Anita Roddick

She started The Body Shop with £4,000 and sold it to L’Oréal for £652M.

In 1976, Anita Roddick was a mother of two living in Brighton, England.

Her husband, Gordon, had taken off to fulfill a dream: ride horseback from Buenos Aires to New York.

So she opened a shop to support her family.

She had £4,000.

She rented a derelict space between two funeral homes.

And she called it “The Body Shop.”

She had 15 products, all based on what she’d seen while traveling through Tahiti, Madagascar, South Africa, and the South Pacific.

She’d seen tribal rituals using cocoa butter.

She’d washed her hair with mud.

She’d watched people care for their bodies without chemicals, branding, or plastic packaging.

So she built a brand around those traditions.

She didn’t run a single ad.

Instead, she handed out in-store pamphlets explaining her values.

Six months after opening, she had two stores.

When Gordon came back, they sold a 50% stake to a local garage owner to fund growth.

By 1991, The Body Shop had 700 branches.

By 2004, there were 1,980 stores serving over 77M customers.

But Roddick never saw it as just a beauty brand.

She saw it as a platform for activism.

In 1985, she gave her first corporate donation to Greenpeace.

In 1986, she teamed up with them to launch the Save the Whale campaign.

In 1990, she created “Children on the Edge,” to support kids in orphanages across Romania, then expanded to help children affected by war, AIDS, and displacement in Africa and Asia.

But success came with backlash.

By the ‘90s, she was the 4th richest woman in Britain.

She was accused of hypocrisy.

Accused of greenwashing.

Critics claimed she’d borrowed the concept from an original “Body Shop” store in California.

Which she later admitted she had, buying the U.S. rights for $3.5M and requiring the founders to sign an NDA.

Journalists dug into her claims about charitable donations.

But Roddick didn’t slow down.

She joined the anti-globalization protests at the WTO summit in Seattle.

She threw her weight behind Amnesty, Greenpeace, the Big Issue, and the Angola Three.

She stood by campaigns to expose Shell’s complicity in human rights abuses in Nigeria.

In 2006, she shocked the world, again.

She sold The Body Shop to L’Oréal for £652M.

A company known for animal testing. A company partially owned by Nestlé. One of the very types of corporations she had spent 30 years criticizing.

People said she’d sold out.

She said she was a Trojan Horse.

She believed she could influence L’Oréal from the inside.

She negotiated a “ringfence” to protect the Body Shop’s mission and independence.

The deal made her £118M personally.

And she used it to give more away.

But Anita unfortunately died of a brain hemorrhage at age 64.

When her will was published, it showed she’d left her entire £51M estate to charity.

She spent her final months raising awareness and campaigning with The Hepatitis C Trust.