Anita Roddick, Body Shop founder
Anita Roddick, 64, founder of the Body Shop cosmetics chain, died Monday after a brain hemorrhage, her family said.
LONDON - Anita Roddick, 64, founder of the Body Shop cosmetics chain, died Monday after a brain hemorrhage, her family said.
Ms. Roddick, who died at a hospital in Chichester, England, revealed in February that she contracted hepatitis C through a blood transfusion while giving birth to a daughter in 1971.
Ms. Roddick was lauded for trailblazing business practices that sought to be environmentally friendly. Queen Elizabeth II made her a dame, the female equivalent of a knight, in 2003.
"Businesses have the power to do good," she wrote on the Web site of the company, which was bought last year by the French company L'Oreal Group. She and her husband stepped down as cochairs of the company in 2002.
She opened her first Body Shop outlet in 1976, before fair-trade and eco-friendly businesses had widely taken hold.
She said she was inspired in part by women's beauty rituals that she discovered while traveling in developing countries and by lessons from closer to home that her mother passed on.
"Why waste a container when you can refill it?" Ms. Roddick wrote. ". . . We behaved as she did in the Second World War, we reused everything, we refilled everything and we recycled all we could."
The Body Shop opposed product testing on animals and tried to encourage development by purchasing materials from small communities in the Third World. It also invested in a wind farm in Wales and set up its own human-rights award.
The company has grown into a global phenomenon with nearly 2,000 stores in 50 countries and remains independently run.
Ms. Roddick rejected criticism that Body Shop was compromising its values by becoming part of L'Oreal, which had not abandoned animal testing. She said it was a chance for Body Shop to teach its new parent company.