The Body Shop: a Global Industry Analysis

Body Shop International, which is traded in the London Stock Exchange as BOS and more commonly known as The Body Shop, is founded by Anita Perella Roddick. During the 1970s, when Anita and her now-husband Gordon Roddick were visiting San Francisco, they came across this particular store on Berkeley, which was selling different skin care products. This store, which was called "The Body Shop" and was founded by two locals, was also publicly promoting their fight against certain environmental concerns, even offering price cuts to customers that will bring their own bottles instead of purchasing new ones. The original store where Anita and Gordon Roddick got their idea is still continuing business in the Bay Area, but under a different name, "Body Time," after the entrepreneurs sold the rights to the name "The Body Shop" in the early 1980s to the Roddicks. They opened their very first Body Shop in the mid-1970s in the United Kingdom, patterned after the San Francisco store. The Roddicks' offered homemade products made using natural and exotic ingredients, and without testing these products on animals. Their products' packaging was detailed with the ingredients used and together with their properties. The Body Shop's center of operations is located in the United Kingdom as well. Due to their non-traditional products, they were more high-priced as compared to others, but still more inexpensive as compared to the exclusive names. Their marketing strategies were out of the ordinary, very much unlike traditional approaches, making use of innovative brochures and product catalogues. Anita Roddick was also highly accessible to the public and to the press, making her quest against social and environmental crises the center of The Body Shop's marketing campaigns. Because of Roddick's unusual and revolutionary ideas and strategies, The Body Shop acquired loyal patrons and by the end of the 1970s, she had several outlets throughout the United Kingdom and had to

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