The first Body Shop opened in my home town of Brighton in 1976. It recently escaped the threat of immediate closure, unlike many others, but its future is still uncertain. The closed stores may yet reopen, but thebodyshop.com is still trading, and I believe passionately that it should be shopped at and saved. Here are just a handful of the many reasons why.
If ethical and sustainable initiatives in retail are now mainstream, it’s because the Body Shop made them so. “You have to go in the opposite direction to everyone else,” wrote founder Anita Roddick in 1992. And that’s precisely what she did. The Body Shop’s radicalism didn’t just change the beauty industry, it changed every consumer industry. It was among the first companies of any type to receive B Corp certification (there are now more than 8,000) – an official acknowledgment that it treated people, profit and planet with equal importance.
