Body And Soul

When The Body Shop International opened in 1976, on $8,000 in borrowed money, the phenomenal success of the business today would have appeared a pipe dream. Provocative, funny, and outrageous--Roddick tells her story, and expresses her unconventional views on hype, greed, caring and communion.

YA-- The fascinating story of an entrepreneur who, with little more than an idea and lots of determination, built a financial empire of over 600 cosmetic stores in 38 countries. Roddick, owner and chairman of the board for The Body Shop, has a strong business sense combined with a solid commitment to social justice. Besides selling natural cosmetics made from plants collected from all over the world, the stores and their staffs are dedicated to environmental and social activism. Roddick's company has worked to protect the rain forests of South America, helped orphans in Romania, and employed poverty-stricken youth in India. This story will appeal to YAs because of its unconventional view of business; they will appreciate the energy and philosophy this good-humored and perceptive woman. The illustrations are almost surrealistic and the photos and drawings are artistically placed throughout. --Deanna Kuhn, Thomas Jefferson Sci-Tech, Fairfax County, VA
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

In case the title fails to warn you, this is a somewhat unfocused inspirational corporate history by the entrepreneurial cult heroine who founded the wildly remunerative ``environmentally conscious'' cosmetics company called The Body Shop. What the book doesn't tell you: anything about the financial or marketing nuts and bolts of how Roddick turned one little provincial English store into a worldwide chain and manufacturer of ``natural'' remedies worth hundreds of millions of dollars. Still, the story has interest--as the chronicle of a hippie woman from Littlehampton, England, tossed willy-nilly into the last decade's economic boom and making the most of it, and as a manifesto for environmentally pure and socially responsible business practices. In respect to the latter, Roddick advocates a ban on animal testing; increased corporate campaigns for saving the whales, preserving the rain forests, and disarming the world; a soft retail sell; recyclable products; and placing factories in undeveloped regions, such as Easterhouse, Scotland--where, Roddick writes, ``we employed the unemployable,'' who ``fell in like lambs.'' (Unions are necessary only when the managers are ``bastards.'') She attributes The Body Shop's success to ``passion'': ``I have never been able to separate Body Shop values from my own personal values,'' she boasts, and delineates them fully. How did Roddick force all 600-odd Body Shop operators to adopt her green-and-white color scheme while maintaining a corporate ``democracy''? What is the exact financial structure of this profitable ``social experiment''? We don't find out here, but we may be inspired to expand our own little business in homage. -- Copyright ©1991, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

In 1976, Roddick needed to support her two children while her husband rode a horse from Buenos Aires to New York. So in Brighton, England, she opened a small shop that sold cosmetics made only from natural ingredients. Despite protests from the neighboring funeral parlor, she called it The Body Shop. Today, Roddick heads a public company with a chain of more than 600 shops and a successful international franchising system. As she writes in her introduction, this book is not a conventional autobiography or business book; rather, it's the story of her personal vision of what business should be. Roddick intersperses autobiographical details with criticisms of the cosmetics industry. Espousing principles of social and environmental responsibility, she describes The Body Shop's Trade Not Aid program in the Third World and its campaign to save the Amazon rainforest. At times, Roddick's lecturing becomes tedious, and some of her ideas, while well-intended (giving the Amazon Indians video cameras to record their culture), are questionable. Still, her passion amd her infectious enthusiasm make her book a cut above the usual gray "How I Succeeded" tomes. Recommended for popular business collections.
- Wilda Williams, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.