Anita Roddick Quotes

If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room.

Cynicism is what passes for insight when courage is lacking.

There are 3 billion women in the world who don't look like supermodels and only 8 that do.

Be courageous. It's one of the only places left uncrowded

If you think you're too small to make a difference, you've never been to bed with a mosquito.

The business of business should not just be about money, it should be about responsibility. It should be about public good, not private greed.

Values carry the message of shared purposes, standards and conceptions of what is worth living for and what is worth striving for.

I want to define success by redefining it. For me it isn't that solely mythical definition - glamour, allure, power of wealth, and the privilege from care. Any definition of success should be personal because it's so transitory. It's about shaping my own destiny.

I'm interested in any ingredient that has a history, that's been used by women, that works

My passionate belief is that business can be fun, it can be conducted with love and a powerful force for good.

Whatever you do, be different – that was the advice my mother gave me, and I can’t think of better advice for an entrepreneur. If you’re different, you will stand out.” - Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop. Via: eBetterBooks

Get informed. Get outraged. Get inspired. Get active.

I'm not about turning back the clock or promising some magic elixir of youth. It's an acknowledgment of the fact that as we age our skin has different needs.

All the recent marketing successes have been PR successes, not advertising successes. To name a few: Starbucks, The Body Shop, Amazon.com, Yahoo!, eBay, Palm, Google, Linus, PlayStation, Harry Potter, Botox, Red Bull, Microsoft, Intel, and BlackBerry. A closer look at the history of most major brands shows this to be true. As a matter of fact, an astonishing number of well-known brands have been built with virtually no advertising at all. Anita Roddick built The Body Shop into a worldwide brand without any advertising. Instead she traveled the world looking for ingredients for her natural cosmetics, a quest that resulted in endless publicity. Until recently Starbucks didn’t spend a hill of beans on advertising either. In its first ten years, the company spent less that $10 million (total) on advertising in the United States, a trivial amount for a brand that delivers annual sales of $1.3 billion today. Wal-Mart became the world’s largest retailer, ringing up sales approaching $200 billion, with little advertising. Sam’s Club, a Wal-Mart sibling, averages $56 million per store with almost no advertising. In the pharmaceutical field, Viagra, Prozac, and Vioxx became worldwide brands with almost no advertising. In the toy field, Beanie Babies, Tickle Me Elmo, and Pokémon became highly successful brands with almost no advertising. In the high-technology field, Oracle, Cisco, and SAP became multibillion-dollar companies (and multibillion-dollar brands) with almost no advertising.

Find Soul Mates The next step is to find some soul mates to go on your adventure—think Bilbo Baggins in The Fellowship of the Ring. However, people love the notion of the sole innovator: Thomas Edison (lightbulb), Steve Jobs (Macintosh), Henry Ford (Model T), Anita Roddick (The Body Shop), and Richard Branson (Virgin Airlines). It’s wrong.

But Anita Roddick had a different take on that. In 1976, before the words to say it had been found, she set out to create a business that was socially and environmentally regenerative by design. Opening The Body Shop in the British seaside town of Brighton, she sold natural plant-based cosmetics (never tested on animals) in refillable bottles and recycled boxes (why throw away when you can use again?) while paying a fair price to the communities worldwide that supplied cocoa butter, brazil nut oil and dried herbs. As production expanded, the business began to recycle its wastewater for using in its products and was an early investor in wind power. Meanwhile, company profits went to The Body Shop Foundation, which gave them to social and environmental causes. In all, a pretty generous enterprise. Roddick’s motivation? ‘I want to work for a company that contributes to and is part of the community,’ she later explained. ‘If I can’t do something for the public good, what the hell am I doing?’47 Such a values-driven mission is what the analyst Marjorie Kelly calls a company’s ‘living purpose’—turning on its head the neoliberal script that the business of business is simply business. Roddick proved that business can be far more than that, by embedding benevolent values and a regenerative intent at the company’s birth. ‘We dedicated the Articles of Association and Memoranda—which in England is the legal definition of the purpose of your company—to human rights advocacy and social and environmental change,’ she explained in 2005, ‘so everything the company did had that as its canopy.’48 Today’s most innovative enterprises are inspired by the same idea: that the business of business is to contribute to a thriving world. And the growing family of enterprise structures that are intentionally distributive by design—including cooperatives, not-for-profits, community interest companies, and benefit corporations—can be regenerative by design too.49 By explicitly making a regenerative commitment in their corporate by-laws and enshrining it in their governance, they can safeguard a ‘living purpose’ through times of leadership change and protect it from mission creep. Indeed the most profound act of corporate responsibility for any company today is to rewrite its corporate by-laws, or articles of association, in order to redefine itself with a living purpose, rooted in regenerative and distributive design, and then to live and work by it.

I guess if I am being honest, I was better at playing second fiddle – my life seems to have borne that out – with occasional bursts of first fiddle (The Big Issue, the Amazon, Riding across the Gran Chaco) – a slightly second-rate Ranulph Fiennes or even Pen Hadow. Nothing I have ever done had the benefit of planning – more based on ignorance than risk.

Anita would never say no to anybody’s dreams.

It was always a question of being present in mind and consciousness – I liked that Anita constantly challenged.

I guess if I am being honest, I was better at playing second fiddle – my life seems to have borne that out – with occasional bursts of first fiddle (The Big Issue, the Amazon, Riding across the Gran Chaco) – a slightly second-rate Ranulph Fiennes or even Pen Hadow. Nothing I have ever done had the benefit of planning – more based on ignorance than risk.

We showed that breaking the rules could lift your head above the mist, the fog and clouds of incomprehension. There was sunshine and laughter up there – anything, everything was possible!

Constantly, the thought is, will I be brave enough? So far, I have not risen to that challenge in my personal or public life. I was good enough to give shape but not detail to the opportunity I had in business.

38 Degrees. After the calamitous loss of Anita, I was looking for something to honour her that had a hint of activism and would be one of her legacy marks.

I am suddenly Held still, Held still, But filled With her. I am suddenly Turned But revolve About her. I am suddenly Me, But breathe About her. I am suddenly Held still By her.

What a thing is this River we run What a thing is this Music we fill What a thing is this Love we fun What a thing is this Quiet we still What a thing is this Universe we spin What a thing is this That is us

I can’t diminish my part in the life of The Body Shop and, of course, the determination and brilliant foresight of Anita, the trail she blazed and the dance she led us all on, the things we achieved and how much she is missed even after all these years, beyond her tragic death on 10 September 2007 – the years have gone quickly.

I am now 80+ and happy to be alive and sitting in the departure lounge. Anita and I made a great partnership, sometimes stormy, and we achieved a lot together in the great arena of life. I hope to exit with a smile, surrounded by my family.

You With Your public eyes And your Dark hair I fun your love And am Pooled Into your Holy See

FUNNY THAT I cannot think what is distinct about my life? What is not Is what I’ve got It’s not like I’ve run rife. I’ve mostly left that To my wife.

I loved her because she made me laugh every single day. I loved her determination to be a maverick and her ceaseless caring for the underdog

In business, we need to find a better way, but I know from bitter personal experience that when Anita and I decided to turn The Body Shop into a public company, we lost control to conservative institutions that cared little for its future. In business, we need to find a better way, but I know from bitter personal experience that when Anita and I decided to turn The Body Shop into a public company, we lost control to conservative institutions that cared little for its future. 

In business, we need to find a better way, but I know from bitter personal experience that when Anita and I decided to turn The Body Shop into a public company, we lost control to conservative institutions that cared little for its future. 

We developed ethical innovations such as community trade, which involved sharing the profits from some products with the communities that produced them and running many challenging campaigns.

38 Degrees. Anita would have been happy that a new spirit of activism would have taken root and her passions supported beyond her life.