leadership in the areas of global justice, human rights, environmental action and grassroots organising".
Early this year Roddick announced she had hepatitis C, a condition she had contracted from a blood transfusion when she gave birth to her daughter Sam in 1971.
"I could still have a good few years, even decades, of life left but it's hard to say," she said in February. "I could be facing liver cancer tomorrow. It makes me even more determined to just get on with things."
Dame Anita Roddick died of a brain haemorrhage at her home in Chichester. She is survived by her husband and their daughters, Sam and Justine.
