As soon as upon a time The Physique Store was a Excessive Avenue sensation, one of many very first companies to reap the inexperienced area of moral consumerism.
It offered cosmetics and skincare merchandise which had been cruelty-free and promoted honest commerce and was run by pioneers who blended their unique fragrance oils with social values.
The packaging was easy, the plastic bottles had been recyclable, the luggage had been biodegradable. All this may occasionally appear unremarkable at this time, however again in 1976, when Dame Anita Roddick opened her first Physique Store retailer in Brighton, it was really a revelation.
Inside a decade or so, The Physique Store was a smash hit; its White Musk was the scent of a era, whereas the Japanese Cleaning Grains and fruit-shaped soaps grew to become iconic merchandise.
Physique Store founder Anita Roddick outdoors considered one of her shops in 1984. Her first store launched in Brighton in 1976 and inside a decade or so the model was a smash hit
JAN MOIR: Even now, it’s laborious to separate The Physique Store from its charismatic founder. There was a time when Anita Roddick was all-powerful; by no means off a soapbox or the tv
Even Princess Diana purchased the model’s Peppermint Foot Lotion whereas the extremely fragranced Dewberry vary — so fashionable within the Nineties that many faculties threatened to ban it — was nearly a ceremony of passage for teenage women.
Now the once-beloved Physique Store is on the ropes. Yesterday, it was plunged into administration, leading to an unsure future for its 200 UK retailers and placing 1000’s of workers in danger.
The image can also be bleak world wide, the place The Physique Store operates greater than 900 shops in 20 international locations, with an additional 1,600 franchised shops in a further 69 international locations, giving a complete of round 22,000 jobs which could quickly bubble down the plughole.
Maybe the miracle is that it has lasted this lengthy. Right here within the UK, The Physique Store isn’t the one Excessive Avenue chain to hit laborious occasions, however it will take greater than a Hemp Physique Mitt to wash away its issues.
For a begin, The Physique Store’s core prospects at the moment are purchasing at magnificence counters elsewhere; now not impressed by vitamin E lotions and ginger shampoo, they’re shopping for tanning drops, acrylic nail merchandise and £30 retinol serums from manufacturers reminiscent of E.L.F and Glossier.
Within the age of TikTok close-ups and selfie sticks, can there nonetheless be a future for a gentler model providing shea physique butter from Ghana and a paraben-free avocado lip masks? The reply appears to be no.
The information comes solely three months after new proprietor Aurelius took management of The Physique Store following a protracted interval of decline. The German personal fairness agency, which specialises within the buy of troubled companies, purchased the corporate for £207million from Brazilian cosmetics big Natura & Co in November.
Following ‘dismal’ buying and selling over Christmas, Aurelius confirmed it had appointed accounting agency FRP Advisory as directors — maybe heralding the dismantling and inglorious finish of yet one more nice British model.
One of many key causes cited for The Physique Store’s low gross sales figures is that they function in a saturated market with too many different firms — together with Lush and Rituals — copying their unique thought of environment-friendly private care merchandise.
Ironic, actually, as copying appears to be precisely what Anita Roddick herself did all these years in the past.
It has handed into Physique Store folklore that enterprising Anita nicked the concept — and the identify — from a small enterprise in Berkeley, California, owned by two sisters-in-law, Peggy Quick and Jane Saunders.
She was no Estee Lauder, but lots of her critics will nonetheless argue that the infinite proselytising of the Physique Store resulted in little of the worldwide change they boasted about
Of their Physique Store, the American ladies offered their merchandise in biodegradable bottles that could possibly be refilled. Anita went on a ‘shopping for binge’ of their retailer and returned to Britain with a number of merchandise — and a marketing strategy. (In 1987, The Physique Store paid Peggy and Jane £2.7million to vary the identify of their firm to Physique Time.)
Even now, it’s laborious to separate The Physique Store from its charismatic founder. There was a time when Anita Roddick was all-powerful; by no means off a soapbox or the tv, a feminist businesswoman spoken of in the identical buccaneering breath as Richard Branson or Freddie Laker.
It was her perception that enterprise could possibly be a drive for good, and he or she would zig-zag the globe, shopping for merchandise reminiscent of Brazil nuts and hemp from indigenous peoples to make her pure concoctions; saving the world in addition to saving your complexion, and all of the whereas campaigning in earnest for worthy causes.
Her core activism concerned rescuing the rainforest and fostering commerce hyperlinks with the growing world. She supported Greenpeace, Associates of the Earth, the Ogoni individuals from Nigeria, the Kayapo tribe of Brazil and Boys City in Kerala, India.
To purchase a banana shampoo bar, you more and more needed to negotiate a picket line of slogans, banners and Roddick’s worthy obsessions in each Physique Store outlet.
There have been at all times accusations, which had been by no means fairly thrown off, that the corporate was responsible of utilizing its social conscience as a advertising train.
‘I’ve an agenda of shock on some points, and I take advantage of the retailers for that,’ Roddick as soon as stated.
Once I met her in 1997, it was like coming nose to nose with Edina from Completely Fabulous.
She had simply returned from ‘my most profound journey ever’, which had concerned travelling for 3 months by way of the southern states of the U.S., residing with households whose solely supply of earnings got here from promoting crack cocaine, cooked in their very own kitchens.
Anita slept in a few of these crack shacks, in a bid to maintain herself actual. ‘Jan, my nice worry is wealth,’ she informed me. ‘Wealth corrodes; it separates you from the human situation.
‘And my different nice worry is that I’ll find yourself like Estee Lauder. So give me any excuse to cease that, to jerk me again into a brand new consciousness.
‘I’ve obtained all these freaking retailers and I feel: “How can we assist? What can we purchase from these individuals?”’ Possibly some low-cost crack, I joked. However wasn’t there one thing distasteful about wanting on the lives of poor individuals in a bid to validate your personal?
She agreed, however added: ‘I didn’t simply take a look at them; I learnt from the expertise. To know the poor, you need to perceive that they know every thing about poverty.’
But regardless of such notion, controversy was by no means distant. In 1994, it grew to become recognized that the caring, sharing Physique Store had made zero charitable donations throughout its first 11 years in enterprise — after which contributions elevated considerably.
There was a rocky patch within the early Nineties when damaging doubts — vigorously denied — had been raised about how inexperienced and moral some Physique Store merchandise actually had been. A tense relationship with their Metropolis backers (‘these pin-striped dinosaurs’, in keeping with Anita) endured lengthy after the corporate’s 1984 flotation.
Maybe most telling had been the skirmishes with Physique Store franchisees, who felt they weren’t getting a good deal — that the corporate was extra targeted on the plight of the Ogoni and Wayapo individuals than on them.
All the things modified in 2006 when Anita and husband Gordon offered the model to French magnificence big L’Oreal for £652million, which appeared to go in opposition to the grain of their hippy values.
But two years earlier, Anita had found she had hepatitis C, which she believed she had contracted in 1971, following a blood transfusion after the beginning of her daughter.
Her household now imagine Anita was one of many first victims of the blood contamination scandal. She died aged 64 of a mind haemorrhage in 2007, leaving her £51million property to charity, as she’d at all times promised to do.
So she was no Estee Lauder, but lots of her critics will nonetheless argue that the infinite proselytising of the Physique Store resulted in little of the worldwide change they boasted about. Actually, after my encounter with the formidable bubble-bath mogul I couldn’t assist however really feel it was all about Anita reasonably than Anita’s pet causes.
‘If I take away the work from my life, I don’t suppose I’m actual,’ she stated.
The Physique Store has gone by way of many adjustments since then, however the one factor it can not change is public style. Everybody goes to overlook it, however nobody was shopping for it, in additional methods than one.
It’s unhappy and Anita could be appalled, however possibly Dewberry has lastly had its day.