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Gordon Roddick seems the perfect foil for Anita. With his Scottish burr and occasional stutter, he is steady where she is erratic and quiet where she is brash. London analysts believe he is the financial wizard behind Anita's success. But he is best known in Body Shop lore for a voyage he took a few years into the marriage. The young couple had just sold a struggling restaurant when Gordon announced that he wanted to fulfill a lifelong dream: to ride a horse from Buenos Aires to New York City, an adventure he figured would take about two years. Anita, already a mother of two and thinking about opening a little cosmetics shop in nearby Brighton, gave him her blessing. "I have always admired people who follow their beliefs and passions," she later wrote. "It was impossible to be resentful."
It turned out to be a costly trip. A few months after she launched the first Body Shop, Anita decided to open a second store in Chichester. She asked her bank for an $8,000 loan but got turned down. Then a friend introduced her to a local gas-station owner named Ian McGlinn, who was prepared to invest the full amount in return for a half share in the business. Anita wrote Gordon for advice, but by the time his reply reached England, urging her not to sign over half the business, the deal had been struck. McGlinn's $8,000 investment has since grown to more than $145 million.
That deal aside, the Body Shop's explosive growth became a classic business- success story -- a case history studied by students at the Harvard Business School. The original idea was disarmingly simple: package cosmetics made from natural ingredients in small containers (in the early days Roddick used the cheapest ones around, plastic urine-sample jars). But from the start she showed an uncanny flair for marketing. She had an eye for the right location -- well-traveled streets catering to mildly bohemian crowds. She hung sweet- smelling potpourri in her shops to attract trade and laid trails of perfume on the sidewalks leading to her door. And she moved quickly into franchising -- carefully vetting would-be franchisees with such offbeat questions as "What is your favorite flower?" and "How would you like to die?"
The turning point came in 1984, when Gordon decided it was time for the Body Shop to go public. In the first day of trading, shares rose from $1.30 to $2.30, pushing the company's value to more than $11 million and the Roddicks' net worth to $2 million. (By 1992 it had reached nearly $350 million.) "I couldn't believe it," says Roddick. "The accolades were so bizarre. Because what they're patting you on the back for is how much money you are worth. I turned to Gordon and said, 'Is that it? Is that the only bloody measurement?' It was then that we decided that we wouldn't sell out, that we would put up obstacles to thinking like a large corporation."
Thus began a long-running campaign to turn the Body Shop into an exemplar of what Roddick calls the new business consciousness. The Roddicks launched projects to save the whales, to end the testing of cosmetics on animals, to help the homeless help themselves. As part of their new Trade Not Aid project, they search the world for indigenous people willing to squeeze oil from Brazil nuts, make paper from water hyacinths, weave back scrubbers out of cactus fiber -- anything that could provide the natives with income and the Body Shop with sales.