WOMAN ENTREPRENEUR-ANITA RODDICK

If someone asks people to list down the names of the entrepreneurs they know, it would
not be surprising if they come up with the names of Ratan Tata, Bill Gates, Warren Buffet
and the like. Whatever names they would come up with, that list is most likely to have one
common feature. I am sure we would be thinking of lofty aspects like guts, intelligence and
glory of those personalities once we look for the commonalities. But above all these is one
simple common attribute. The common person’s idea of an entrepreneur is that “HE” would
be a male and the list that he would come up with, would be a male-dominated one,
irrespective of which gender he/she belongs.

Are female entrepreneurs few in numbers? A dispassionate analysis would tempt a person
to answer in the affirmative. The reasons were (hopefully not “are”) plenty. Whatever the
obstacles are/were, things have changed in the last few decades. Women entrepreneurs
have begun to show up and are beginning to prove that they are inferior in no way to their
male counterparts. Let us take a look at the inspirational life of one such entrepreneur,
Anita Roddick.

Anita Roddick was the founder of British cosmetic retail company, Body Shop. What made
it stand out in the cosmetic industry was that it stood for “ethical consumerism”. The Body
Shop was one of the first commercial cosmetics outlets to prohibit the use of ingredients
tested on animals and one of the first to promote fair trade with third world countries. It
stood for aspects like community trading, human rights protection and promotion of self-
esteem based on the ideals of its founder, Anita Roddick who vigorously campaigned for
environmental and social issues involving herself with organizations like Greenpeace.

She attributed her work ethic to her childhood life which in no way was a smooth road. She
was born in 1942 as the third child to parents who would get divorced when she turned
eight. She grew up working in a café and one fine day she stumbled upon a book on the
holocaust, carrying horrible stories of the Nazi concentration camps. “This kick-started me
into a sense of outrage and a sense of empathy for the human condition”, she would later
say.

She initially wanted to become a teacher and accordingly pursued her tertiary education.
She had earned herself a scholarship to study in a “kibbutz” in Israel where she was
expelled (thankfully?!) for playing a prank.

She held various jobs and travelled to many places from South Africa to Tahiti. She went to
a school in South Africa where again she was expelled for violating an apartheid law. She
returned home and shortly married Gordon Roddick. The two of them made a living
running a restaurant and an eight room hotel.

One fine day after Gordon Roddick went trekking on a horse from Buenos Aries to New
York leaving her to support her two girls; she started a cosmetic retail “The Body Shop”
(incidentally, placed between two funeral parlors!) in Brighton, England. 0ut of
desperation, she created cosmetics out of every ingredient that she had stored in her
garage. Her products contained ingredients that women used in cleansing rituals that she
had witnessed in her travels. She opened her first shop with only twenty five products
financed the store using her hotel as collateral.

With its strong environmental flare and popular demand of the products, Roddick had
already opened a second shop before her husband’s return after 10 months. She took the
franchising route when the company was in a financial crunch and spread franchises all
over England. In 1984, the company decided to go public, a decision she thoroughly
regretted as their company was evaluated by how much profits they were making and not
the number of jobs they created being the socially active company it was. Today, The Body
Shop has over 1,980 stores and more than 77 million customers in 50 different markets
serving customers in over 25 different languages. Its success put Roddick’s net worth at
more than $200 million. In 2006, the company became an independently managed
subsidiary of the L’Oréal Group.

The Body Shop has a reputation for supporting social and environmental causes, thanks to
Roddick’s strong personal sense of social responsibility. After stepping down in 2002 from
co-chairman, she spent 80 days of the year working as a consultant in her stores and used
the rest of her time to advance causes in campaigns against human rights abuses and
exploitation of the underprivileged.

On September 10, 2007, Roddick passed away due to a massive brain hemorrhage

SOME OF HER QUOTES ON ENTREPRENEURSHIP

“If you do things well, do them better. Be daring, be first, be different, be just”(sic).

“Dysfunction is the essence of entrepreneurship. I’ve had dozens of requests from places
like Harvard and Yale to talk about the subject. It makes me laugh that ivy leaguers are so
keen to “learn” how to be entrepreneurs, because I’m not convinced it’s a subject you can
teach. I mean, how do you teach obsession? Because it is obsession that drives the
entrepreneur’s commitment to a vision of something new
“If you think you’re too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito!”

An Article By

Manohar S

(With inputs from the internet)