Anita Roddick – A PR Natural

To its critics, The Body Shop was always a business built on a fad, a company that was a massive PR success but not much more than that.

Another way of looking at it is that founder Anita Roddick was so brilliant at public relations that she created a company valued at £652 million when she sold it to L’Oréal in 2006.

For a while the jokes abouts its whacky products – banana skin body wash and the like –  stopped. Caring about the environment is no longer seen as a fad.

Administrators have just been appointed for the UK arm, three months after it was sold to private equity at a cut price £207m.

But it’s not like you can say L’Oréal got tricked here. A few years ago it was valued at nearer a €1 billion when the French group sold it Brazilian outfit Natura, who soon admitted it lacked the necessary “retail expertise” to run the business.

When Dame Roddick first sold the firm, some saw it as the greatest sell out of all time.

The supposedly green campaigner and her husband Gordon got £130 million for their stake.

As I wrote at the time, it was quite clear she had not the first idea how to spend this money and saw the sale as pragmatic, “an approximate solution” to what to do with the business.

To interview, Roddick was a treat.

Like football reporters used to say about Brian Clough, there wasn’t a deal more to be done than take down her words and start most sentences with: “Anita Roddick today said….”

One of the reasons journalists liked her was that the PR industry pissed her off and she was very happy to say so. She didn’t mind being rude to journalists either, which most of us find very attractive.

Roddick thought the world of business laughably macho – a bunch of blokes with Blackberry’s strutting around, not achieving very much.

Things are better now, though I dare say she’d find room for improvement.

If the Body Shop does entirely fail, no one can remotely say this is down to her. She died in 2007.

It is also hard to see how The Body Shop can be used as a case study in how to build a business or do PR.

Since everything about it was authentically her.

I wonder how many PR executives advise clients to just be themselves, before later realising that them being themselves is almost the entire problem.

Roddick would laugh at that.

It’s a shame that the very best person to bring The Body Shop back to life is no longer available.