Body Shop’s Background

Background of the Body Shop The famous cosmetic shop, Body Shop was founded on 26th March 1976 in Brighton by Anita Roddick with just the simple reason of supporting her husband’s dream to visit more countries on the time. At the beginning, the Body Shop was just a small shop painted with green. Its products were just placed in little recycled bottles while its labels were just handwritten. All of these were to lessen the production cost. As a result, new shops open at the rate of two per month by 1982.
The natural, environmentally-minded and intimates cosmetic shop inspired Anita Roddick to open the shop. Therefore, all products of Body Shop such as accessories, body and bath, fragrance and so on are made from natural ingredients targeting at different type of people including children, ladies as well as gentlemen. The purpose of Anita Roddick to open the Body Shop was not for the money, but about the responsibility. She claimed that the shop opened should be about the public good, but not the private good.
In 1984, the Body Shop was listed as a public company. At the same time, Anita Roddick started her efforts to encourage and contribute to social and environment problems such as campaign of issues against animal testing in cosmetic and recycling. On the other hand, the Body Shop Trade Not Aid program started in 1987. It was aimed to help sustaining third countries’ people livelihood. Besides, the Body Shop had also organized many charitable activities such as aiding communities close to home and various donations.

In 2006, the Body Shop was purchased by Loreal which is not against animal testing. This move had raised a huge disagreement around the supporter of the Body Shop. However, the company clarified that it is operated independently within the Loreal Group. As a result, with the faiths in protecting the environment and caring for people, the Body Shop had been running successfully and expanded amazingly with a high growth rate from a local shop to the well-known international toiletries retailers group with 2400 stores in 61 countries today.