Goodbye Anita

You were proof that it could be done, long before green became a buzzword.

From BBC:

Founder of ethical cosmetics firm Body Shop, Dame Anita Roddick, has died at the age of 64.

Her family said in a statement she suffered “a major brain haemorrhage” at 1830 BST at St Richard’s Hospital in Chichester, West Sussex.

[…] “She was so ahead of her time when it came to issues of how business could be done…When you look at it today, and how every company claims to be green, she was living this decades ago.”

[…] “Anita carried out campaigns on so many issues and often issues that were not popular by the mass of public and took some strength of character to become involved in,” she said.

[…] “We have lost a true champion of the oppressed and persecuted.

From Time:

Long before going green was an international pastime, when the only corporate responsibility was to the bottom line, a small store opened in Brighton, England, selling homemade moisturizers and hair-care products packaged in plastic urine-sample jars. The cosmetics were all-natural, the containers were reusable and the ethos — creating products that were as good for the earth as they were for your skin — was still considered radical, the kind of thing only hippies cared about. But when Anita Roddick opened The Body Shop in 1976, she wasn’t thinking about changing the world, just supporting her family while her husband followed his lifelong dream of trekking across the Americas on horseback. It was almost by accident that she started a revolution.

“The real triumph isn’t the fantastic price that L’Oreal paid for Body Shop,” says Rory Stear, head of the Freeplay Energy, a company that develops environmentally responsible electronic products and has Gordon Roddick as one of its directors. “It’s that L’Oreal has now adopted into its core operating model plans to move the biggest cosmetics group in the world towards the ethical standards that Anita had championed.” The cosmetics giant has already said it plans to phase out its animal testing. “The triumph is that The Body Shop, which was a relatively small player in global business terms, now, after 30 years in existence, has the big players turning to it and saying, ‘You were right all along. We want to do that, too.’ Anita was clearly a visionary, way ahead of her time.”

And on Wikipedia.

/salute

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