Body Shop Roddick

<div id="mw-content-text" lang="en" dir="ltr" class="mw-content-ltr" style="direction: ltr;">=http://www.democracynow.org/2007/10/22/body_shop_founder_environmental_campaigner_anitaBesieged Body Shop comes out fightingCYRIL DIXONSunday, 28 August 1994THE BODY SHOP issued a 32-page dossier attacking an American journalist yesterday, in anattempt to pre-empt criticism of its ethical practices in an article due out this week.The embattled green cosmetics group circulated the file in response to news stories ahead ofthe most damaging piece, to be published in the Minneapolis-based Business Ethics magazineon Thursday.Although The Body Shop is understood not to have seen the article, it gave a detaileddefence of allegations that have surfaced during earlier investigations by its author, JonEntine, who is a former producer with ABC, the US television network.
Mr Entine was accused by the company of using questionable methods, and making'misleading statements which are seriously defamatory of The Body Shop'. It added that he'has been engaged in a single- minded campaign of vilification against The Body Shop'.Mr Entine is alleged to have described Anita Roddick, the company's founder, as a'schizophrenic and a sociopath'.
He is said to have denounced the company in approaches to investors, franchisees andpotential supporters. Yesterday's statement also accused him of pestering Anita Roddick athome, a claim Mr Entine denies.
Among allegations to surface in the past 10 days are claims that the company's 'Trade notAid' policy of buying goods from indigenous peoples was not as vigorously pursued as TheBody Shop had claimed, that Ms Roddick 'stole' the company's concept from a tiny Americanoutfit, and that it had been responsible for pollution in New Jersey.
The company's share prices fell following the news that the US ethical investment fundFranklin Research and Development had sold 50,000 Body Shop shares and recommended itsclients do likewise because of concerns over its green and ethical stances.
Yesterday, it was reported that the RSPCA had decided to remove the Body Shop name froma pamphlet of cruelty-free suppliers. There were concerns that its policy of not usingingredients tested on animals covered only the most recently developed products. JohnGrounds, Body Shop head of public affairs, refused to comment on the RSPCA story.Meanwhile, Gordon Roddick, chairman and husband of Anita, said: 'The Body Shop can nolonger sit, wait and allow pre-publicity hype to damage its reputation.' Mr Roddick said of MrEntine: 'We have been the object of his obsessive campaign for over a year.'Last night, Mr Entine, speaking from his home in California, said he stood by his investigationswhich were backed up by documents and tape recordings. He accused The Body Shop ofcarrying out personal attacks on him in order to deflect criticism. He said: 'When our storycomes out the facts will speak for themselves.'
The Body Shop dossier, entitled Memorandum of Response to the Allegations of Jon Entine,includes a point-by- point rebuttal of the main allegations, and extensive details of projectsthat it has financed.
It says the company became aware of the allegations through research Entine did inpreparation for a report for ABC's Prime Time Live programme, and an article for the USmagazine Vanity Fair. Neither piece of work was used.
Among the counter-claims listed by the Body Shop are:Trade not Aid - The company says figures relating to the percentage of goods it gets fromdeveloping countries are inaccurate. 'More importantly, his percentages are beside the point,'it adds, and goes on to detail projects in which it has invested heavily.
Plagiarism - It says it has previously disproved suggestions that Ms Roddick in effect stolethe name from a company in California. The owners, Peggy Short and Jane Saunders, havetestified that they never made such allegations.
Natural products - It says it cannot guarantee 100 per cent of its ingredients are 'natural',but that it makes no attempt to conceal that some are synthetic.
Animal testing - It rejects claims that it has used lack of animal testing as a marketing ployand that it has resisted attempts to seek a complete ban on animal testing for cosmetics andpressured the British Union for the Abolition of Vivisection to alter its campaigns to suit itsmarketing interests. It says its reputation on testing was vindicated when it won damagesfrom Channel 4 and an independent production company in a libel action.
Environmental practices - It says discharges from its New Jersey plant were limited to two'minor' spillages of shampoo, both during 1992. The company reported both.
Marjorie Kelly, publisher of Business Ethics, said publication would go ahead despite threatsof libel action. As well as the first article on ethics, a second would focus on Anita Roddick'spersonality.(Photograph omitted)http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/besieged-body-shop-comes-out-fighting-1379187.html?printService=printRoddick libel claim lands a body blow:Channel 4 sought to depict a 'cynicalmask'. Anita and Gordon Roddick said itsprogramme was a smear.MARIANNE MACDONALDSaturday, 31 July 1993
IT MAY have been the holier-than- thou image of the Body Shop that prompted the makersof Dispatches to attack an empire which had long prided itself on helping the homeless, theenvironment, the community and the Third World. It may have been the additional fact of itshealthy profits. Either way, the onslaught proved disastrous.
'Tonight's Dispatch examines the Body Shop phenomenon, with its founders Anita and GordonRoddick. Does their claim to be different really stand up to a full body search?' the 45-minuteprogramme on Channel 4 demanded in May last year. The makers saw it as puncturing acynical mask to reveal greed and hypocrisy beneath. The Body Shop saw it as a degradingand inaccurate smear and, for the first time in its 17 years, sued for libel.
For Anita Roddick, the case was crucial. She and her husband had built their pounds 365mempire on 'conviction merchandising'. Vociferous campaigns helped pull in customers bypersuading them they were not just being frivolous when they bought dewberry body lotion,but somehow helping the planet.The windows of its 950 stores world-wide displayed slogans for human rights andinternational issues. From the start its cosmetics - such as banana hair putty, orchid oilcleansing milk and Viennese facial chalk - were sold in unadorned, refillable bottles whichconserved resources and cut waste. Staff were encouraged to participate in communityprojects. Annual reports announced the company had sent more than 60 volunteers toRomania and recycled vast quantities of consumer waste.
Anita and Gordon Roddick said they fought Channel 4 because the programme had cynicallychallenged their sincere belief that business could be altruistic. Expecting a balanced picture,the Body Shop gave Fulcrum Productions, the film makers, full co-operation. Mr Roddick toldthe High Court: 'It gave the impression we were dishonest, deceitful in everything we did.'The programme was repeated three days later. As a result of hostile reaction, profits fell by4 per cent, the jury was told.The libels in the programme centred around claims that the Body Shop pledge not to use
ingredients until five years after they had been animal-tested was largely worthless, partlybecause many new ingredients took that long to gain approval for use. The makers alsoalleged they were misleading customers by labelling products 'Not tested on animals' and'Against animal testing'.
The programme claimed other companies, such as Boots and Sainsbury, adopted morestringent criteria preferred by the RSPCA under which they refused to use ingredients whichhad been animal-tested after a fixed date. These chains' products, it said, were substantiallycheaper than the Body Shop's.It also falsely claimed the company had launched a petition opposing an EC directive onproduct-testing on animals in a bid to prop up its share price even though the directive hadalready been withdrawn. Further, that the Body Shop had broken promises made when itopened a soap factory in Easterhouse, Glasgow, that a quarter of the profits would go to thelocal community.The Body Shop rebutted the allegations. Charles Gray QC argued few customers beyond the'odd 14- or 15- year-old girl' could be misled by explanations of its animal testing policies inits leaflets; that the 'five-year rule' was supported by the British Union for the Abolition ofVivisection, and strictly applied; that even the House of Lords had been unaware of theabandonment of the EC directive. As for the Easterhouse claims, the company had donatedpounds 50,000 to the area despite the factory making losses of around pounds 130,000 in1990 and 1991.
Summing up, Mr Justice Jowitt asked the jury to consider 'whether a businessman mayundertake good works out of sheer altruism while at the same time recognising - and thismay be part of his motive - that good works are good for business'.Cynical commercialism or a true ideology? Or could the two go hand in hand? The jurythought so and, for Channel 4 and Fulcrum Productions, their body search had proved morelike a body blow.(Photograph omitted<a href="http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/roddick-libel-claim-lands-a-body-blow-channel-4-sought-to-depict-a-cynical-mask-anita-and-gordon-roddick-said-its-programme-was-a-smear-marianne-macdonald-reports-1488241.html?printService=print">http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/roddick-libel-claim-lands-a-body-blow-channel-4-sought-to-depict-a-cynical-mask-anita-and-gordon-roddick-said-its-programme-was-a-smear-marianne-macdonald-reports-1488241.html?printService=print</a>Roddicklibel claim lands a bodyblow: Channel 4 sought to depict a 'cynical mask'. Anita and Gordon Roddick said its programme was a smear. Marianne …http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/roddick-libel-claim-lands-a-body-blow-channel-4-sought-to-depict-a-cynical-mask-anita-and-gordon-roddick-said-its-prog… 2/2labore, c points to:ethical biz uk last update april 97? <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428183738/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/">https://web.archive.org/web/19970428183738/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/</a><hr style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" />During the summer of 1994 a controversy developed concerning the Body Shop. It grew from the publication of some articles which appeared in the New Consumer and Business Ethics magazines which were critical of the company. The Body Shop subsequently responded to these criticisms. This page contains links to a number of the key articles concerned, including one of the several documents the Body Shop issued in response. Given the leadership position the Body Shop has adopted on environmental and ethical matters, this debate raises many important and difficult issues for those who aim to build more sustainable and responsible business.<ul style="background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428210542/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/share/0newcon.htm" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">New Consumer</a> Briefing's on the Body Shop [bubble act https://web.archive.org/web/19970428220133/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/share/1south.htm<ul style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428210542/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/archive/bodyshop/bsoct93.htm">October 1993</a> - article on the Body Shop</li><li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428210542/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/archive/bodyshop/bsfeb94.htm">February 1994</a> - follow up</li><li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428210542/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/archive/bodyshop/bsjun94.htm">June 1994</a> - update</li><li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428210542/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/archive/bodyshop/bssep94.htm">September 1994</a> - article on the summer '94 controversy</li><li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428210542/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/archive/bodyshop/bsdec94.htm">December 1994</a> - update</li><li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428210542/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/archive/bodyshop/bsfeb95.htm">February 1995</a> - update</li></ul></li><li style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428210542/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/archive/bodyshop/utne.htm">'Greenwashing: Exploiting Idealism'</a>, by Jon Entine, a similar version of which published in the Utne Reader (January/February, 1995)</li><li style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428210542/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/archive/bodyshop/franklin.htm">'Body Shop Scrutinzied'</a>, by J.Bavaria, E.Becker and S.Billenness for <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428210542/http://envirolink.org/products.old/gmj/greenmoneyfal/frdc.html">Franklin Research's</a> Insight (September 15, 1994).</li></ul><ul style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428210542/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/archive/bodyshop/roddick.htm">The Body Shop Response</a> Letter from Gordon Roddick to Business Ethics (Septermber 22, 1994).</li><li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428210542/http://www.the-body-shop.com/">The Body Shop's Homepage</a></li><li><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428210542/http://www.think-act-change.com/">The Body Shop's Social and Environmental Audit </a>(January 1996)</li></ul><hr style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428210542/http://www.bath.ac.uk/Centres/Ethical/Papers">Back to Papers</a><div>f/u</div><h3 style="font-family: arial, helvetica; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">New Consumer Briefing - February 1994</h3><hr style="font-family: arial, helvetica; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><h3 style="font-family: arial, helvetica; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Body Shop Follow-up</h3>In our last issue we raised concerns about the emphasis being placed by The Body Shop on its Trade Not Aid programme. Since them much of the argument has been printed in the pages of New Statesman and Society including a strong attack on New Consumer's approach. Gordon Roddick brushes aside our request for firm facts and figures but goes on to repeat the previously stated benefits accruing from The Body Shop such as product premiums, time and energy, and sustainable and viable trading partnerships. We have to repeat that without verifiable evidence based on hard data these statements are worthy but meaningless.All this will undoubtedly encourage Body Shop to take positive action but, as yet, the chronic lack of information about the value and volume of third world sourced products involved in this initiative has not been remedied. The Body Shop continues to promote fair trade in a way that implies it is taking an exemplary and substantive role in showing how it can be done.An example of this was a speech given by Anita Roddick to the International Chamber of Commerce Biannual Meeting at Cancun, Mexico, reported in New Statesman and Society. In another example of good PR , '- advertising is you saying you're good, PR is getting someone else to say it'. (The Body Shop Annual Report 1993 p20), Anita is reported as applauding the initiative by Levi Strauss to withdraw from China in protest at its government's human rights record. 'The new corporate responsibility is as simple as saying no to dealing with torturers and despots.' she said. Yet for more than ten years The Body Shop has been purchasing baskets from China in huge quantities, and continued to do so as Anita Roddick spoke. In spite of The Body Shop buyers having been shown, and visited, numerous high-volume basket producing groups in India, Bangladesh and Africa, over several years, the Chinese baskets continue to win-out because they are cheaper. Clearly for The Body Shop the new corporate responsibility is not as simple as saying no.What is ironic about this example is that the Levi Strauss initiative has been the subject of detailed investigation by New Consumer. On an extended visit to corporate headquarters in San Francisco, we had full access to the company files showing how this decision came about and the systematic and well thought-out policies that lay behind it.Does this mean that The Body Shop should be removed from its high position on the list of responsible companies? Not necessarily. As we say in conclusion to the current feature on Procter and Gamble, trying and failing in some respects is better than not trying at all and The Body Shop is undoubtedly trying. But it needs to take much more seriously the way commercial demands can push even the well-intentioned down the slope of overstatement and misrepresentation.But on a more encouraging note we have heard that The Body Shop has recruited Jacqui MacDonald, the current managing director of an alternative trading group in Canada, to completely review up its ethical sourcing policies and programmes from April. This is particularly good news as Jacqui, is known as a no- nonsense, highly competent manager, committed to the principles of fair trading. We wish Jacqui every success in a very challenging job and congratulate The Body Shop on getting someone who can, given the freedom and resources, build confidence in the fair trade claims.<hr style="font-family: arial, helvetica; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428212855/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/archive/bodyshop/Default.htm">Back to Body Shop archive</a>
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428212855/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/main/archive.htm">Return to main archive</a>=<h3 style="font-family: arial, helvetica; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">New Consumer Briefing - June 1994</h3><hr style="font-family: arial, helvetica; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><h3 style="font-family: arial, helvetica; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Body Shop Update</h3>In April the Danish magazine, PRESS, published a lengthy and highly critical article about the Body Shop. Amongst the points that it made:Natural cosmetics specialists dismiss the Body Shop range because it relies on synthetic preservatives and colourings and non-renewable ingredients. In responding The Body Shop did not dispute this analysis but did not explain how its emphasis on the natural aspect of its products can be squared with its claim to honest marketing nor its objection to the EU Eco-label because it does not take account of the use of non-renewable resources.The top European cruelty-free listing, the Deutsche Tierschutzbund, does not include Body shop products.Wide-ranging secrecy clauses are built into franchise agreements prohibiting freedom of expression.Currently, Body Shop is seeking to prevent publication of an extended and in-depth feature by the American journalist Jon Entine in the magazine Vanity Fair. In response to letters to New Consumer from the Body Shop legal department we have said that we believe that a full public debate of the numerous allegations in this article must now be in the best interests of the movement for social responsibility in business.<hr style="font-family: arial, helvetica; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428212913/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/archive/bodyshop/Default.htm">Back to Body Shop archive</a>
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428212913/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/main/archive.htm">Return to main archive</a><h3 style="font-family: arial, helvetica; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">New Consumer Briefing - September 1994</h3><hr style="font-family: arial, helvetica; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><h3 style="font-family: arial, helvetica; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Massive media attention</h3>On August 19 the Financial Times broke a story headlined 'US ethical fund turns against Body Shop'. It referred to the advice given by Franklin Research of Boston that investors would be advised to sell Body shop shares because of a forthcoming critical article which would adversely affect their price. That article, Broken Image, published by Business Ethics magazine on 1 September, was preceded by more than 100 features in the British press and wide radio and TV coverage. Its contents had been so widely leaked and debated that the media regarded its eventual release as something of an anti-climax.Prior to this national exposure our own earlier coverage of The Body Shop, in issues 16,17 and 18 of New Consumer Briefing, had confined comment primarily to the Trade Not Aid issue though we had also touched on the lack of transparency, weakness in corporate governance and the generous interpretation of the company's 'naturally-based' description of its products. In earlier issues and in four books we had given The Body Shop well-above average ratings in most areas of corporate social responsibility. Anita Roddick had written the forward to our top-selling book on products from developing countries, The Global Consumer. Along with other social analysts on both sides of the Atlantic we accepted and added to the picture of social and environmental leadership which the company painted.<h3 style="font-family: arial, helvetica; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Views revised</h3>Although our view of these claims has undergone radical revision in the last year we have to make two opening points. The first is that parts of what The Body Shop achieved through its publicising of business social responsibility have taken hold and will not be undone, whatever the eventual fate of the company. Secondly, New Consumer makes no claim to be specialist in most of the areas under discussion and therefore we rely heavily on the considered judgement of others on technical matters.In tracing the main areas of controversy we have followed the outline of the recently published scrutiny by Franklin Research (FR). Other sources are also referred to but we take full responsibility for the conclusions we have reached.<h3 style="font-family: arial, helvetica; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Disclosure and debate</h3>After a modest opening dialogue on the Trade Not Aid issues we experienced an increasingly aggressive attitude from The Body Shop to criticism and an unwillingness to provide specific information. Instead of a rational dialogue about the inconsistency of The Body Shop highly praising Levi Strauss as role-model company for not dealing with China whilst itself being a major purchaser of Chinese products we were virulently and inexplicably attacked by Gordon Roddick as 'ivory tower purists'. The repeated failure to provide information and to indulge in personal abuse instead of debate, 'violates what we consider to be cornerstones of social responsibility: openness and accessibility at the highest levels of management.'(FR)<h3 style="font-family: arial, helvetica; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Franchise System</h3>The vast majority of the Body Shop's retail outlets are franchises to which it provides goods and services on a wholesale basis. Commentators have concluded that good relations and high standards are not invariably present. There have been major international disputes between the company and head franchisees, some of which continue at present through legal action. The US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is currently investigating The Body Shop in this area. Disputes in the franchise world are common and The Body Shop argues that it is making big changes in franchise practice and that the problem is overstated because there is a low turnover of franchisees. However, Franklin Research concludes, 'the existence of the FTC investigation and the lawsuits do force us to question The Body Shop's reputation as a responsible business partner.<h3 style="font-family: arial, helvetica; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Products</h3>It is not confidential information that the 'naturally-based' products sold by The Body Shop can contain non-renewable petro-chemicals, synthetic colours, dyes fragrances and preservatives. The product information book which is publicly accessible in each store provides this information and a scrutiny of its contents reveals that there are very few Body Shop lines that do not contain synthetics. For many years The Body Shop unashamedly promoted its products as natural and it is clear from the many public perception pieces run in the British press that this remains their image today. Alongside Franklin Research we have to state that we cannot determine whether the company deliberately misrepresented the nature of its product range. But we can also ask whether they, 'should be held responsible for the public perception of its products if that perception diverges from the truth?'We believe that The Body Shop is in considerable debt to the green movement for 15 years of largely uncritical commendation and endorsement. A company is accountable for the image it creates, particularly if it employs a large and well-funded public relations department to cultivate and foster that image. The natural world is better represented in the names of the products than in their ingredients.<h3 style="font-family: arial, helvetica; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Environment</h3>Although The Body Shop's first director of environmental affairs in the US has been quoted as saying 'When push came to shove every idea got dumped in favour of manufacturing or quick purchase decisions', we have experienced the strongest positive responses and the most thorough application of best-practice on environmental impact issues here in the UK. David Wheeler, UK Environmental Director, is establishing systems which meet with admiration from independent experts. Wheeler has also kept open the door to New Consumer in terms of dialogue and information which we take as not only an act of good faith but confidence and commitment to high standards. Although some of the programmes under this heading appear to have a significant public-relations spin, such as part-funding a wind farm to replace energy used by the company, they also demonstrate that it is possible to be imaginative and constructive in the framework of a programme making a genuine attempt to be comprehensive.<h3 style="font-family: arial, helvetica; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Trade Not Aid</h3>We have argued for some time that Some Trade-Not-Aid programmes had questionable impact on the recipients and their overall size did not justify the massive promotion mounted by the company. A Body Shop statement of 27 August 1994 eventually stated, 'Total Trade Not Aid purchases paid to the producers increased to �2m in our last financial year, from �6m in 1993.'In the 1992/93 year, the one under discussion when we first asked the Body Shop for such figures, we told them we believed their Trade Not Aid purchases to be a fraction of 1% of the sales value of the products. Our estimate was an informed one, based on our own extensive knowledge of the field, but clearly only Body Shop invoices could provide the detail. We made this statement in October 1993 and published it in New Consumer Briefing No. 16. We could not obtain confirmation from The Body Shop despite numerous attempts but instead received letters evading the questions and asking on what our calculations were based. In 1993 The Body Shop's own figure for retail sales world-wide was �3m. (Annual Report p10). Therefore, in 1993 the payments made to producers constituted 0.165% of customer purchases.We note the claim by The Body Shop that purchases in this area are rapidly increasing but must ask (yet again) for confirmation of these figures by original invoices and shipping documents. Even in 1994 the purchases, if accurate, only constitute 0.3% of sales. The Body Shop's argues that 'the only results which are truly meaningful are the numbers of people who have benefited'. The company has provided statistics, not about people helped in various projects but about the number of people involved in the projects where The Body Shop says it has made purchases. The real issue is, of course, the number of people who have been directly helped by the Trade Not Aid purchases. Franklin Research's Insight magazine picks up this point when talking about the Santa Ana Pueblo in New Mexico. 'We find it misleading when The Body Shop claims that the project "indirectly" affects 3 villages and 500 Native Americans. Kinsman (the project manager) told Insight that the project employs 9 full time equivalent Native American employees and that the profits (which are tiny) are reinvested in the project rather than being distributed to the community.'This sort of detail is rather tedious and of a nature that is unlikely to get a full airing in the press. It is however, the only way that the depth of PR claims and the extent of Trade Not Aid programmes can be judged. We share Franklin Research's conclusion on this issue. 'we found The Body Shop less than forthright when presenting its Trade Not Aid program in company materials. Though its flyers may be factually accurate they leave The impression that the Body Shop ethically sources all or most of its ingredients, rather than the tiny number that are part of Trade Not Aid.'But on a positive note we believe that the publicity of the last few weeks has massively strengthened the hand of those within The Body Shop pressing for more effective, broader and better financed 'fair trade' purchasing programmes.<h3 style="font-family: arial, helvetica; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Integrity</h3>An absolutely critical point that has arisen is about the integrity of the company; the moral centre. Once again this is a question of detail rather than generalities. We offer the following example.Anita Roddick says in her book, Body and Soul (1991), that in early 1971 she visited San Francisco, California, spending some of the time 'half-heartedly looking for business opportunities'(p59). In 1975, after three years running a small hotel and restaurant, in Littlehampton Anita decided to 'look around for a little shop.' She portrays an original thinking process then taking place in which she arrived at the idea of selling appropriately packaged, naturally based cosmetics (p68-69). 'I already knew of about twelve natural ingredients that I had seen working in various areas of the world' 'I also had a name for my embryonic business - The Body Shop. It was not original: I had seen it in the United States where dents were banged out of cars in garage 'body shops' everywhere. I must have stored it away in my subconscious memory and I certainly thought my use of the name was a lot more appropriate. I found out later there were already other stores in the USA which had made the same connection.' (p75) 'I found a small manufacturing chemists not far from Littlehampton...we drew up a list of twenty five possible products using those natural ingredients that were readily available.' Anita says she could not afford to buy enough bottles but, 'would get round the problem by offering to refill empty containers or customers own bottles.' (p76) 'On Saturday 27 March 1976, the first Body Shop opened its doors for business'.But earlier in California, at another company called The Body Shop.....'Since we opened our first shop on Berkeley's Telegraph Avenue (a suburb of San Francisco) in 1970 we have had so many requests for our products from all over the country that we now offer you the following mail order list. All biodegradable, our products are made to our specifications by a pharmaceutical chemist in his development laboratory...avoiding all expensive, gimmicky advertising and presenting all products in attractive but modest packages... you might bring your own or our empty bottle for a price-reduced refill.' (1971) (a copy in our possession)This catalogue was produced annually with minor changes for several years. We also have a copy of the third fourth and fifth versions, the latter dated March 1976. The similarity, in layout, grouping, design and content with what we know of The Body Shop's opening range is quite interesting - we have a UK price list of 1978/79. The earliest descriptive catalogue of The Body Shop (UK) that we have is probably slightly later. Examples are compared below.(These reproduced examples from the two catalogues showed numerous word for word similarities)The above two examples of virtually identical copy writing are taking from Body Shop (USA) literature of 1976 (the same piece of copy was used in each of their annual catalogues from 1973). The Body Shop (UK) literature is not dated but was obtained in October 1980 and is likely to be c.1979. The Body Shop (UK) has argued that there is bound to be overlap in product ranges but to extend this to product descriptions seems ingenuous. Body Shop (USA) literature dated 1971 and 1973 notes the following points about the company, its ethos and method of operation.By-passes the big cosmetics companies; bio-degradable with a natural emphasis; customers can mix fragrances and solutions; can bring their own bottles, buy in small quantities, reasonable prices; minimal packaging, hand-written labels, avoids expensive advertising; natural finished wood decor; encourage people to 'go behind the scenes' - learn the secrets of the cosmetics industry.Clearly, The Body Shop UK, as well as using the same name, has also managed to replicate some of the literature, range, ideas and ideals of The Body Shop USA. This is both legal and clearly shows some entrepreneurial flair. In 1987 The Body Shop UK bought sole rights from The Body Shop, USA, to their name in America for $3.5 million. But The Body Shop UK has never admitted that the similar name, ethos and range was anything more than pure coincidence. Indeed, in its statement of 27 August 1994 is specifically says, 'Any suggestion that the Company's catalogue is derived from the California company's catalogue is simply false.' Readers may draw their own conclusions.This point about the company's origins lies at the heart of corporate integrity. There may well be excellent reasons why there are similarities but the explanation that The Body Shop has given so far, that many natural products use the name of their main ingredient in the product name, hardly covers word-for-word duplication of extended product descriptions nor the many other common features.<h3 style="font-family: arial, helvetica; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Corporate Governance</h3>Every company needs to ensure that its decisions are balanced and reflect not only their own perspective but an appreciation of the commercial and social environment. This is why all quoted companies are advised to have a number of non-executive directors on their Board directors who are not employees of the company and who can provide that independent view.The Body Shop has never had non-executive directors. Again, we quote from Franklin. 'We are frankly not impressed by The Body Shop's inability thus far to name a single independent board member. The Body Shop currently does not comply with the British "Code of Best Practice" recommended by the Report of the Committee on the Financial Aspects of Corporate Governance. Consequently, the company's shareholders lack such independent checks and balances as an independent audit and remuneration committee.' We believe that independent directors also can offer another valuable service - a reality check.<h3 style="font-family: arial, helvetica; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Response to Criticism</h3>The Body Shop has issued nearly 100 pages of comment and 'rebuttal' over past weeks. We have assessed this material and adapted our position on some very minor points where appropriate and after wide consultation and verification. Much of the information offered by the Body Shop sought to undermine the credibility of the critics rather than the criticism itself. Many specific issues have yet to be addressed by the company. A theme that has appeared in many press features connected with The Body Shop debate is the way that the company has met unfavourable analysis in a highly aggressive manner. The Body Shop retains Hill & Knowlton, the giant public relations company whose clients have included the Chinese government (after Tiananmen Square) and former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier. The company was subject of a lead article in Business Ethics magazine in May 1993 entitled 'Lying for a Living'. The Body Shop's lawyers in the UK are those used by Robert Maxwell, Lovell White Durrant. Franklin Research sums up, 'we found the Body Shop's consistent use of character assassination and its habit of assuming motives to be offensive and virtually unheard of in our experience. The Body Shop's bumbling and bombastic tactics have set back any legitimate attempts by the company to change and currently seem to be triggering a backlash.' Franklin also refer directly to our own role. 'We are particularly concerned at the way in which the Body Shop has treated Richard Adams, Director of New Consumer, a British non-profit that publishes research on corporate responsibility issues. In our view, Adams has, since the Fall of last year, made legitimate requests to the Body Shop for information that backs up the company's claims. The Body Shop has refused to provide what we would consider to be readily obtainable and non proprietary information, such as the amount of goods bought through its trade not aid programs, stating: "[Adams] close relationship and support for, Entine's 'investigation' over the past year makes all his opinions highly suspect." We find this claim of "guilt by association" unwarranted considering the thoughtful and fair tone of Adams' writing for New Consumer and his extensive experience in the field of alternative trading relationships with developing countries.'<h3 style="font-family: arial, helvetica; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">What of the future?</h3>There are considerable points of encouragement to note in what The Body Shop has said about its own future, particularly if they are worked through in practice. They have said they are now committed to networking and linking with Alternative Trading Organizations and NGOs. We believe that the adoption of this policy in 1986, together with mechanisms for its operation, would have prevented a number of false- starts and conflicts that have arisen in past programmes. A number of specialist staff to develop the social/ethical programmes have also been recently recruited and a full social audit together with non- executive directors on the board are also promised, all things which New Consumer has pressed for in the past.There remain the discrepancies between our understanding of numerous issues and the facts as recorded by the Body Shop. The Body Shop has also yet to provide any explanation as to why major, long-running Trade Not Aid promotions were mounted in 1992/93 on the basis of a benefit to producers which constituted 0.165% of sales. This is not a numbers game or a question of debate over statistics but reveals the pressure that a company may come under continually to bring before the public social and ethical initiatives, at whatever stage of development, that promote its image and the sale of its products. Perhaps The Body Shop would be better served by dropping its 'no advertising' policy. This would reduce the pressure to be continually inventive which the public relations department must feel. But, fundamentally, there remains the question of just who is telling the truth? Oft-proclaimed excellence but under achieved practice is, in the long run, more damaging than a person or company of modest virtue.<hr style="font-family: arial, helvetica; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428212941/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/archive/bodyshop/Default.htm">Back to Body Shop archive</a>
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428212941/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/main/archive.htm">Return to main archive</a><h3>New Consumer Briefing - December 1994</h3><hr /><h3>Radical change or bolt-on ethics at the Body Shop?</h3>It is now more than a year since New Consumer published its first Body Shop analysis and the East Sussex HQ of the company has been buzzing as action is taken in response to the exposure of a series of weaknesses in the company's social, ethical and environmental credentials.The first two non-executive directors have been appointed to the board with previous track records in Pepsi Cola and American Express. A social audit has been formally announced, to report next year. A values and vision department has been established, apparently as an in- house ethical watchdog. The Trade Not Aid team has been greatly strengthened and it is reported that some basic product ingredients are under review to see if they can be ethically sourced. A large number of meetings have been held with alternative trading groups, ethical investment funds and NGOs and a massive PR campaign has resulted in many, largely favourable, articles in the press. Many prominent figures in the environmental movement continue to offer the Roddicks support on the basis that whatever The Body Shop may or may not have done it is still better than most of British business.So the message seems to be getting home - you really do have to walk your talk. What is far from clear is whether this grafting-in of ethics and accountability is going to work. There are two major problems. The Body Shop is a growth-orientated business and above all it need a period of retrenching to sort out its moral and social credentials. The way it has chosen to operate with a high added value, high profile, franchise dependent system means the commercial adrenaline is constantly being pumped. At the same time the company faces its biggest competitive threat to date as the US-owned Bath and Body Works shops begin to open in the UK.Secondly The Body Shop has taken some very heavy blows to its credibility which, in spite of its claims to the contrary, it may not be able to shrug off. Its heavy-handed behaviour in dealing with the allegations in the US seriously damaged its image amongst its socially concerned customer base. In the UK it has certainly not reconciled its most penetrating critics. Survival International, the respected international organization concerned with the rights of tribal people's concluded a recent report prepared for EIRIS, the Ethical Investment Research and Information Services, with these worlds. 'The Body Shop's practices should be viewed with the utmost suspicion by any truly independent observer. We no longer believe it is a company which operates to an acceptable ethical standard.'But perhaps the most worrying aspect of all this is The Body Shop's continuing denial that any of its 'new look' programmes are a response to criticism. According to the company all these things have been in the pipeline for some time and their co-incidence with blanket public exposure and criticism was purely fortuitous. Recognition of past mistakes and acknowledging responsibility for them is surely part of the process of setting things right.<hr /><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428212950/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/archive/bodyshop/Default.htm">Back to Body Shop archive</a>
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428212950/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/main/archive.htm">Return to main archive</a> <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428212950/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/main/archive.htm">Return to main archive</a><h3 style="font-family: arial, helvetica; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">New Consumer Briefing - February 1995</h3><hr style="font-family: arial, helvetica; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><h3 style="font-family: arial, helvetica; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">The Body Shop: more signs of change</h3>Somehow The Body Shop, whose share price has fallen by 35% from last year's peak, manages to keep itself in the news. In America a law suit was filed in late January by a former employee who alleges that she was sacked after writing a memo about sexual harassment. Dona Longstreet, who was the creative services manager at the company's Manhattan office says Anita Roddick was dismissive of her concerns and the company then used restructuring as an excuse to fire her. Two weeks earlier a Jerusalem court heard a case in which Fischer Pharmaceuticals, one of Israel's biggest skincare firms, sued Body Shop for 'passing off', that is for opening a shop using The Body Shop name which Fischer was already using. Fischer, who won a preliminary injunction forcing the Body Shop to close its store, argued that Body Shop, although originally having registered its name in Israel, did not open any shop because, it was claimed, it feared that it's Arab stores would then be boycotted. After the peace deal and the lifting of the boycott Body Shop tried to enter the Israeli market, opening a shop in Rishon le-Zion in November 1994. But by then its name registration had been revoked for failing to trade in the previous years.In mid-January BBC 2's Money Programme featured the current market difficulties the Body Shop is facing with the launch in the UK of its US rival, Bath and Body Works. Coverage was also given to some of the ethical issues that had arisen and part of our own perspective was reported in some detail. Ironically, Anita Roddick dismissed Bath and Body Works as plagiarising her idea. Readers of New Consumer Briefing will already know of the remarkable similarities between The Body Shop, California, opened in 1970, and Anita Roddick's 'original' Body Shop, opened in 1976.To some extent all these difficulties are part of the normal cut and thrust of competitive business. However, there is a considerable amount of positive news showing that the analysis and criticism of The Body Shop - which has always claimed the highest standards - is having results. After considerable criticism of its Kayapo programme The Body Shop is commissioning a detailed evaluation of its links with groups in the Amazon. The evaluation is due to be completed by 30 May and it is to be hoped that the findings are made public.Working papers have also been circulated to social interest groups outlining the first stages of the detailed Body Shop social audit. The timetable reveals that the intention is to have the report complete and verified by September 1996. Although this will come some years after a social audit was first promised by the company it is a very welcome move.We are very encouraged at the steps The Body Shop is taking to evaluate and underpin those ethical credentials which it has proclaimed over the last few years. In particular the very high profile now given to these issues within the Body Shop have raised staff expectations and make it easier for those wanting to hold to a strong social and ethical policy to do so.<hr style="font-family: arial, helvetica; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" /><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428213036/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/archive/bodyshop/Default.htm">Back to Body Shop archive</a>
<a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428213036/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/main/archive.htm">Return to main archive</a><blockquote style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';"><h3>'GREEN WASHING: Exploiting Idealism'</h3>by Jon Entine (from the Utne Reader 
January/February 1995) [version of?]<hr />Imagine for a moment that science developed a new technology that could magically sort truth from hyperbole. When someone tells a really big lie, a truth bubble, visible only to those with this special power, suddenly appears and reveals the real story. This unique tool would be welcomed by parents, and no one would ever again have to fear used car salesmen or shifty politicians.Or the tidal wave of green marketers exploiting idealistic consumers. If responsible business leaders were smart, they would use the truth bubble to root out hypocrisy in their own backyard before it's used against them.Consumers used to feel pretty confident when companies-that-share- our-values such as The Body Shop or Ben & Jerry's promoted their latest plan to save the rainforest and empower its workforce. But the phenomenal growth of many New Age businesses has sparked a green boomlet. Now, everyone from Mobil to Monsanto to Waste Management is making noise about protecting the environment.This dramatic increase in "cause-related marketing" raises concerns whether green practices are being replaced by green washing. But green marketing cannot be explained away as soul-less multinational capitalists using progressive buzz words and ruining it for the good guys. The circle-the-wagons mentality in the wake of the Body Shop fiasco suggests a more troubling explanation: green washing is a by-product of the arrogance of the progressive business community itself.Few people, least of all the leaders of the social responsibility movement, asked the tough questions when Anita Roddick claimed her Body Shop was the "most honest cosmetic company in the world." The media, desperate for a feminist superstar, helped her craft an inspiring rags-to-riches-to-Robin Hood success story. Hungry for recognition, progressives seemed all too willing to encourage Roddick's self-promoting, hyperbolic attacks.Roddick was the $200 million woman with a $1.3 million annual income, a castle in Scotland, a flat in London, a fleet of cars and a penchant for flying the Concorde--by the early 1990s, Roddick had become the New Age teflon icon. Competitors were labeled "assholes," Harvard business profesors were dismissed as backward thinking slugs and the investment bankers who flotated her stock and helped make her one of the world's richest women were dismissed as "blood sucking dinosaurs."Unfortunately, enthusiasm and charisma are no substitute for integrity. A truth bubble would have stopped the deception cold. Roddick fabricated stories about how she started the Body Shop and sourced ingredients from bare-breasted natives. According to its own financial records, the company gave not a dime to charity over its first nine years of existence; its historical record is less than half the average of charitable contributions by American corporations. Its over-hyped "Trade Not Aid" program amounts to .016% of ingredient costs, a dismal figure by most company standards and far less than its innocent and naive customers have come to believe. This shameless victory of rhetoric over reality infects every part of the company's vaunted ideals.Over the years, as white lies about the company's progressive practices grew darker, the Roddicks defended their myth-making with vitriolic personal attacks and legal threats. The established a formidable swat team of solicitors, led by Lovell White Durrant which made its name defending Robert Maxwell, and the Hill & Knowlton public relations company, also known as Idid Amin's agency.In light of the facts, the honesty gap at The Body Shop is startling. Gordon and Anita Roddick may have believed their propaganda, but good intentions (if that is the case here) are not enough. In the capitalist world of caveat emptor, honest information is our only defense. Social vision means nothing unless companies tell the truth. Anita Roddick and the Body Shop may have exposed other beauty companies for exploiting women; consciously or not, she exploited the innocence and idealism of her customers.This is not a "he said, she said" story nor an example of a company falling short of its ambitious values only to fall prey to a cynical and vicious press. That's the Body Shop plea bargaining for the support of the very people who should be most outraged by the company's betrayal.The Body Shop is a morality tale: the Roddicks' and increasingly the social responsibility community's.Even today, the movement is reluctant to acknowledge its own culpability. The atmosphere at a mid-October meeting of progressive business leaders held in Cambridge, Massachusetts could be likened to a family gathering a few days after everyone's favorite uncle was found molesting a neighbor's child. The scandal was on everyone's mind, few would openly talk about it, and most hoped that by ignoring it, the story would soon fade away. It won't.Here's a wake up call: this fiasco will get worse unless progressives look into their cracked mirrors, decide what values they really stand for, and speak out loudly and decisively. Socially responsible business is not about having a good heart or striving for perfection. It's about recognizing the original sin of capitalism, preaching only what is practiced, and turning out a fair-priced, quality product.Baby boom businesses must guard against becoming seduced by their growing wealth and notoriety, or losing touch with the impact of grand visions on real people: women who scrape together family assets to buy a franchise, twenty-something clerks getting by on near-minimum wage, Mexican Indians turning out scrub mitts for pennies an hour, teenagers who buy shampoo or ice cream thinking they are preserving the rainforest. Recklessly executed and misleadingly promoted corporate visions undermine the credibility of those who play it straight.Journalists love to create heroes and unmask hypocrites. With Anita Roddick, they hit the Daily Double. Over simplifying complex moral issues and exaggerating positive corporate behavior breeds cynicism. Good guys take note: green washing invites the press to caricature even the most well intentioned businesses.The social responsibility community is justifiably concerned that the Body Shop firestorm will consume the entire movement. It could. Already, less socially conscious marketers, sensing the honesty gap, co-opt green symbols to sell everything from detergent to gasoline to cigarettes. Consumers hate to be taken for granted. Once their trust is abused, it's gone forever.This is a plea for less hubris and more transparency. If progressive business leaders rediscover their moral center, in a few years, the shattering of the Body Shop myth will seem like a distant memory. But if the movement doesn't stand for openness and honesty from members of the "club," it stands for nothing at all. It's time to use the truth bubble.JON ENTINE (runjonrun@aol.com)</blockquote><hr /><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428213105/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/archive/bodyshop/Default.htm" /><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428213105/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/archive/bodyshop/Default.htm"></a><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428213105/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/archive/bodyshop/Default.htm"></a><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428213105/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/archive/bodyshop/Default.htm">Back to Body Shop Archive</a><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970428213105/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/archive/bodyshop/utne.htm">https://web.archive.org/web/19970428213105/http://www.arq.co.uk/ethicalbusiness/archive/bodyshop/utne.htm</a>

<h3 style="font-family: arial, helvetica; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Body Shop Response to Criticism</h3><hr style="font-family: arial, helvetica; font-size: small; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);" />This is a letter sent from Gordon Roddick, Chairman of the Body Shop, to Business Ethics, shortly after the publication of John Entine’s article in that magazine. It has been published here with permission of the Body Shop.If you want further information, The Body Shop have offered a full rebuttal document. You can get this by writing to the Body Shop. You could try an email to www@bodyshop.co.uk, or by mail to The Body Shop International, Watersmead, Littlehampton, West Sussex. BN17 6LS, UK.(This is a scanned copy, so may contain some typographical errors. Please notify c.r.mackenzie@bath.ac.uk if you spot any.)<h3 style="font-family: arial, helvetica; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Dear fellow Business Ethics subscriber,</h3>I sit down to write this letter with some anger and considerable sadness. It concerns the article "Shattered Image," which appeared in the September/October issue of Business Ethics. As you are probably aware, that article contained allegations that maligned and defamed our company, my wife and me. Although a representative of The Body Shop is quoted in the article, making it appear that we were given an opportunity to respond, in fact we were not informed of most of the charges prior to publication. Such treatment would be indefensible under any circumstances, but it is especially troubling when the right to a fair hearing is denied by a magazine with "ethics" in its title.It has become clear that writing to you personally is the only way we can be sure you will have the chance to hear our side of the case. Hence, this letter.Frankly, it is difficult to know where to begin rebutting an article filled with as many lies, distortions, and gross inaccuracies as this one. 1 suppose we have to have the author some credit for throwing together such an impressive volume of information. It is his attempt to confuse and misrepresent the reality of a company that has struggled hard for 18 years to be in the forefront of a movement seeking a different way of doing business.Where the information comes from is another matter. Of the 22 sources named in the article, 10 are disgruntled former employees or franchisees, current competitors, or disappointed bidders for our business, all of whom obviously have personal reasons for wanting to make The Body Shop look bad. Four other sources have either strenuously denied their quotes or said their words have been used out of context in a way that entirely distorts their meaning. Yet another five sources are cited for opinions they expressed about social investment in general, opinions that have been turned around so as to make them appear to be highly critical of The Body Shop.There is, in fact, almost no attempt to observe the normal standards of journalism. The article cites two people as "independent experts", for example, without mentioning that they are among our competitors. Elsewhere, a competitor's marketing newsletter is used to provide "expert analysis", again without noting the obvious conflict of interest. And another alleged "source", the Federal Trade Commission, has already issued a flat-out denial that it has commented on The Body Shop practices in any way, shape, or form. We understand from the FTC that Business Ethics have agreed to print a correction in the next issue.But to see what is really going on here, it is necessary to look at some of the specific allegations in detail. Consider the opening snapshot of two former franchisees, Stacy and Larry Benes, who are portrayed as terrified, bankrupt people somehow done in by our malfeasance. The implication is that such stories are common throughout our organization. Nothing could be further from the truth.To begin with, there is more to the Beneses' story than the author chose to report. Stacy and Larry Benes were like many other people who come to us for a franchise, whenever we begin trading in a country or a region. They bring us their hopes and dreams, which may or may not be achievable. We try to select franchisees with realistic expectations and the ability to fulfill them. It is very much in our interest as a franchiser to do so. Sometimes we make mistakes in our selection.In the case of the Beneses, we were led to believe that Larry had a full-time job and Stacy would run the shop, which would thus have to provide income for just one person. Whatever they say now, they were clearly told at the time that a single shop in Charlottesville, Va., could not possibly do more, at least in the first few years. Whether it could do even that well depended to a great degree on what the Beneses were prepared to put into it. Sadly, they turned out to be neither good franchisees nor good retailers. They so mismanaged the business that a group of their employees came to us to complain about their behavior and their values. Meanwhile, they were taking out more than $80,000 a year for themselves in their first year of operations - somewhat more than either Anita or I were paid annually during The Body Shop's first decade. Eventually, they wound up in financial difficulty, owing the company more than $200,000 for products they had bought from us on credit and then sold. Rather than sue them for payment, we agreed to repurchase the store.As unfortunate as such episodes are, it is ridiculous to suggest they are typical of our relationships with franchisees. Within 24 hours of this article's publication, 95% of our U.S. franchisees signed a letter repudiating the accusations in it. The fact is that we operate on a worldwide basis trading either directly or through head franchisees in more than 40 countries with more than 1,100 stores, of which 1,000 are owned by approximately 650 franchisees. There are always some disputes between franchiser and franchisees. That's the nature of business. But our disputes have actually been far milder than is common. In 18 years of operation, we have terminated the contract of only one franchisee, and that was in England. (She had fired all her employees on grounds that could only be described as lunatic. We put them on our payroll, some 50 people in all, many of whom had mortgages and other financial obligations, and we kept paying them until the dispute was resolved.) In addition, we had litigation in Norway that was settled amicably. There is presently litigation in Singapore, but we are hopeful it, too, can be settled.Such conflicts are the daily bread of any business. The unusual part is that we have had so few of them, as Business Ethics would surely have discovered had it checked the facts of this article with independent franchising experts. Instead, it appears to have relied on the author's own biased sources, who naturally confirmed what they'd already said to him.The same pattern repeats itself throughout the article. There is, for example, the assertion that we stole The Body Shop's name, concept, and products from Jane Saunders and Peggy Short, who have a natural cosmetics business of the same name based in Berkeley, Ca. The charge is pure rubbish. Jane and Peggy do not make such claims. They have stated that the company "didn't rip us oft" and that there have always been "fundamental differences" between their stores and ours. (I am using their words here.) Had they thought otherwise, we would probably not have been able to develop the warm and cordial relationship we have with them and their companies, a relationship that continues to this day.Indeed, the fundamental differences in our retail styles and appearance are instantly obvious to anyone who visits the two companies' shops. After the author of "Shattered Image" showed up at the Saunders', we heard from Jane Saunder's daughter Ann who wrote us saying a man named Jon Entine (the author of the Business Ethics article) had "barged in" on her and started making claims about our supposed larceny. She told him she "had no knowledge of anything he was talking about." She said "his ‘facts’ are wrong." Entine has since alleged that there is a gag order preventing Jane Saunders, Peggy Short, and others from commenting on the relationship. In her letter, Ann wrote that she specifically told him there was no such gag order.Another person supposedly under a gag order is Mark Constantine, who was a major supplier to us for more than a decade and whom we worked with to develop many of our early products. He wrote me after reading the opinions ascribed to him in the article. Judge his remarks about Entine for yourself:"it would appear that he has edited or, worse, twisted my comments.Taking a few of the points, "Roddick's, first business partner, cosmetologist Mark Constantine (who is under a gag order prohibiting him from discussing it), "...suggest that Anita knew about the Berkeley company."Oh how I wish I had been your business partner! ..."cosmetologist," I am not a cosmetologist"under a gag order", No gag order, See the interview in last Sunday's Mirror as an example. Anyway, how can I suggest something if I'm under a gag order?He suggested that Anita knew about the Berkeley company, and I was shocked when he asked me, I didn't deny it because I did nor know. I was entertained to see the examples he chose for similarities: "loofah sponges and glycerin and rosewater lotion. "I take offense at the next paragraph "The Body Shops most basic myth." Anita was the first person to recognize that the products that I formulated had a greater amount o "naturals than any others on the market, then or now. She gave me a much needed break at a time when no one was interested in natural ingredients as anything but label claims. I went to great pains to explain this, and the guy phoned me back and read this paragraph to me. It was rubbish then, and I told him, and it's still rubbish now.Mark's letter reflects the frustration we have all felt in trying to deal with this article. There are sensible questions that could be raised, and we would all learn from such a discussion. I make no appeal for The Body Shop to be exempt from criticism or scrutiny. We are happy to open up our hearts, our minds, and our company to those who wish to examine us, provided they accept their responsibility to be balanced and fair.But I am at a loss to find anything balanced or fair in this article. In its zeal to impugn our commitment to our principles, it goes after our Trade Not Aid program, building its attack around an utterly irrelevant statistic - the percentage of our ingredients that come from Trade Not Aid projects. What is this number supposed to reveal? It certainly tells nothing about the effectiveness of our efforts. Or the amount of time and energy we have put into nurturing these projects. Or the obstacles we have had to overcome due to the lack of infrastructure in disenfranchised, Third World communities-transport difficulties, investment problems, absence of technological capabilities, cultural issues, the need to build trust and personal relationships, and so on. One single ingredient, such as Brazil nut oil or cocoa butter, may take two years or more to source and develop. Believe me, there are much easier ways to do business than by taking on the problems of such projects. We don't do it to "save the planet." In most cases, we do it because we are asked to help by the disenfranchised communities themselves. The only significant measure of our success is the number of people who are directly and beneficially affected by our activities. That number, I am proud to say, runs into the thousands. It can best be verified by talking to the communities we have assisted - another thingBusiness Ethics neglected to do.A letter was written to Business Ethics on 26th August 1994 from Jerry Kinsman, the program manager of Santa Ana Agricultural Enterprises (The Pueblo of Santa Ana is a federally recognized American Indian Tribe located in New Mexico). In this letter he says: . . .,"I hope you will give some importance to what representatives of Body Shop's trading partners have to say about that company."However, Business Ethics chose to ignore that request.Kinsman writes:"Be assured that the people of Santa Ana Pueblo are very pleased with and proud of the connection with Body Shop. Whereas the direct profit from sales to BSI [The Body Shop] has been very beneficial, it should be noted that the relationship has had an indirect multiplier effect on the Tribe’s Blue Corn business public notice from the association, in and of itself has brought in more public notice - and more business. Santa Ana has become The place to find out about Blue Corn and The place to observe successful Native American development efforts. Has Body Shop been the singular cause of that accomplishment? Clearly not! More than any other factor, the Tribe's achievements are a function of some very savvy people knowing what they want for themselves. Has Body Shop been important? Clearly yes . . . I must inform you that Santa Ana is not a victim of BSI Rather, the Tribe is an ardent supporter of its approach to trade. "And let me tell you about a Trade Not Aid project that produces no ingredients for our products. It is called The Big Issue, and it is a newspaper sold by about 2,000 vendors, almost all of them homeless people, in London, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Manchester, and several other cities in our own backyard. Its average weekly circulation is 20Q,000. It has been going for three years now and has been financially self sufficient on an operating basis for some time. Recently it moved into a new building with a print shop, meeting rooms, and a cafe.I myself started this project after seeing the homeless newspaper called Street News being sold in New York. I persuaded an old friend of mine to be the editor. Together we launched The Big Issue despite a feasibility study warning against the idea. The Body Shop put in $450,000 over two years, and The Body Shop Foundation contributed another $350,000. As large as the investment was, the possibility of losing the money was not, in fact, the greatest risk we faced. Far more serious was the risk that the project might go wrong and wind up harming our reputation. That is always a danger when you work with disadvantaged people. In the case of the homeless, you are wide open to accusations of promoting drug abuse, violence, alcoholism, welfare fraud, and so on - all issues around which passions run high. The possibility of scandal is a given. You can't avoid it, especially in the early phases of a project, when you are feeling your way and haven't yet figured out the necessary controls. So far we have been lucky. We have also had an enormous amount of help - from the police authorities, commercial businesses, and non-profit foundations. We have thanked them all in the newspaper itself. Still the fact remains that the risk was, and is, ours. If scandal comes, if the project fails, The Body Shop will take the heat.We are not looking here for credit, or recognition. I would not have brought it up at all but for this unscrupulous attack in a magazine called Business Ethics. I mention The Big Issue only because it is one of several projects that we talk little about, but that have provided some small measure of hope or work for a lot of people. Those people are the entire reason for doing these things. Yet they are the ones who get lost when high-minded organizations quibble about the percentage of ingredients produced under our Trade Not Aid policy.I could go on and on cataloguing the error and misrepresentation in this article, but it would take a small book to answer every one of Entine's allegations. We have, in fact, prepared such a document and would be happy to send it to you if you are interested. Meanwhile, there are a couple of other matters I must address, including the charge by Entine, and the editors of Business Ethics and others that we have used thuggery and legal threats to suppress legitimate criticism of The Body Shop.Let me say straight off that Anita and I are very protective of the business we have built, and we have probably been oversensitive and overdefensive to criticism at times. But look at the history.In 1992, representatives of a company called Fulcrum Productions approached us about a program on The Body Shop they wanted to make for Channel 4, a British television channel. They asked for our help, assuring us they would produce a fair and balanced piece. We let them film at our headquarters in England and our Soapworks factory in Glasgow. We gave them volumes of printed material as well as in-house videos, films, and stills that they wound up using in the program. They had full access to the company. We answered every question they raised. Both Anita and I made ourselves available for interviews on camera. Subsequently, the producer admitted, under oath, that we had been very cooperative.The program Fulcrum produced was a shamefully biased piece that defamed The Body Shop, Anita, and me. In order to keep it from being sold into the 40-odd other countries where we trade, we decided after lengthy deliberation to sue Channel 4 and Fulcrum Productions.We won the libel action after a grueling six-week trial in the British High Court. Thousands of documents, internal memos, position papers, and videos were paraded before the jury, along with every other scrap of information that might possibly be relevant. Anita and I and others in the company were cross- examined for days on end. I personally put in four days in the witness box. The intensity of the process made a social audit look tike a day at the fairground.Contrary to what you may have heard, truth is a defense against libel in the U.K. Had the charges in the program proved to be truthful, Fulcrum and Channel 4 would have won the case, and we would have had to pay their legal bills. Instead, we were completely vindicated. The jury found in favor of Anita, myself, and The Body Shop. The defendants had to pay damages of £276,000 pounds plus our court costs. Our total award required them to pay us in excess of one and a half million dollars ($1.5). In addition, they were served with an injunction forbidding them from repeating any of the defamatory statements they were found to have made, including those concerning our public positions on environmental, human rights, and animal testing issues.It would be difficult to imagine a more public airing of the issues surrounding The Body Shop. It would be equally unimaginable that rational human beings would willingly subject themselves twice to the level of stress involved in such a court action.Four weeks after the end of the trial, Jon Entine showed up at our headquarters in England, saying he was working on a piece about The Body Shop for ABC's Prime Time Live. We gave him hundreds of pages of documents and offered to provide more. Within days, however, we began hearing from suppliers, franchisees, and independent organizations about his investigation of us. His technique was literally to harass people until he got something he could use. He called one of our suppliers more than seven times in two days. Whenever he got hold of somebody, he would misrepresent what another person had said in an aggressive attempt to elicit "on-the-record" responses from the person he was talking to. These remarks he would then repeat to his next subject, distorting them as necessary. In this manner, he created a maelstrom of misinformation and fear wherever he went.We eventually got fed up with all this and contacted people at ABC to advise them of their producer's outrageous behavior. Entine left ABC with the program unfinished. He alleges, of course, that we intimidated the network. It is hard to believe that a major news organization with a reputation for hard-nosed investigative journalism would be intimidated by the likes of the Body Shop, especially if we are as supposedly evil and as despicable as he had said on many occasions. Then again, we do not know for sure what happened at ABC. Our best source is the deputy editor of The Sunday Times. England's leading weekend newspaper, who wrote me a letter on October 8, 1993, after we had questioned a story the newspaper had run on the proposed Prime Time Live piece following its cancellation: In his letter he said:"We [The Sunday Times] have now established what we did not know then: that ABC discovered Entine had made a number of mistakes in his methodology, so serious that they had in effect fired him some 10 days before. Entine, probably unknown to ABC, was however picking up his messages from a phone on his old desk in the ABC building. We now understand from ABC sources that Entine is regarded as out of control and has been running around saying some wild things "So, whatever may have happened inside ABC, Entine was misrepresenting himself as part of ABC to a journalist at The Sunday Times after he had already left the network. Moreover, he was telling the journalist that the Prime Time Live segment would be shown when he knew it would not. As it turned out, he was playing much the same game with the Food and Drug Administration.Unbeknownst to us, Entine, while still at ABC, had gone to the FDA with a number of untrue allegations, leading inspectors to make a surprise visit to our new headquarters in Wake Forest, N.C. They issued no citations or violation notices. Undeterred, Entine, now gone from ABC, but leaving the FDA inspector with the impression that he was still with them and headed our way with hidden cameras - got the FDA to make a second inspection. Again, no citations. Having failed twice, Entine did not give up - he obtained a copy of the internal FDA notes of their visits and leaked them to other journalists, trying to start a story that we had problems with the FDA.There was one problem with his strategy, however, and he was well aware of it. The internal documents made it absolutely clear that the FDA inspections were initiated "in response to allegations made by a Prime Time news reporter...’Entine found a simple solution to his problem. By his own admission,[?] he falsified the FDA documents to blot out his name and all references to himself as the source of the "complaints"; he circulated the FDA documents that directly misled other reporters to believe he, Jon Entine, was not at the start, middle and end of this whole episode.Let's face it: this is not the behavior of a responsible journalist. I dare say it is not the behavior of a journalist at all. I certainly cannot imagine a real journalist launching a campaign to drive down the share price of a company he was writing about. Yet Entine did just that, even calling up Peter Lynch's office to urge him to dump Fidelity's holdings of The Body Shop stock. Entine also showed up in Toronto at a meeting of the Social Investment Forum and harangued the assembly about The Body Shop until he was told to sit down. He then proceeded to hand out copies of a grossly defamatory article he had written about us for Vanity Fair, which had rejected it. This same article he circulated to social activists, fair trade organisations, animal rights advocates, and others on both sides of the Atlantic. Still others he called up and harangued about "the most evil corporation [he had] encountered in twenty years of reporting, " as he described us to Jay Harris, the publisher of Mother Jones a magazine that has tangled with some pretty evil corporations in its day. Entine was quoted in one newspaper saying that his impending revelations would be "the story of the century," putting us right up there with the moon landing, two world wars, the Holocaust, the war in Vietnam, the end of the Soviet Union, and countless human and ecological disasters. All of which would have been worth a good laugh had he not also taken to harassing Anita in public and in private. At that point, his obsession became both unnerving and a bit frightening.In the face of such attacks, I make no apologies for anything we have done to protect ourselves. It is not "legal thuggery" to defend your fairly, your employees, your friends and associates, your principles, and your reputation from someone who is hell-bent on doing as much damage to them as he can. There is a difference between criticism and character assassination. Just as there are environmental laws to stop polluters, so there are libel laws to stop irresponsible and damaging reports. Yes, we protested vigorously to Vanity Fair for assigning an article on The Body Shop to Jon Entine. We told the magazine we would cooperate with any responsible journalist they cared to have write about us, but we would not deal with Entine under any circumstances.Vanity Fair dropped the article. Business Ethics picked it up.I cannot tell you how disheartening it is to find the attack on us coming now from people with whom we had always supposed we shared common commitments and common values. That Entine succeeded in driving down our share price was thanks largely to Franklin Research and Development, whose President, Joan Bavaria, wrote a column for Business Ethics in the same issue. Franklin sold 50,000 shares of The Body Shop stock on the strength of Entine's rejected Vanity Fair article. This information wasrelayed to the Financial Times in London, which ran an article about it, setting of a firestorm in the British press. Only later did Franklin even make a pretense of investigating Entine’s charges. How this qualifies as "ethical investing" is beyond me.Which brings us to Business Ethics. When we learned of the magazine's intention to publish a version of Entine's article, we informed the editors of our history with him and asked for an opportunity to review the piece for factual inaccuracies. The editors declined. One of our staff, Angela Bawtree, then visited the Business Ethics offices, but very few of the allegations contained in the article were put to her. Editor Craig Cox later refused her offer of follow-up information.The editors have since tried to portray themselves as crusading journalists standing up to a bullying corporation. They have boasted loudly about taking out libel insurance. They have made much of their fear of publishing in Britain and their insistence that distributors sign pledges not to sell the magazine in any Commonwealth country. But, as noted above, truth is a defense against libel under British law. They face no risk if their article is factual. If we did sue them (something we have not threatened to do), they could recover all their legal expenses-assuming, that is, they could prove the accuracy of Entine’s charges. So why didn't they publish in the U.K.? And what were their motives in publishing the article at all?Perhaps the answer lies in a letter that Majorie Kelly, publisher and editor-in-chief of Business Ethics sent to her financial backers in August, just prior to publication of the Entine article."This piece will be talked about," she wrote. "It will create a stir....It 's the best thing we've ever done. It could put us on the map.The emphasis, I'm afraid, is hers.Let me reiterate in closing that we have a detailed response to every single allegation Entine makes in his article and elsewhere. We will happily provide those responses to all who care to read them, but now we wish to get back to work. We have taken a severe kicking from the press on both sides of the Atlantic and elsewhere in the world. Perhaps there is some balance in that. We have also had a lot of good press over the years, some of it excessive in its enthusiasm. I suppose we should learn to live with excessive attacks as well.In the future, I hope there will be objective and detailed reporting on our business. Some of the conclusions would no doubt be critical, but I am also certain a fair analysis would reveal a company that has tried very hard and has much to be proud of. We chose a difficult and thorny path. With the help of many others, we will continue to tread that path with pride and vigor.In any event, the time for anger is past. We know the world is filled with businesses concerned with "putting something back." We hope they will not sit around too long in detailed analysis and therapy as a result of the hoopla created by this attack on us.After the Channel 4 libel case, we ourselves began the process of producing a methodology for an definitive social audit of our company, following the lead of Ben and Jerry's and other companies. It is a mammoth undertaking, aimed at analyzing our social performance against the expectations created by ourselves and others. Along with our financial and environmental reports, it should provide a complete picture of the business, available to all. We expect to have a report by mid 1995. It will come as a great relief, most of all to us, who will use it to improve on the shortcomings it will undoubtedly highlight.And what of Business Ethics? To date, two prominent members of its editorial advisory board have resigned, questioning the ethics of the magazine. We wonder if Marjorie Kelly has achieved the circulation boost she was counting on. The episode has certainly provided a reminder of the potential conflict between business needs and editorial principles. Perhaps Marjorie's words at the end of her "Musings" piece in the same issue of Business Ethics should now be read in a new light:"What we may have neglected in our enthusiasm is ethics. Good old fashioned ethics Also known as integrity. It's not something to shout about in our marketing packages, but if we can't live up to it, we won't have much to shout about for long "We agree entirely. Enthusiasm in the pursuit of greater circulation is no substitute for ethics. I can only hope that the standards Majorie articulates will be applied to Business Ethics magazine in the future.Yours truly,Gordon Roddick Chairman.=tbs audit 1996 <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/19970117130139/http://www.think-act-change.com/">https://web.archive.org/web/19970117130139/http://www.think-act-change.com/</a>=Gordon Roddick is the former husband of <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anita_Roddick" title="Anita Roddick" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Anita Roddick</a>.<ul style="line-height: 19.200000762939453px; margin: 0.3em 0px 0.5em 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANAQMAAABb8jbLAAAABlBMVEX///8AUow5QSOjAAAAAXRSTlMAQObYZgAAABNJREFUCB1jYEABBQw/wLCAgQEAGpIDyT0IVcsAAAAASUVORK5CYII=); font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Cofounder/Chair, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/38Degrees" title="38Degrees" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">38Degrees</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Advisory Panel (2009), <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Resurgence" title="Resurgence" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Resurgence</a> <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Gordon_Roddick#cite_note-1" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[1]</a></li></ul><h2 style="font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.6em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); font-size: 19px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Resources and articles</h2><h3 style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; font-size: 17px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Related Sourcewatch</h3><ul style="line-height: 19.200000762939453px; margin: 0.3em 0px 0.5em 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANAQMAAABb8jbLAAAABlBMVEX///8AUow5QSOjAAAAAXRSTlMAQObYZgAAABNJREFUCB1jYEABBQw/wLCAgQEAGpIDyT0IVcsAAAAASUVORK5CYII=); font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/First_Nations_Development_Institute" title="First Nations Development Institute" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">First Nations Development Institute</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/David_Suzuki_Foundation" title="David Suzuki Foundation" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">David Suzuki Foundation</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/The_Climate_Group" title="The Climate Group" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">The Climate Group</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Sam_Roddick" title="Sam Roddick" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Sam Roddick</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Big_Issue_Foundation" title="Big Issue Foundation" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Big Issue Foundation</a></li></ul><h3 style="margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; font-size: 17px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255); background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">References</h3><ol class="references" style="line-height: 19.200000762939453px; margin: 0.3em 0px 0.5em 3.2em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none; font-size: 13px; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><li id="cite_note-1" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Gordon_Roddick#cite_ref-1" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up↑</a> Resurgence Magazine, March/April 2009.</li></ol>=2:12 PM 7/16/2014entine714
=
what's impotant/diff about this guy? STATS? appears fair?
attacked social entr Roddick! a capitalist //borelli
see also STATS gmunat assoc of scholars
pest conf aei?
cf John Graham OMB stats (milloy)
BA philosphy Trinity Vt 1974 (geo Will, Tucker Carson)
claims a journalism award, worked for 
"bs:  He has produced news magazine programs at ABC News and CBS News, an entertainment special for NBC (on the Miss America Pageant!), and was Tom Brokaw’s long-time producer at NBC News, where he was also the executive in charge of documentaries.

"In 1989, Tom and Jon collaborated to write and produce Black Athletes: Fact and Fiction, named Best International Sports Film of 1989), which led to his best-selling book, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We are Afraid to Talk About It (Public Affairs, 2000), which was recently reissued. AEI has published two books written and edited by Jon: Pension Fund Politics: The Dangers of Socially Responsible Investing (AEI Press, 2005) on the growing influence of social investing in pension funds and Let Them Eat Precaution: How Politics Is Undermining the Genetic Revolution in Agriculture (AEI Press, 2006), which examines the debate over genetic modification (GMOs), food, and farming. In 2007, Jon published Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People..."]--latest on gmo corn french:http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonentine/2014/06/24/zombie-retracted-seralini-gmo-maize-rat-study-republished-to-hostile-scientist-reactions/RODDICKcorp report 2014  <a href="http://viewer.zmags.co.uk/publication/61c41367#/61c41367/36">http://viewer.zmags.co.uk/publication/61c41367#/61c41367/36</a>Times of London!http://www.jonentine.com/reviews/caring_capitalism.htm 31 December 1995Business Focus<h2 style="font-family: 'Times New Roman';">Caring Capitalism</h2>Jon Entine, a campaigning journalist specialising in business ethics, says the 'green' stances taken by some firms raise as many questions as they answer.The story of good intentions gone awry is becoming a familiar refrain in the once-pristine world of New Age "socially responsible" capitalism. The fiasco of the "rainforest harvest", the sourcing by eco-friendly retailers of goods from what turn out to be sweatshops, and the Greenpeace-generated hysteria over Shell's Brent Spar oil platform are just a few recent ethical fumblings.The movement's highest-profile company, Body Shop International, is expected in February to release a much-delayed review of its ethical operations. It will be interesting to see how it treats the ethical issues it has faced.As western business passes the mid-point of the 1990s, there are signs that the green marketing boom ushered in by Body Shop and other entrepreneurial companies may become the victim of high promises and public cynicism.Jon Lickerman, a researcher with Calvert, an ethical-fund manager, says: "So many socially responsible companies have noble corporate philosophies but then seem to mistreat their own workers, suppliers and customers."Founded two decades ago on high hopes and promoted by a sympathetic press, the rags-to-riches Robin Hood business movement is floundering.The "ethical business" movement, known by some as cause-related or social marketing, has a quixotic history. It brings together two 1960s currents: environmental, anti-war, feminist and human-rights activism on the one hand, and narcissism on the other. In her American Express commercial, Anita Roddick says: "I'd rather work for justice, human rights and fair trade than ever sell a bubble-bath." The generation that once wanted to change the world now wants us to "shop for a better world", the title of a green consumer guide. Body Shop sells more than a dozen kinds of bubble-bath.Cause-related marketing is a hot business trend. Surveys suggest British consumers spend Pounds 25billion a year with companies seen as progressive. The "ethical" investment movement, which includes funds from Abtrust, Friends Provident, Jupiter, NPI and TSB, attracts thousands of investors interested in screening out "sin" companies, such as tobacco makers, and screening in "progressive" firms.Many funds use social agenda screens drawing on notions of liberal propriety and correctness and using buzzwords such as "natural", "cruelty-free" and "fair trade". Entrepreneurs who have built fortunes employing low-wage workers and selling high-priced commodities such as ice cream or "naturally based" shampoo containing colours and fragrances derived from petrochemicals and packaged in plastic are promoted as icons. There appears to be a bias against technology (except multimedia) and defence contractors and a bias in favour of boutique retailers.Tobacco companies are taboo. Banks get a pass, though loans to nuclear-power companies and other "sin" industries may go undetected. Self-promotion sometimes rates higher than worker and customer relations.The sector is loath to acknowledge spotty research or problematic social criteria. Mark Campanale, an NPI Global Care Fund analyst, was criticised last summer for saying ethical funds could be seen as "mere marketing gimmicks ... a sop to the conscience of naive investors". Yet Campanale was writing what many researchers admit privately.Under some criteria, entire industries are dismissed though they make essential products and pay workers well. British Petroleum, with an enviable environmental record within its industry and a state-of-the-art audit, is left off "ethical" lists because it uses fossil fuels. Whitbread fails the test because it makes beer, owns pubs and has donated to the Tories. Yet its charity and community record is almost unmatched.The urge to demonise big business and idolise eco-entrepreneurs ignores the complexity of business. Robert Gray, of Dundee University's social and environmental accounting centre, says: "Corporations and industries with the most innovative environmental programmes are not always the ones getting most of the attention."MANY traditional companies have quietly emerged as leaders in dealing with necessary, but inevitably messy, technologies. The chemical industry embraced transparency and accountability after the Bhopal disaster in India. Canadian producers in 1988 launched a "responsible care" initiative; this year, its 55 members underwent mandatory third-party verification of risk-assessment procedures."Even a tiny 1% improvement in the environmental standards of a DuPont or a Monsanto will have a more meaningful impact than creating a hundred new boutique retailers," says Paul Hawken, a writer on corporate ethics.High among the issues that Body Shop has faced is the controversy surrounding a former Christian Brother who ran the Boys' Town orphanage in India. Body Shop used to buy "footsie roller" foot massagers from Boys' Town. It was its first Third World "trade not aid" scheme.After adverse press reports about Boys' Town in 1990, Body Shop pulled out. It then resuscitated the "trade not aid" venture at a new facility, Teddy Exports, which employed local teenagers, setting up a hospital and school. But recently dozens of Boys' Town thugs crossed the road to Teddy Exports. Eleven workers were knifed, two seriously. The woman who ran the project is now home in Ireland, afraid to return. Steve Mitchell, who owns four Body Shop franchises and has worked on both projects, says: "It's a complete mess. Nobody knows what will happen. This is probably its death knell."Boys' Town has been a long-running problem for the company. Richard Adams, the founder of Traidcraft and director of two "Out of This World" sustainable markets, remembers when he first saw leaflets about Boys' Town at Body Shop's stores in 1987. "I was shocked," he says.As a Traidcraft director, Adams had carried a different Boys' Town product, wood carvings. After receiving poor-quality goods, he sent a manager to investigate. He was stunned by the news. "The project's then director was sourcing carvings from child-labour sweatshops," he recalls.When Adams found out about Body Shop's Boys' Town link, he wrote to the Roddicks. "I never heard back," he says. Over the next few years glowing reports went to franchisees about Boys' Town. "We have the power to change people's lives for the better," Roddick wrote.The Boys' Town saga shows how even the best-intentioned of New Age capitalists can experience the gulf between rhetoric and philanthropy. SINCE Roddick opened her first store in 1976 using plastic bottles, recycling philosophy, store and logo design and a product list with catalogue descriptions remarkably similar to another Body Shop, a Berkeley, California, store founded in 1970, she has successfully nurtured the idea that she operates on a higher, ethical plain. While rivals sold beauty in a bottle, Roddick marketed integrity and idealism.In promoting Body Shop, Roddick lambasted rivals as "monsters" who "lie and exploit women", and called her City backers "pin-striped dinosaurs" and "wankers". This language was taken as candour by journalists who share her campaigning views. Here was a harbinger of the New Age, weaned on can-do chutzpah, do-right values and me-too economics. The baby boomers had found a voice and standard bearer.Body Shop's romance with cause-related marketing blossomed in 1986 when Roddick teamed up with Greenpeace in a two-for-one promotion: "Buy not-tested-on-animals jojoba oil substitute for whale spermaceti and save the whale". The next year she linked up with the British Union Against Vivisection to lobby against testing on animals. In 1987, pictures of Roddick with bare-breasted natives were plastered on shop walls to promote newly launched "trade not aid" products. The campaigns brought in new waves of socially conscious shoppers but also introduced trade issues that all capitalists face.That tension was on display two years ago when Roddick spoke at an International Chamber of Commerce meeting in Mexico on "Corporate Responsibility: Good Works Not Good Words"."I've established England's most effective and successful international retailing company," she said. "We want a new paradigm ... for seeing and understanding how business can and must be a force for positive social change."Roddick then introduced China. "Just say no," she said, co-opting an anti-drug slogan. Say "no to dealing with torturers and despots. This is what Levi Strauss decided when it closed operations in China ... The world applauded when the Olympics chose not to go to Beijing we should listen to that message." Yet Body Shop sources baskets from China and, according to its own estimates, its fair-trade turnover, which Gordon Roddick claims is a "cornerstone", represents a tiny fraction of sales.But Roddick remains a favourite of the media. "Anita," says Mara Amats, who introduced Body Shop to a Nepalese papermaking project, "instinctively understands the facile nature of the press and plays to it." THE MEDIA have often overlooked how traditional companies deal with complex ethical issues such as testing on animals.On the one hand, companies such as Gillette and Procter & Gamble perform expensive, government-required safety tests. Both have pioneered alternatives to animal testing and Gillette publishes the rationale for each of its tests.On the other hand, Body Shop and so-called "bathtub" firms, which promote cruelty-free products and help keep the controversy boiling, use animal-tested ingredients developed by rivals while earning a pricey green premium.Between 1980 and 1986, before many companies realised the potential profit in animal-testing demonology, mainstream producers had cut testing by up to 95%. Scientists at Body Shop's rivals do not go to bed at night dreaming of pouring chemicals into the eyes of rabbits [?!] a point driven home in 1990 when a suit by the German Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and the government forced franchisees to stop claiming Body Shop set a higher ethical standard than other companies. During this time, Body Shop pulled its "not tested on animals" slogan and replaced it with "against animal testing".Scientists say in-vitro tests or computer models cannot approximate a living animal and say testing, mostly on mice or rats, remains necessary to protect human health. ETHICAL stances taken by some companies raise as many questions as they answer: Co-operative Bank, which endowed a Manchester University business-ethics chair, said it would no longer supply services to those exporting weapons to repressive regimes. But the effect of its "progressive" stance was negligible: Co-op's international business is tiny. Reebok, applauded for its Human Rights Award, sources from Far East producers who pay tiny wages. Asked about this, Reebok's Paul Firestone says he will not "impose American culture on other countries". Esprit de Corp, Levi Strauss and The Gap source clothing from what many would describe as sweatshops in countries where human-rights violations are common.Though most New Age capitalists are guilty of little more than "greenwashing", actions based on lofty aspirations can lead to big problems. The rainforest harvest, which proponents claimed provided natives with an alternative to selling land to industrial groups, may encourage the nightmare it seeks to contain.The project was launched in 1988 when Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry's, the ice-cream firm, met an anthropologist promoting capitalism on the Amazon. Soon after, Cohen launched Rainforest Crunch ice cream and Roddick brought out brazil-nut hair conditioner. The result was that a tiny crop of high-priced nuts was targeted by the region's giant agri-businesses. Production volumes soared and prices tumbled, cutting native incomes just as governments used the harvest as an excuse to cut aid. Finally, Ben & Jerry's changed the wording on its Rainforest Crunch label after its own social-performance review revealed that 95% of its brazil nuts came not from forest people's co-operatives but from commercial suppliers.The ethical business movement has some soul-searching ahead. Observers ask whether it should be about the New Age entrepreneurial vision or about reasonably priced quality products, fair treatment of workers, suppliers, customers and the community, a responsible attitude to the environment, and transparency.It is revealing what happens when workers, rather than boutique activists, determine what constitutes ethical business. In 1991, South Africa's black trade unions asked their members how pension funds should be invested. New Age issues such as animal testing were out. The key criteria were product quality, jobs, working conditions, benefits, safety and equal opportunity.That companies believe they are taking an ethical stand does not obviate their responsibility to clarify complex issues. "Social marketing", whether practised by New Age firms or giant corporations, should be viewed with caution.© The Times of London acad paper uases 3 JE art'l;<a href="http://sbaer.uca.edu/research/usasbe/1996/pdf/09.pdf"> http://sbaer.uca.edu/research/usasbe/1996/pdf/09.pdf</a>mascara ingrdients <a href="http://www.thebodyshop.com.au/make-up/eyes/super-volume-mascara.aspx">http://www.thebodyshop.com.au/make-up/eyes/super-volume-mascara.aspx</a>
data limited: <a href="http://www.ewg.org/skindeep/ingredient/706937/VP%3B%3B_VA_COPOLYMER/">http://www.ewg.org/skindeep/ingredient/706937/VP%3B%3B_VA_COPOLYMER/</a><h2 style="color: rgb(79, 68, 89); padding: 0px; margin: 0px; line-height: 27px; font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Organ system toxicity (non-reproductive)</h2><table class="product_tables" style="border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0px; font-size: 14px; width: 692px; margin-top: 25px; color: rgb(90, 89, 99); font-family: 'Open Sans', sans-serif; background: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><thead><tr><th width="60%" style="margin: 14px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 8px; font-weight: 400; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(240, 229, 209); color: rgb(78, 71, 78) !important;">Concern</th><th width="40%" style="margin: 14px; padding: 0px 0px 0px 8px; font-weight: 400; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(240, 229, 209); color: rgb(78, 71, 78) !important;">Reference</th></tr></thead><tbody><tr><td style="margin: 0px; padding: 6px 8px; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(240, 229, 209); border-collapse: collapse; color: rgb(79, 78, 87);">Classified as not expected to be potentially toxic or harmful</td><td style="margin: 0px; padding: 6px 8px; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(240, 229, 209); border-collapse: collapse; color: rgb(79, 78, 87);">Environment Canada Domestic Substance List</td></tr></tbody></table>nyt<div class="timestamp" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; white-space: nowrap; color: rgb(128, 128, 128); line-height: 15px;">September 2, 1994</div><h1 style="margin: 0px 0px 19px; line-height: 1.083em; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">Market Place; Body Shop's Green Image Is Attacked</h1><div class="byline" style="font-family: arial, helvetica, sans-serif; font-size: 10px; line-height: 1.2em; color: rgb(128, 128, 128); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);">By RICHARD W. STEVENSON,</div><div class="articleBody" style="margin-top: 15px; margin-bottom: 17px; font-family: georgia, 'times new roman', times, serif; font-size: 10px; line-height: 15px;">LONDON, Sept. 1— The Body Shop International P.L.C., the retail cosmetics chain that has expanded rapidly from Britain into American malls, has carefully crafted its image by pledging sensitivity to the environment, promising not to test its products on animals and seeking to be a progressive force in the communities where it operates.The success of the Body Shop, its 1993 annual report intoned, "proves that profits and principles can go hand in hand and that business can be a force for social change."Now the company is under attack by an American journalist, who in an article published today by the Minneapolis-based journal Business Ethics, takes issue with the Body Shop's contention that the company's walk matches its talk. Formaldehyde Is CitedThe journalist, Jon Entine, a former ABC News producer who spent much of the last year working on the article, said the company's charitable contributions, environmental standards, efforts to buy materials from developing nations and use of "natural" ingredients in the company's products all failed to live up to the Body Shop's stated goals.Some of the company's products use "outdated, off-the-shelf product formulas filled with unrenewable petrochemicals," Mr. Entine wrote. The Body Shop, he said, has had quality- control problems that on one occasion led to its selling products containing formaldehyde. And despite generating considerable publicity about its efforts to develop suppliers among native people in developing countries, only a tiny fraction of the company's purchases actually come through its "Trade Not Aid" program, Mr. Entine reported.Mr. Entine also wrote about the disillusionment among some of the company's franchisees, some of whom are cooperating with a Federal Trade Commission investigation into the company's franchise practices in the United States.The company, in a 32-page rebuttal that was distributed before Mr. Entine's article was published, acknowledged that there was an F.T.C. investigation. But the company dismissed it as a routine and groudless response to a complaint by a single franchisee.And the company also said that Mr. Entine's criticisms of its purchasing policies were unjustified. "His numbers are wrong, but more importantly his percentages are beside the point," the company said, adding that it had a deep and growing commitment to developing third world suppliers. Today the company dismissed the article as "recycled rubbish."Nevertheless, the publicity over the article has already proven costly to the Body Shop, both in public relations terms and in its standing with investors.The dispute, analysts and investors said, may also prove to be a cautionary tale for companies that project a righteous image. Increasingly, they said, journalists, regulatory authorities and so-called socially responsible investment funds are peeling back corporate facades to see whether their operations justify their claims to "green" or socially englightened business practices.Although it has bounced back somewhat in the last two days, the Body Shop's stock price has taken a beating over the last several weeks, dropping as much as 15 percent as rumors about the article spread. Investors had to ponder both whether something is fundamentally amiss and whether the company was at risk of losing business. The stock closed today in London at 224 pence, or about $3.45, up 8 pence, or a little over 12 cents. The stock had been as high as 264 pence earlier this year.One investment fund that sold the stock last month was Franklin Research and Development of Boston. Franklin sold its 50,000-share holding and recommended to its clients that they do the same.Joan Bavaria, Franklin's president, said the decision was motivated partly by concerns that sales growth was slowing at the Body Shop. "We felt it was a fully valued stock with some questions about its incremental growth rate," Ms. Bavaria said.But she said Franklin, which invests on behalf of clients who are concerned about companies' social responsibility, was also aware of the gist of Mr. Entine's article, and felt that its publication would probably send the stock down.Ms. Bavaria said Franklin had made no judgment about the article's accuracy. But she said that because of Mr. Entine's conclusions, Franklin had decided to look into the Body Shop's business practices on its own and would publish its findings next week in its newsletter. Franklin has not yet reached a conclusion about whether the Body Shop lives up to its socially responsible billing, she said.The Body Shop was founded in 1976 by Anita and T. Gordon Roddick, a British wife and husband team. Over the years their chain of retail stores, selling cosmetics, soaps and other beauty products, grew into one of Britain's most successful and best-known enterprises.Much of its focus in recent years has been on expanding into the United States and Europe. It now has 1,128 stores worldwide, including 240 in Britain, 196 in the United States and 111 in Canada. Many of the stores are franchises.In its latest fiscal year, ended Feb. 28, the Body Shop reported a net profit of $:19.4 million, or just under $30 million at current exchange rates, a gain of 40 percent over the previous year.From the beginning, the Roddicks sought to position the Body Shop as a store with a conscience. Mrs. Roddick, the company's managing director and its public face, spoke out about human rights, environmental protection, cosmetic tests using animals and fair trade with developing nations. It donated money to charity and supported various causes.In Britain, for example, it spent $450,000 to start a newspaper produced and sold by homeless people. The paper, The Big Issue, is now self-supporting and is widely considered a model for providing opportunity and hope for homeless people.The company's do-good image has been challenged from time to time, and the company has a reputation for responding aggressively. After a critical documentary by Britain's Channel Four, the Body Shop filed a libel suit in London and won a $425,000 judgment.Last weekend, the Body Shop distributed a six-page dossier on Mr. Entine, raising questions about his reporting techniques and saying he was conducting "a single-minded campaign of vilification" against the company. Earlier this year, the company threatened to sue Vanity Fair magazine, which was then considering printing a version of Mr. Entine's article. Vanity Fair later rejected the article, and people there said the decision was not determined by the Body Shop's threats.In its statement today, the Body Shop said it was "reviewing" its legal options in response to the Business Ethics article."The Body Shop's goal here is to isolate this as a story between me and them," Mr. Entine said in an interview.</div><a href="http://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/02/business/market-place-body-shop-s-green-image-is-attacked.html?pagewanted=print">http://www.nytimes.com/1994/09/02/business/market-place-body-shop-s-green-image-is-attacked.html?pagewanted=print</a>=http://www.theguardian.com/business/2007/apr/13/retail2 tired to buy TBS<a href="http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=8d40fc2f-bc4d-4cb9-abb4-f39c5dcf337a&k=23533">http://www.financialpost.com/story.html?id=8d40fc2f-bc4d-4cb9-abb4-f39c5dcf337a&k=23533</a>...Purists, including Mr. Constantine, say the buyouts serve as a fig leaf for large corporations who appropriate the virtues of the ethical company to rehabilitate their image. The trend has led to a new term dubbed "green-washing." While the North American arm of Lush, based in Vancouver and coowned by Mark Wolverton, may benefit from their competitors' sellout -- Lush's sales are predicted to jump from US$50-million in 2007 to US$80-million this year -- Mr. Constantine says the buyout fever will eventually lead to a consumer backlash.He cites an informal survey on treehugger.com, which found that 48% of customers would abandon an ethical brand if they were bought out by a multinational. In addition, following the sale of the Body Shop to L'Oreal, the company's "buzz rating" had fallen 10 points and "satisfaction" rating levels declined from 25 points to 14, according to BrandIndex ratings measured by YouGov. But that's not slowing the trend. According to a report issued by Euromonitor last year, natural and organic products were a key driver in the 5% growth of the US$270-billion market between 2001 and 2006 because they "inject innovation" and sell at a 30% to 50% premium over standard products.....
=worked for UN in field, tookreports on torture vics?)employees paid 1/2 day's wage to do comm serviceco $ to amnesty int'l and PETA
The Limited copies; lease barred TBS
Ben Cohen quit Biz Ethics mag
David Moberg
H&K got entine on NPR? why?
1994 ethics audit b/c they bought mail list?!
jan 1995 utne forum
entine publ a verson of art;l in trade mag; even before publ in BizEthics, stock price took a hit when an org sold stock
biz ethics says checked all sources, but i can't confrom any?=http://www.investmentbanter.com/showthread.php?t=18367
<table class="tborder" id="post54043" cellpadding="6" cellspacing="1" border="0" width="100%" align="center" style="border: 1px solid rgb(25, 55, 55); font-size: 12px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><tbody><tr><td class="thead" style="font-weight: bold; font-size: 11px; padding: 4px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><div class="normal" style="font-weight: normal;"> June 15th 04, 08:35 PM</div></td></tr><tr><td class="alt2" style="font-size: 1em; line-height: 21px; padding: 0px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="6" border="0" width="100%"><tbody><tr><td nowrap="nowrap" style="font-size: 1em; line-height: 21px;"><div id="postmenu_54043"><div class="smallfont" style="font-size: 1em; line-height: normal;">Jon Entine</div></div><div class="smallfont" style="font-size: 1em; line-height: normal;">external usenet poster</div></td><td width="100%" style="font-size: 1em; line-height: 21px;"> </td><td valign="top" nowrap="nowrap" style="font-size: 1em; line-height: 21px;"><div class="smallfont" style="font-size: 1em; line-height: normal;"><div>Posts: n/a</div><div /></div></td></tr></tbody></table></td></tr><tr><td class="alt1" id="td_post_54043" style="line-height: 21px; background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><div class="smallfont" style="font-size: 1em; line-height: normal;"><img class="inlineimg" src="http://www.investmentbanter.com/images/icons/icon1.gif" alt="Default" border="0" title="Default" style="vertical-align: middle;" /> THE STRANGER-THAN-TRUTH STORY OF THE BODY SHOP</div><hr size="1" style="font-size: 1em;" /><div id="post_message_54043">My name is Jon Entine. I'm â€˜scholar-in-residence' at Miami University
(Ohio) teaching journalism and corporate social responsibility. I'm
also a columnist for the British magazine "Ethical Corporation"
(<a href="http://www.ethicalcorp.com/" target="blank">www.ethicalcorp.com</a>) and a frequent writer on business ethics,
journalism ethics, and science and public policy (I have a few books
on genetics). My website is: <a href="http://www.jonentine.com/" target="blank">http://www.jonentine.com</a>

Many of you will recall the 1994 Business Ethics magazine article
"Shattered Image: Is The Body Shop Too Good to Be True?--the first
balanced look at the myth of Anita Roddick and the Body Shop.

"Shattered Image" led to a reassessment of the company and the
"corporate social responsibility" movement as a whole, because it
demonstrated how credulous academicians and journalists had been in
accepting at face value the misrepresentations at the heart of the
Body Shop myth. It accelerated the movement toward transparency and
accountability, rather than celebrating posturing and rhetoric at the
expense of stakeholdersâ€”the centerpiece of Anita Roddick's â€˜marketing
strategy.

Now, the 10,000-word essay upon which "Shattered Image" was based (but
was never published) is included in a book put out by the book
division of the left magazine Nation. "Killed: Great Journalism Too
Hot to Print" (Nation Books):
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1560255811/qid=1083936657/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_1/002-5208305-0489642?v=glance&s=books" target="blank">http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg...glance&s=books</a>

In its review of the book, Publisher's Weekly called my article," THE
STRANGER-THAN-TRUTH STORY OF THE BODY SHOP, "a model of investigative
journalism.'

Unlike the Business Ethics piece, which focused on the company, this
story is built around Anita Roddick herself. It includes the
blow-by-blow details of her brazen heist of the Berkeley Body Shop as
well as the impact that her erratic character--effervescent and
inspiring at times, demonic at others-- has had on the company and its
operations. There are many fascinating stories. The article presents a
very human picture, often sympathetic--it just describes the Body Shop
from the inside--how its stakeholders, not its cult followers, know
it.

Among the key facts: Anita Roddick's reputation is built upon thievery
and lying. Most startling--she stole the name, products, brochure
design, product descriptions, marketing ideas--virtually everything
that 'brands' a company--from the Berkeley Body Shop that she visited
six years before she opened her copycat version in England. Roddick
even repeated the grammatical errors in her word-for-word copying of
the brochures (which I have, along with recorded interviews of people
who accompanied her to the shops in the Bay Area)! Roddick also
fabricated almost every aspect of her 'founder's myth', such as her
absurd stories of finding her exotic ingredients in trips around the
world--stories credulously repeated even in 'academic' accounts of
Body Shop today! Body Shop had even lied about its charitable
contributionsâ€”the company gave ZERO money to charity over the first 11
years of Body Shop's existence, and when I did my story in 1994, was
averaging less than half the percentage of charitable contributions of
average companies. (FYIâ€¦Body Shop did increase its charitable
contributions somewhat after my criticism, but even today, its
contributions are dismal relative to other companies its size, and
only look minimally acceptable because it calculates them based on its
pre-tax profits, which have been tanking for years.)

The sources for the article and are all first hand: her best friend
who opened her first shop and whose former boyfriend became her
partner; her first cosmetologist, Mark Constantine, the founder of
â€˜Lush' cosmetics; her first PR agent; her first franchisees; the
former wife of the president of the American Body Shop, who provided
an eyewitness account of how Roddick stole her ideas from the Berkeley
Body Shop. There are literally more than a hundred others including
former Chief Financial Officers, director of her image campaigns, and
the staff of her quality control operations, which provided testing
results showing how Body Shop has regularly sold contaminated
products. (It goes without saying that Body Shop's synthetic, heavily
fragranced, artificially colored cosmetics are among the â€˜least
natural' (and over-priced) in the faux natural products nicheâ€”one of
Roddick's company's nicknames is "The Shoddy Bop" because of the poor
quality of her cosmetics).

Since my original article, Body Shop's stock has declined by
approximately $700 million, it's cut its operations in the US by 2/3,
its been forced to pay out more than $200 million to settle franchise
fraud suits and to buy out dissident franchisees, its shown net
negative cash flow for years, and it has abandoned its disastrous
<a class="vglnk" title="Link added by VigLink" rel="nofollow" href="http://www.amazon.com/">Amazon</a> exploitation. The Body Shop has all but kicked Roddick out in
an attempt to salvage this ethical and operational mess.

(Yet, because of her cult following, particularly among some
academics, on these lists and elsewhere, Roddick has maintained a
platform for traveling around the world demagoguing issues, while her
franchisees, mostly women who swallowed her hype, are in dire
financial straits).

Here's the brief intro that runs with the piece in the Nation book:

THE STRANGER-THAN-TRUTH STORY OF THE BODY SHOP
By Jon Entine
Killed by Vanity Fair, 1994

Ever wonder why the British press routinely bashes the Royal Family,
but does not produce the kind of investigative reports on corporate
corruption so common to the United States? How, for example, did
Robert Maxwell, the right-wing British media tycoon infamous for
pillaging his company's pension funds manage to avoid an exposÃ© even
though his misdeeds were well known among journalists?

Welcome to the stifling reality of investigative reporting in Britain,
where corporations exploit Commonwealth libel law to ensure
unpalatable truths remain concealed. In contrast to the legal
protections of the First Amendment and The New York Times vs. Sullivan
(1964), in British courts the burden of proof is on the defendant to
prove beyond a doubt the truth of any allegations. Even when
journalists get all the facts right, they often lose. Only after
Maxwell died in 1991 did Fleet Street admit they had been aware of his
improprieties, but had refrained from reporting on them for fear of
prosecution.

The Body Shop hired Maxwell's former legal swat team, Lovell White
Durrant, to squelch critical stories. "As you will no doubt be aware
of by now," an editor at The Daily Telegraph wrote me in April 1994
explaining why the paper had shelved an investigation of Roddick, "our
libel law is much more restrictive than yours. The truth in certain
circumstances is an insufficient defence."

Vanity Fair faced a similar legal onslaught from Lovell White Durrant.
"We wish to emphasize that Mr. Entine â€¦ has conveyed libel slanderous
and libelous statements to a wide variety of individuals in the United
Kingdom," Body Shop's lawyers wrote in one of many threatening letters
to CondÃ© Nast's General Counsel. "Such statements are false and
defamatory and actionable under English law." The legal advisors to
the magazine, which prints a British edition, reluctantly concluded
that publishing the exposÃ©, no matter how accurate, was too
financially risky.
As disturbing as the censorship, however, was the wimpy reaction of
so-called progressives to evidence of Body Shop's ethical
transgressions.

While researching the story, I encountered an unexpected
circle-the-wagons mentality from many journalists and activists, who
knew about the gap between Roddick's rhetoric and The Body Shop's
practices. Desperate for a feminist superstar, they had willfully
overlooked the hypocrisyâ€“â€“and the fact that The Body Shop's name, some
of its products and its marketing concept were stolen from a
predecessor chain of the same name--not out of fear of a law suit, but
because they believed her message of "social justice" was inspiring
and that someone with a progressive reputation was entitled to a â€˜get
out of jail free' card. Thankfully, I did get investigative support
from dozens of top journalists, fair trade activists, animal right
campaigners and others not seduced by rainforest chic.
In the years following my investigation, The Body Shop paid out more
than $200 million to settle franchise disputes and to cover endless
corporate reorganizations. Its stock dropped by three quarters before
recovering slightly, stripping investors, peak to trough, of 700
million dollars. In 2000, Roddick herself tacitly acknowledged the
depths of the company's problems, deriding her creation as a
"dysfunctional coffin," then putting it on the block; only bottom
feeders bid on it.

Don't cry for Anita Roddick; she's still worth hundreds of millions.
However, the "green" movement has paid a high price for this brazen
exploitation of idealism. Following the trail Roddick blazed in
cynical "cause related marketing," corporations now use green symbols
to peddle everything from tobacco to industrial chemicals.
Progressives love to create heroes and unmask hypocrites; with Anita
Roddick, they hit the Daily Double. Let's hope we've learned a lesson.
If reformers and critical journalists don't have the guts to demand
integrity and honesty from someone who poses as a social reformer,
they stand for nothing at all.

This article is essential reading to anyone who embraces corporate
reform and does not want the movement hijacked by demagogues and/or
hypocrites.

Regards,

--
Jon Entine
Scholar in Residence, Miami University (Ohio)
<a href="http://www.jonentine.com/" target="blank">http://www.jonentine.com</a>
(513-527-4385)</div></td></tr></tbody></table>
=nat post no date obit cda
It's a September mid-morning and the concrete shacks lining the road into Ixmiquilpan, a dusty, poor town, are broiling, sending everyone into the town square. Young Nanhu Indian boys play a game with a stick and string, while the girls and their mothers, their hair tied with colourful berets, look on.Suddenly, a mariachi band starts playing and six vans pull up. Out bounds Anita Roddick, the founder of The Body Shop. It's 1992 and these are the best of times for Anita -- everyone calls her by her first name. She is an international legend, part Robin Hood, part Mother Teresa. She rustles the hair of the boys and hugs the women, who giggle shyly at the white princess. There is a magnetic force about her. Charisma.This ramshackle town was soon transformed into a Hollywood set. "It was a bizarre scene," recalled Alison Rockett, a young Canadian hired by Roddick to scout locations for the filming. "Port-o-johns with flush toilets were hauled in from Mexico City," four hours by bus to the south. "A chef was hired to prepare smorgasbord and fettuccine Alfredo."There are two crews: American Express has sent 20 people to film Roddick as part of its "Don't leave home without it" campaign, and Body Shop has dispatched a PR team to tape Amex filming Anita. Although Roddick has long boasted she would never stoop so low as to advertise -- crass capitalism, she had said-- she has jumped at the promotional opportunity.Anita walks into the crowd enveloped by an army of cameramen carrying boom mics and reflectors. "I want you to film my favourite people," she tells one cameraman, and then turns to the villagers. "I will be getting money for this filming, and I want to give it to you. What do you need?"For the Nanhu, more is at stake than an advertisement. The local women make cheap exfoliating mitts from a local cactus plant for which they earned a profit of a peso (then equivalent to 17 cents) per mitt. If they could land a de-cent-sized order, there might be enough money to build a school or repair some houses. With the cameras rolling, one woman says the village needs a tortilla machine. A teacher asks for a library. Anita promises they'll get them."Anita just kept saying 'uh huh, uh huh', jotting down their requests on this little notepad," said Rockett. Word of her largesse spread quickly. People travelled for hours on foot to meet the woman who was going to lift them out of poverty. "She was so enthusiastic they thought she was going to buy them everything they needed. It was all done so spontaneously but really so thoughtlessly."---Even in the eyes of her sharpest critics, Roddick was larger than life, with a big heart, a quick wit and a foul mouth. She had chutzpah. The beauty business? It was made up of monsters that lied, cheated and exploited women by selling rubbish. Corporate executives? "F---ing robber barons." Investment bankers, the ones who floated her stock and made her a multi-millionaire? "Blood-sucking dinosaurs."On the other hand, Roddick had no doubt about Body Shop's place in the pantheon of responsible companies. "I think you can trade ethically, be committed to social responsibility, empower your employees. I think you can rewrite the book on business," she often said. Many women idolized her for promoting a feminist business ethic based on "love" and "care" and "intuition."Traditional cosmetic firms peddled beauty in a bottle. But under Roddick's vivid command, Body Shop took a commodity product and charged a huge "integrity premium," packaging idealism and hope for a better world. Customers snapped up her not-tested-on-animals Brazil-nut hair conditioner, making her rich and influential in the process. At its height, her Body Shop empire had more than 2,100 branches in 55 countries.But Roddick's legion of admirers saw her as far more than just a beauty titan. In obituary after obituary, following her untimely death last week at the age of 64, she was celebrated for her outspoken support for social causes. Over the years, this ex-hippie had morphed into a renowned anti-capitalist gadfly, promoting the latest politically correct cause: ending animal testing; saving the whale; rescuing the rainforest; encouraging recycling; combating global warming.When she began her campaigning ways, social marketing was a radical stance in the corporate world. Now, every company, it seems, is going green. Arguably, many of these "socially responsible" initiatives have their origins in promotions embraced, indeed invented, by Dame Anita. Which raises an important question: What is Anita Roddick's real legacy? Did The Body Shop "walk its talk" as Anita and her husband Gordon used to boast?By the late 1980s, so-called "Trade Not Aid" had become the "cornerstone" of what Body Shop was all about, according to Anita. But it's difficult to determine what that meant. After all, Body Shop sold a commodity product -- cosmetics, readily available in comparable quality in any drugstore. Its brand image -- and profit margin -- revolved around its claims of honesty and integrity. Is it important that you "walk your talk," as Anita always claimed was Body Shop's credo?Words versus deeds. It was always an issue at Roddick's Body Shop. "The new corporate responsibility is as simple as just saying no to torturers and despots," Anita proclaimed in 1992 at a keynote speech at an International Chamber of Commerce meeting in Cancun. "The world applauded when the Olympics chose not to go to Beijing-- we should listen to that message." Yet, even as Roddick was delivering her speech, Body Shop was sourcing millions of dollars of goods from China.Body Shop's first trading scheme, manufacturing footsie rollers in India at an orphanage for young boys, blew up amid charges that the orphanage was run by a pedophile, about whom the Roddicks had been warned of in advance. Its first Brazilian project, Amazon bath beads made from babassu oil, were actually made from refined oil purchased from Croda Chemical. (Babassu nuts aren't even grown in the rainforest.)The biggest controversy swirled around its sourcing of Brazil nuts from the Kayapo, whose chief would later successfully sue Body Shop for exploiting his image for commercial gain. Former University of Chicago anthropologist Terrence Turner, an expert on the Kayapo, ridiculed the initiative as a gimmick, calling it "Aid Not Trade" -- aid by developing peoples to Body Shop with no real trade in return. "Don't be fooled by Body Shops benevolent exterior. Their project has been very disruptive for the Kayapo." At the height of the publicity surrounding Body Shop's ethical trading claims, in 1993, Roddick was sourcing no more than 0.165 % of its goods from fair-trade sources."Anita is a myth-o-maniac," said Mara Amats, who set up another of Roddick's failed celebrated projects, a papermaking venture in Nepal. Amats said Roddick rejected the chance to work with UNICEF to make high quality paper using rice paper harvested in an environmentally sensitive manner, but instead bought cheap paper that didn't sell. "They just made symbolic purchases" as a promotional gimmick, she said. "Anita instinctively understood the facile nature of the press and just played to it. She had her head in the clouds and her feet in s--t."That's too harsh a judgment. Roddick's Achilles heal was her unbounded enthusiasm that allowed her to promise the world without evidencing much regret when she did not or could not deliver.Consider what happened in Mexico, after the commercial was in the can. The local Nanhu were thrilled--at first. But soon, the caterers packed away their omelette pans and white tablecloths, and Roddick and the crews departed. In the months that followed, there were no first world wages. The promised gifts and increased orders for scrub mitts never materialized."Anita broke every rule in Anthropology 101," Rockett said. "In the days after she left, people were abuzz with talk of presents that this white goddess was going to send them. Months after she left, people were still saying, 'Where's my tortilleria?' ""Roddick had no understanding of what it's like working with pre-capitalist cultures," sighed Peter Winkel, the Dutch anthropologist who headed the Mexican project. When, after three years of ravaging inflation, he suggested a small raise in the price she paid for the mitts, Roddick wouldn't budge. "They told me they could get similar mitts cheaper in India, so I dropped it."---The conflicting stories about the origins of The Body Shop offer perhaps the most revealing insight into Roddick's character. The idea for the shops just popped into her head, Roddick wrote in Body and Soul, the first of her numerous ghostwritten autobiographies. She claimed she came up with the clever name from the auto-repair businesses, named "body shops," that she noticed while travelling with Gordon in California in 1970. Six years later, Roddick opened her first store in Brighton, England, offering exotic-sounding "natural" potions sold in small plastic bottles with hand-written labels.There was a slight gap in her recounting of the story, however. Her shops did trace to body shops that Anita had seen in her travels, but not of the auto variety. While in San Francisco and Berkeley, Anita and Gordon had visited a tiny hippie shop owned by Peggy Short and Jane Saunders, sisters by marriage. It was a fun place, offering "biodegradable" shampoos and lotions made with avocado, cocoa butter and cucumber, packaged in round refillable plastic bottles with handwritten labels. The store carried glycerin soaps scented with strawberry and perfume oil redolent of gardenia. It was housed in CJ's, formerly an auto garage. The founders cleverly named it "The Body Shop.""That was the place to buy shampoo and body cream," said Alma Dunstan, the paramour of David Edwards, Gordon's longtime friend, who lived in the Bay Area and hosted Anita and Gordon during the visit. She recalled Anita going on a buying binge at The Body Shop in San Francisco, walking out with fistfuls of hand-cut soaps, loofahs --and brochures.The Roddicks' copycat shop, opened six years later, nicked everything from the business name to the green colour scheme to the cosmetic line. The original Body Shop brochure noted: "All of our products are biodegradable & made to our specifications ? Bottles 20¢ or bring your own." Anita's version read: "All our products are biologically soft and made to our specifications ? Bottles 12p, or bring your own." The original offered Four O'clock Astringent Lotion; Anita sold Five O'clock Astringent Lotion.The heist continued for many years thereafter. A particularly telling knockoff is a still popular facial scrub made from ground adzuki beans, which Anita called "Japanese Washing Grains." She bragged that she came up with the idea for it during a sojourn through Asia. The truth is more prosaic. The Korean woman who made the kimonos sold in the Bay Area shops shared her family's secret preparation, which led to "Korean Washing Grains," introduced years before.Why didn't the founders of the California Body Shop challenge Roddick? Offered US$3.5-million in 1987 to change their name to Body Time, Peggy and Jane opted for the promise of lifetime security. As part of the settlement, they agreed to a gag order. But over the years, Roddick's claims to have originated the concept began to grate."What really got them angry was the ongoing deception," said David Brostoff, a former executive with Body Time. "Anita's constant lie that she originated the idea, the green colour scheme, the products, all the things that gave the company its unique identity ? never in our wildest imagination did [we] think that Roddick, with all her claims about being so honest, would keep this fabrication going," Brostoff said.The origin story was only one of the many myths of The Body Shop, I discovered in 1993, when I first began investigating the company.The investigation culminated in the publication of an award-winning article, Shattered Image: Is The Body Shop Too Good to Be True? in the U.S.-based Business Ethics magazine in 1994, which sent the stock on a multi-year tailspin.As the green marketing movement that Roddick helped birth gathered momentum, and Roddick rolled out her franchise into suburban malls around the world, misrepresentations mounted. Roddick claimed in company "fact sheets" that Body Shop "donated an inordinately high percentage of pre-tax profits to often controversial charitable campaigns." The English Charity Commission contended differently. Over the first 11 years of its business, The Body Shop made zero charitable contributions -- not one penny. After my expose, in 1994, the company's percentage of contributions, based on its pre-tax profits, increased dramatically. But because it struggled financially, its charitable donations were always modest in comparison to companies with similar revenues.What about its "natural products"? Roddick and her brochures touted them as "100% natural." Not. From the very first, Roddick added massive doses of chemical preservatives, petrochemical-based dyes and artificial fragrances so the cosmetics smelled like their natural-sounding names, all to create the "fun" atmosphere that became so much a part of The Body Shop's image."Roddick never could care less about ingredients," said Mark Constantine, Anita' original cosmetologist, who left the company in the 1980s and later went on to co-found Lush. It never even entered into her consciousness." Today, The Body Shop retains its reputation in the cosmetic industry as a producer of drug-store quality faux natural beauty products, but with high street prices.An environmental leader? Let's be real for a moment and separate Roddick's verbiage from her practices. She sold cosmetics made mostly with water, colourings, fragrances and preservatives made from petrochemicals. Body Shop packages beauty notions in plastic bottles, an anathema to serious environmentalists, and ships them around the world in carbon-belching trucks and planes. From an environmental perspective, its business model is a train wreck.From its earliest days, Body Shop was always more about image than substance. In 1979, the Roddicks contracted with Janis Raven, who ran a public relations company in London, to ramp up promotions. Janis, Mark and Anita became the merry mythmakers, concocting elaborate fables about some of their best-selling natural-sounding cosmetics: cocoa butter inspired by Hawaiian natives; peppermint foot lotion mixed on request of the London Marathon; eye gel developed for a computer firm concerned about worker eye strain. The stories, like Anita's claims of travelling the world before the stores opened and discovering cosmetic wonders, were all fabrications."The pineapple facial wash ? we talked about Anita going to Sri Lanka and seeing the women rubbing pineapples over them. You know, that kind of nonsense."Why was it nonsense?"Because it wasn't true. That was Mark's information, and we just decided to make it a bit more romantic."Even the widely held belief that Roddick was the original source of Body Shop's social consciousness was an exaggeration."Mark is the one who actually got her fired up about green things," Raven recalled. Anita knew little about cosmetics and was originally oblivious to the debate over animal testing."She and I used to have arguments over whether 'not tested on animals' should be on the bloody bottle," Constantine said. "She couldn't see the point. It was just a few vegetarians and ex-hippies."Body Shop's celebrated campaigns didn't begin until 1986, when the company faced its first serious challenge to its natural marketing niche from Revlon and Marks & Spencer. Looking for a way to promote her products made with jojoba oil, which Body Shop claimed was a substitute for whale spermaceti -- it isn't -- Anita hooked up with Greenpeace U.K., printing fundraising posters to "save the whale." Raven, who shortly thereafter left in a salary dispute, created a brilliant media campaign that established Anita as the Queen of Green."The link with Greenpeace signals a change in corporate attitude at The Body Shop," Raven read from her scrapbook as we talked in her office. This marks a "serious public commitment to protecting the natural world." She looked up and at me and laughed. "That is a real serious sort of nonsense statement, isn't it? And I wrote it."But it worked. Emboldened by the PR coup, Anita threw herself behind one cause after another. Body Shop's "two-for-one" promotion had idealistic girls agog: Buy a bottle of lotion and get social justice for free.The anointing of Saint Anita had begun. "She went a bit over the top," said Raven. "Anita just disappeared up her own backside. She started to believe her own publicity."In one sense, the fibs are understandable. After all, few retail ideas are original, and Roddick has earned her reputation as a savvy businesswoman. In fact, for a brief period into the early '90s, Body Shop was a case study in success.It thrived on the idealism of young women like Toni Lambert, a management trainee at Royal Bank in the early 1980s, when she wandered into a Body Shop and was charmed by its sense of fun. "I was 24 years old and for the first time, I knew that this is what I wanted to do," she told me. Lambert came to own two Toronto-area franchises, and eventually moved to Michigan, opening more Body Shops.It was during this period that Body Shop reached a tipping point. In its early days, its vast network of franchisees, who had paid a pittance for the right to open a shop, profited. But sales slipped. According to court filings involving nine U.S. franchises, to cut costs Body Shop consistently understocked franchisees by as much as 40% and discriminated against them in favour of company-owned stores. Even as the company raked in sizable profits selling new franchises and pushing wholesale products through the system, franchisees faced brutal competition from copycats, like The Limited's Bath and Body Works, which sold similar drugstore-quality products, but at lower prices.Franchisee revolts erupted in Norway, Scotland, Britain, France, Spain, the United States and Canada. "For 12 years, I put everything I owned into that company -- my life, my home," Lambert says, who found sales and once-massive profit margins collapsing. "I even adopted a new country." In 2001, an Ontario Superior Court Judge scolded Body Shop for attempting "an egregious breach of widely accepted commercial morality ? not consonant with our system of justice and general moral outlook," prompting Body Shop to reach an out-of-court settlement.As part of a massive shift away from its franchising model in the late 1990s, the company shuttered or took over hundreds of shops and paid out more than $200-million to settle with dissidents. In August, 2000, Roddick tacitly acknowledged the depths of the problems, deriding her creation as a "dysfunctional coffin." It was an odd comment as she and her husband were desperately searching for a suitor to take the damaged goods off their hands. With only bottom feeders expressing interest, they installed yet another executive team, the fourth corporate makeover in a decade.The Roddicks finally agreed to back away from the business, and The Body Shop commenced a remarkable resurgence that returned it solidly into the black. Last year, the Roddicks agreed to sell to L'Oreal for US$1.3-billion, a fraction of its estimated worth 15 years previously.---In recent years, with the responsibility of actually running a business behind her, Roddick moved on to her real passion: stumping for her brand of social justice. She and Gordon made almost US$250-million from the sale, on top of the hundreds of millions they had earned over the years. Saying that she believed it was a disgrace to die rich, she donated US$60-million to her foundation.Anita Roddick had what amounted to a cult following among followers who believed she had ushered in a new age of responsible business. But when the solemnity subsides and the history books are finally written, she is not likely to be remembered as the world's most socially responsible executive. She recognized long before most businesses that the world economy was headed toward a commodity model, with products differentiated mostly by brand image. She rode the green wave she helped create into the suburban malls of the world, becoming unimaginably wealthy in the process. Let's not forget what Dame Anita wrote, in large type and bolded, in the last line of Body and Soul: "I'm doing this for me."Perhaps if Anita Roddick had not spent most of her career promoting herself as a model ethical businesswoman she would not have become such a target."She stands full square between Estee Lauder and Elizabeth Arden," said Mark Constantine. "They all wrote their own stories." In the end, she is just one more beauty baroness who created a myth to make her dreams come true. Anita never could decide whether she wanted to practise her social vision or merely exploit it. - Jon Entine is a columnist and board member for Ethical Corporation magazine, adjunct fellow for the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., and a sustainability consultant for Northlich, a brand management firm based in Cincinnati, Ohio.not here https://connect.data.com/directory/company/list/uS9epKKUD_J_ZSV3IpNDBg/northlich=
london greenpeace/ http://www.mcspotlight.org/beyond/companies/bs_ref.html
cites entine repeatedly
46. The Body Shop has threatened legal action against many critics or potential critics such as the Sunday Times (UK, 1980), BBC 'Tomorrow's World' programme (UK, 1980), Mail on Sunday (UK, 1991), 'International Management' magazine (1986), 'Mandesbladet Press' (Denmark, 1994), the Guardian (UK, 1996), 'Oko-Test' magazine (Germany), Survival International (UK, 1992), 'Vanity Fair' (USA, 1994), and 'Business Ethics' magazine (USA, 1994). The company brought a libel action against Channel 4 (UK) in 1992/3. The Body Shop retained Hill & Knowlton, the giant PR company whose clients have included Idi Amin (Ugandan dictator), the Chinese government (after the Tiananmen Square massacre), and former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier. Hill & Knowlton founded the American Tobacco Research Council (an arm of the tobacco lobby). The Body Shop's lawyers in the UK are Lovell White Durrant, who represented the notorious Robert Maxwell. After publication of the critical article 'Shattered Image' in 'Business Ethics' magazine, the Body Shop set up a fake charity in order to illegally obtain Business Ethics' mailing list; they then sent out a condemnatory letter to all 12,000 subscribers.
 [Numerous articles by Jon Entine including "Squandering the Integrity Premium" (Feb 98); New Consumer (Autumn 94); Franklin Research's Insight (Sept 94); Body Shop letter to 'Business Ethics' subscribers (Sept 94); Letter from the editor of 'Business Ethics' magazine (13/9/94); "Survival International's contacts with the Body Shop" (Oct 94).] Survival International characterised the Body Shop's attitude towards them as "aggressive and bullying" ["Survival International's contacts with the Body Shop" (Oct 94).] 
In his social assessment commissioned by the Body Shop, Kirk Hanson concludes that "the company has not demonstrated adequate openness and transparency, accuracy in its general communications and willingness to entertain constructive criticism." He notes that it has "reacted poorly to criticism even from 'friends', franchisees and employees" ["Social Evaluation: The Body Shop International 1995".]=Franklin Research and Development 711 Atlantic AvenueBoston, MA 02111617-423-6655www.frdc.com 404
Publishes Investing for a Better World and Franklin Research's Insight, monthly newsletters with information on socially responsible investing, stocks, community investing, and shareholder activism.
Joan Bavaria, Eric Becker andSimon Billennessnow http://www.trilliuminvest.com/socially-responsible-investment-company/board/
Read more: http://www.utne.com/economy/socially-responsible-investing-2000.aspx#ixzz37g7i7w61
my copy cut and paste ok pdffile:///C:/DATAleno/BURKE1113/IMAGES/bodyshop.pdf
end w/ 2 complaints; align perception w/ reality 9higher std?) and don't attack critics [but stock price] entine is evil?
cast doubt on je as whisleblower? but also refutes main claims on trade not aid
http://www.trilliuminvest.com/pdf/ifbw_9-94.pdf  62 galsDurham, Michael and Jan Rocha. 1996. Amazon Chief Sues Body Shop: Anita Roddick Exploited Me, Claims Village Elder, The Observer (London), 3 March.
Business Ethics: The Magazine of Corporate ResponsibilityVolume 8, Issue 5, September/October 1994Shattered ImageJon EntinePages 23-28DOI: 10.5840/bemag19948558
=
September 7, 1994National Public Radio Morning Edition
Body Shop International Takes Heat With Ethics Charges
ADDENDUM: The following story about Body Shop International contained an erroneous statement, due to a tape editing error, when it was originally broadcast. The story ran in Morning Edition, September 7, 1994 and a correction was run the next day, September 8, 1994, in Morning Edition.
ALEX CHADWICK, Host: This is Morning Edition; I'm Alex Chadwick. The cosmetics company Body Shop International advertises itself as socially and environmentally responsible, but, an article in the Minnesota- based magazine Business Ethics challenges that claim. Among other things, the article alleges that Body Shop's products are not so natural, its policies not so environmentally conscious, and its business practices not so ethical. Nina Teicholz reports.
NINA TEICHOLZ, Reporter: With more than a thousand outlets in 45 countries, the London-based Body Shop's trademark bright-green stores are well-known to many consumers. And, like many people, the customers in this Washington, D.C., shop say the company's socially responsible reputation is one of the main reasons they buy Body Shop products.
BODY SHOP SHOPPER: I like to buy the ones that are made in, like, Third World countries and stuff like that. I think that's a really neat idea.
2nd BODY SHOP SHOPPER: I like their commitment to the environment. They're very conscious about that.
3rd BODY SHOP SHOPPER: And I like the fact that they don't use animal testing. I like to support that kind of business.
TEICHOLZ: But, last week, that progressive image came under fire. In an article published by Business Ethics magazine, journalist John Entine [sp] reported that the company's image is more myth than reality.
JOHN ENTINE, Journalist, Business Ethics' Magazine: The Body Shop is sleazy and bullying, and hides behind a veneer of rubbishy and manipulative propaganda. They are nothing more than a group of thugs. TEICHOLZ: Here, Entine quotes a letter sent to him by Steven Corey [sp], director of the Indigenous Peoples Rights Organization, Survival International. The statement may sound like hyperbole, but, Entine says more than 125 interviews with former employees, franchisees, and others, support that view. For example, according to Entine, the company emphasizes its program to buy raw materials from the developing world. Yet, those products account for less than 1 percent of its overall purchases. And he says the Body Shop's so-called natural products' are apparently filled with petrochemicals.
Mr. ENTINE: Its colorings, its fragrances, its preservative systems, its base ingredients, are all synthetics, are all petrochemicals. Yet, if you pick up a Body Shop brochure, or you look in their product catalogue, you don't see a word mentioning the petrochemicals.
TEICHOLZ: The Body Shop's record as an environmental leader is also called into question. In 1991, for example, David Brook [sp] was hired by the company to develop environmental programs for the company' s U.S. branch.
DAVID BROOK, Developed Environmental Programs for Body Shop International: The reality was that I had no budget to put those ideas and programs into place. At that point I began to question how sincerely committed the corporation was towards accomplishing those environmental objectives.
TEICHOLZ: Brook says company officials stymied his attempts to improve recycling efforts which, to him, reflected the Body Shop's overall focus on the bottom line.
Mr. BROOK: Some of the decisions that seemed to be made in the U.K. were based purely on economics and not on environmental concerns. And what I mean by that is that if it was cheaper to make a container out of a cheap plastic over there without regard to its recyclability, they would do it.
TEICHOLZ: Perhaps most troublesome of John Entine's allegations is that the Body Shop abuses its franchisees around the world.
Mr. ENTINE: The Body Shop just settled a breach of contract suit in Norway. French franchisees have banded together to take legal action. There are problems in Australia, Scotland-
TEICHOLZ: Conversations with several U.S. franchisees, afraid to be named, confirmed this portrayal. Their revenue never came close to company projections, and when, nearing bankruptcy, they approached the company for help, they say the Body Shop responded with legal threats and intimidation tactics. A spokesman for the House Small Business Committee, currently reviewing franchising practices, says he's received complaints from almost a quarter of the 65 U.S. Body Shop franchisees, and the Federal Trade Commission is investigating those complaints.
The Body Shop has launched a vigorous campaign of denial against the article, although company spokeswoman Angela Bawtry [sp] admits a rapidly expanding company sometimes makes mistakes.
ANGELA BAWTRY, Spokesperson, Body Shop International: At the end of the day we are human beings, and I think, you know, in any company you're going to get small incidents that don't go the way you want them to go, and we admit that that's the case. I think what we have here is a completely flawed picture of those incidents being exaggerated; some of them actually being untrue.
TEICHOLZ: She says the Body Shop fully discloses the contents of its products, and that synthetics and petrochemicals must sometimes be used for preservative purposes. She characterizes the company' s relationship with its franchisees as healthy and prosperous, and the Body Shop calls environmental manager David Brook a disgruntled former employee.' Consumer advocate Ralph Nader has criticized John Entine for picking on a decent, if imperfect, company, when so many other corporations engage in much more reprehensible business practices. But, as Richard Adams [sp], publisher of U.K.-based New Consumer magazine says, the Body Shop must answer to a higher standard of accountability. RICHARD ADAMS, Publisher, New Consumer' Magazine: The difficulty with the Body Shop is that it claims leadership of the social responsibility movement in business. To me, that means they have to be operating at really a very high level and, unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be the case.
TEICHOLZ: Many in the socially responsible investment movement are dismayed by the company's continued resistance to outside scrutiny and criticism. They hope the dispute will be clarified by two investment house reports on the Body Shop due out later this month. For National Public Radio, this is Nina Teicholz reporting.
CHADWICK: A correction now regarding our story yesterday about the Body Shop International, a producer of cosmetics and other beauty products. Due to a tape-editing error, the story created the impression that Body Shop products contain only petrochemicals and synthetics; in fact, the products do contain natural ingredients, as well as other substances.
[The preceding text has been professionally transcribed. However, in order to meet rigid distribution and transmission deadlines, it has not been proofread against audiotape and cannot, for that reason, be guaranteed as to the accuracy of speakers' words or spelling.]
 
May 31, 2002 R.O.B. - Toronto Globe and Mail's Report on Business Magazine,
Body Flop: Anita Roddick proclaimed that business could be caring as well as capitalist. Today The Body Shop is struggling on both counts.
By Jon Entine
It was early one Sunday morning and the thick scent of patchouli filled The Body Shop. It evoked memories of my own hippie days, but the overflow crowd at this freshly minted franchise shop was more Britney than bohemian. Girls in designer jeans chattered away on purple cellphones, standing painted nails-to-painted nails beside moms carrying Gucci bags.
Anita-everyone calls her by her first name-was there to open yet another store in what is now a 50-country cosmetics empire. This was San Francisco in 1994, but it could have been any time and any mall from the Eaton Centre in Toronto to the suburbs of Tokyo. Body Shops are packaged with a precision that would make Ronald McDonald blush with envy.
Anita launched into a spirited attack. Corporate executives? "Robber barons," she shouted. Investment bankers, the ones who floated the stock that made her fabulously wealthy? "Blood-sucking dinosaurs." They were rough words, but delivered and received with an unmistakable sincerity. There is a magnetic force about her. Charisma.
It was still the best of times for Anita, at least in the eyes of the media that had been so instrumental in the success of The Body Shop International PLC. She had created an empire by promoting herself as a trailblazing feminist who packaged an activist social philosophy in every bottle of facial cream.
"I'd rather promote human rights, environmental concerns, indigenous rights, whatever, than promote a bubble bath," she gushed, her raven hair flying. It was impossible not to notice the shelf stacked high with bath bubble gel, one of 14 Body Shop varieties that framed Anita almost perfectly.
The contradictory faces of Anita Roddick reappeared last February when she and her husband, Gordon, announced, not for the first time, that they were reducing their management roles. They stepped aside as co-chairmen, and director Adrian Bellamy, who oversaw Body Shop's recent strategy of sweeping up ailing U.S. franchises, was elevated to executive chairman. North American boss Peter Saunders, formerly chief operating officer of Eatons, took over as CEO. The announcement came after many months of failed negotiations to sell the company. A series of teams on a short leash had been installed over the years to reverse Body Shop's fortunes; now a new set would try.
After a previous round of takeover talks collapsed last summer, Roddick herself was quoted calling Body Shop a "dysfunctional coffin." Only a decade ago, journalists were hailing her as the Mother Teresa of Capitalism. Here was a harbinger of the New Age, weaned on can-do chutzpah and do-right rhetoric. Then came an almost endless series of ethical blowups, franchisee spats and organizational make-overs.
Body Shop stock peaked in 1992 at £3.72 on the London Stock Exchange. Once known as "the shares that defy gravity," they rediscovered Newton's Principia, plunging to their present level near 95 pence. That's a decline in market value of about £500 million.
It's a big comedown from the time when Body Shop grew as lushly as the Amazon rain forest. Early on, Gordon Roddick realized that, with the young company's borrowing potential tapped out, the best way to expand was by shifting the cost to others through "self financing"-franchising.
It was a brilliant formula for a while. During the boom times, when Body Shop was annually adding scores-sometimes hundreds-of stores, franchising was a cash cow. Body Shop International pocketed a chunk of each franchisee's start-up investment, which, in the U.S., now ranges from $318,700 to $774,750 (U.S.) per shop. In addition, franchisees are locked in as buyers of Body Shop's cosmetics and sundries, and pay royalties of 5% on sales. For the idealistic young women that Body Shop has attracted, such costs have been a daunting, sometimes insurmountable hurdle in the low-profit business of running storefront franchises.
In the good times, many franchisees prospered in tandem with the company. But by the 1990s, Bath & Body Works in the U.S., Boots in Britain, and even some department stores had developed similar lines, backed by fresher promotions. Body Shop continued to expand, but per-store sales declined for much of the decade. The 119 Canadian franchised shops have had far less competition and have not been hit nearly as hard. Nonetheless, some Canadian franchisees say that Body Shop Canada, which is privately owned by Margot Franssen, her husband, Quig Tingley, and her sister, Betty-Ann Franssen, has been "entertaining offers" and has been "very hopeful of finding a buyer" in recent years. (Body Shop Canada declined my requests for interviews for this article.)
The financial problems that began for Body Shop in the 1990s were compounded by its cosmetic line. When it came to phasing out synthetic colourings and artificial fragrances, the onetime innovator now appeared no better than premium competitors such as Aveda, Lush and Origins. That Body Shop had lost its edge became clear when even women's magazines, which had long lavished unqualified praise on the company, began taking potshots. In a 1995 article, Women's Wear Daily quoted a consultant who sniffed that Body Shop products are "low-end...at a premium price."
The fading cachet of Body Shop products intensified the plight of those franchisees who struggled to cover their debt as sales slumped. Yet even as complaints mounted-one typical article, in Britain's Sunday Times in 1996, blared, "Roddick faces franchise rebellion"-Body Shop continued to sell new franchises, require ever-larger investments from franchisees, and push products through the pipeline.
The rubber band has finally snapped. Over the past half-dozen years, Body Shop has been sweeping up hundreds of outlets around the world (some at just pennies on the dollar), shuttering its manufacturing operations, and adding debt. "They haven't had positive net cash flow for five years," noted John Stevenson, a London analyst with ING Barings Charterhouse Securities, in January. (In May, however, the company reported positive cash flow for fiscal 2002.)
Body Shop remains a mostly franchised operation. Only 29% of its 1,954 stores are in company hands. Body Shop executives would not grant me an interview for this article, but the company did release a statement, which cited strengthening sales in major markets. Still, "Our earnings profile over the last three years has inevitably reflected the very significant changes taking place within the business."
Stevenson, one of only three analysts who still follow the company, thinks that the issue is the company, not the sector. "Roddick is right, they're dysfunctional," he says. "And their competitors have a similar political message and products that are at least as good. As an innovative leader and growth company, Body Shop is a dead concept."
Despite that assessment, Anita Roddick made it clear during the February shakeup that she has no intention of stepping into the shadows. In her new role as a consultant to the company, she will offer "essential expertise in product, marketing and values." She added: "Being now a non-exec is going to be much more fun for me because you can be much more of a tyrant."
Anita Roddick's and Body Shop's stature as symbols of socially responsible business is not all hype. Body Shop is a pioneer of social and environmental accounting, in which companies report on their own ethics, warts and all. In a survey published in December by the Financial Times, media and non-government organizations ranked Body Shop second (after BP) among the world's companies for managing its environmental resources. Body Shop's reputation as a social marketer dates to a 1986 collaboration with Greenpeace U.K. It sold jojoba oil in a "save-the-whale" promotion (the oil was marketed as a substitute for whale spermaceti, which had not been used in mass-market cosmetics for years). The media lapped it up. Bolstered by the free publicity, Body Shop attracted waves of new customers. Ever since, the company has aligned itself with one politically correct cause after another: supporting the rain forest and recycling, battling domestic violence and globalization. At every turn, Roddick likens Body Shop to a grand experiment in "profits with principles."
Such rhetoric makes former franchisee and Toronto native Toni Lambert wince. Lambert, who first became a franchisee in 1985, put her stores into bankruptcy protection five years ago and remains locked in a bitter legal wrangle with Body Shop.
It's hardly surprising to find frustration among the hundreds of thousands of people who have bought franchises of one brand or another across North America. Franchising is often a precarious business. It's not long before eager but frequently naive entrepreneurs realize they are at the mercy of a big company with its own agenda. But Body Shop's hard-nosed tactics have come as a shock to franchisees attracted by its progressive reputation. The company has faced suits by at least 15 franchisees-and many additional threatened suits-over the last decade, including an action involving nine U.S. franchises that is set to go to trial as early as this fall.
Lambert was a management trainee at Royal Bank in the early 1980s when she wandered into a Body Shop and was charmed by its sense of fun. "I was 24 years old and for the first time, I knew that this is what I wanted to do," she says. Lambert came to own two Toronto-area franchises. These were the golden days for Body Shop and its partners. Franchisees, then paying a pittance for the right to open a shop, often made out famously. But as evolving franchisors are apt to do, Body Shop began to enforce stricter specifications on store design and the myriad details necessary to create a consistent shopping experience. Being a Body Shop franchisee gradually became more costly.
Lambert says that the Franssen-Tingley trio, which then also controlled franchise rights for the northeastern United States, approached her about buying two flagging shops near Detroit, with a promise of rights to the entire region. She jumped at the chance. In 1992, Lambert convinced her husband, John, to quit his job as head of trading and sales at Nomura Canada, a Bay Street brokerage. They sold the Toronto stores and moved to Detroit.
Business went like gangbusters-at first. Within a year, the Lamberts were offered a third shop, which they also revived. The problems started, they say, when they agreed to take over a struggling location in a crime-ridden mall. "No cherry picking," Toni Lambert says they were told. Rather, the company said, they'd be looked on favourably for future stores if they took over the money-losing one. Despite the erosion showing up in other franchises, the Lamberts took the deal.
Even as her profits began to slide, Lambert added two more stores. She also reached out to other franchisees as a member of the Committee for Progress, which the company set up as an advisory board to field franchisees' beefs. The committee presented Body Shop with a list of issues that mirror complaints by franchisees over the years: poor marketing and advertising, competition from company-owned stores and catalogues that operate with larger margins, and supply-chain screwups. According to court filings in the U.S. action involving nine franchises, Body Shop consistently understocked franchisees by as much as 40% and discriminated against them in favour of company-owned stores.
"The playing field between corporate and franchise stores was not even," Lambert contends. "It was like they were running two separate businesses." The final blow came in a disastrous 1996 Christmas season. The Lamberts ended up with a warehouse full of inventory. With Body Shop unwilling to help ease them out of their plight, she contends, Lambert and her husband put their business in bankruptcy protection. "We felt we had no choice. Under the basic franchise agreement, Body Shop had the right to take our assets and terminate our franchise at any time [if any of certain conditions of the wide-ranging agreement were breached]. They could have taken the stores." (Many companies' franchise agreements have such clauses.)
"For 12 years, I put everything I owned into that company-my life, my home," Lambert says. "I even adopted a new country."
Body Shop International's position on the dispute is that the Lamberts "reneged on a debt of over $1 million owed to us and subsequently moved to Canada." The company expects to prevail in court.
Toni Lambert is one of dozens of franchisees who have contacted me to tell their own Body Shop saga. The calls began in 1993 and led to the publication of my article "Shattered Image" in Business Ethics magazine. Some callers had complaints that were strictly business-franchisee revolts were simmering in the U.S., Asia and Europe. But more often, they painted a picture of Body Shop that was at odds with the company's image. The file grew fatter over the years. Some examples:
While Body Shop has touted its products as "naturally based" and "inspired by Nature," many of its bright colours and thick fragrances are produced in the laboratory. There have been instances of product contamination over the years, according to Food and Drug Administration inspection reports, interviews and documents from quality control managers, and statements from disgruntled franchisees. In the early '90s, various guides, including Consumer Reports, criticized Body Shop products on overall quality or for liberal use of synthetics.David Brook, a former Environmental Protection Agency lawyer who was Body Shop's manager of environmental affairs in the U.S. in the early 1990s, dismissed the company's environmental claims as "window dressing." He provided environmental-agency records documenting discharges of pollutants into the local water system at Body Shop's former U.S. headquarters in New Jersey. He says that after management blew off these and other problems, he quit in frustration.There is sometimes a gap between Body Shop's assertions that it "campaigns for human rights all over the world," and company practices. After Roddick, in a 1993 speech before the Congress of the International Chamber of Commerce, applauded companies that refused to trade with nations led by "torturers and despots," such as China, enraged employees sent me photocopies of supply manuals indicating Body Shop bought many of its gift baskets from Chinese companies. The Roddicks later said that, rather than boycott entire countries, Body Shop would require suppliers to sign a labour-standards code of conduct.The most famous of Body Shop's media-celebrated "Trade Not Aid" initiatives, sourcing Brazil nuts for hair conditioner from an Amazon tribe, has been rife with controversy. The face of its promotion, a grinning Kayapo chief, filed suit over the use of his image. A Kayapo expert from the University of Chicago ridiculed the fair-trade initiative as "Aid Not Trade"-aid from developing peoples to Body Shop. According to a U.K. fair-trade research group, Body Shop's 1993 payments to Third World producers amounted to 0.165% of its retail sales.Even Body Shop's reputation for charitable giving has been an issue. In 1994, reporters quoted Roddick as saying, "so what else do I do with the money than give it away to groups and projects relevant and right for our times." The record told a more penurious story. Whatever the Roddicks personally may have given away, the company says it has no record of making financial donations prior to 1986, a year in which it gave 0.4% of pretax profits to charity. Its giving averaged 1.46% a year in the following decade. (The percentage recently has gone up, albeit from a smaller profit pie.)Cumulatively, these episodes made Body Shop less of a magnet for the well-informed conscientious consumer: Maybe Body Shop wasn't about doing business differently after all. In 1987, the Roddicks made a fateful expansion decision: They moved into the world's most lucrative but most competitive market, the United States. But before they did, they had to deal with their long-simmering "Berkeley problem."
One of the foundations of the Anita Roddick myth is that she invented the Body Shop concept. In fact, the saga began not in Brighton in 1976 but one day early in that decade in the Bay Area of California. That's when the young Anita Perella, with a child in tow and pregnant, travelled with her boyfriend, Gordon, to visit Gordon's best friend, David Edward, in San Francisco.
David's former wife, Alma Dunstan-McDaniel, remembers dragging Anita to her favourite shop, a tiny toiletries store filled with tie-dyed decorations and redolent with incense. Anita was taken by the shelves stacked high with hand-cut soaps, loofah sponges, and exotic-sounding potions in small plastic bottles with hand-written labels. "We were young women and that was the place to buy your shampoo and your body cream, and it was hip and cool," Dunstan-McDaniel says. The owners, Peggy Short and Jane Saunders, had carved the original store in the little chain out of a converted garage, cleverly calling their creation The Body Shop.
Years later, back in England, a close friend of Roddick's remembers her excitedly going through dog-eared, hand-drawn brochures of the original Bay Area Body Shops. The breakthrough recycling policy, the products, and, most important, the California Body Shop's fun ethos all predated the version Roddick would launch in 1976.
Comparisons of the brochures of the two Body Shops are telling. Short and Saunders broke out their products under the categories "For the Hair," "For the Bath," "Creams," "Lotions" and "Essential Perfume Oils." They cut freshly made glycerine soaps in lemon, rose and strawberry scents, and poured perfume oils scented with linden, magnolia, "woody sandalwood" and ylang-ylang.
Roddick's brochures, put out years later, had nearly identical categories and many identical product names-or variations. Berkeley had "Four O'clock Astringent Toner"; England, "Five O'clock Witchazel Astringent." Berkeley offered "Beauty Grains: A natural cleanser made from finely ground Japanese Azuki beans." Brighton did too, save for the word "Japanese." The top of a California brochure stated, "All of our products are Biodegradable & made to our specifications in Berkeley"; and "Bottles 20¢ or bring your own." The top of a U.K. brochure read, "All our products are biologically soft and made to our specifications"; and "Bottles 12p, or bring your own."
In 1987, when Short and Saunders were happy proprietors of six Body Shops, the Roddicks offered them $3.5 million (U.S.) in exchange for the name. They snapped up the offer, converting their own stores to Body Time over a period of five years.
It is not illegal to copy a business concept; nor is it generally illegal to use a company name in a country where it has not been trademarked. Over the years, however, these otherwise mild-mannered women became resentful when customers accused them of stealing Anita Roddick's concept. Some would even show them comparison copies of the brochures.
"What really got them angry," says a colleague, "was the ongoing deception-Anita's lie that she originated the idea, the colour scheme, the products, all the things that gave the company its unique identity. Never in our wildest imagination did we think that Roddick, with all her claims about being so honest, would keep this fabrication going."
Body Shop has been adamant that its concept and name did not originate in California, and has used legal warnings to prevent or water down published reports to the contrary. The claim brings a blunt response from Dunstan-McDaniel, the witness to the borrowing. "That's bullshit, because I took her there. It felt unsavoury from the beginning. Anita ripped them off."
The buyout proved a short-lived triumph for Roddick. Like other European retailers who invaded the U.S. market-Benetton, Laura Ashley, Tie Rack, Sock Shop-Body Shop stumbled. Look-alike competitors, in particular Bath & Body Works, whose locations now outnumber Body Shop in the U.S. by about 5 to 1, came to dominate the premier malls, offering fresher products with sharper marketing and pricing.
In recent years, Body Shop has bought out or shuttered 160 franchisee stores in the U.S. Threatened suits by franchisees, including one by the Careless Group in England, and others in France, Spain, Germany and Austria, have also led to buyouts in some cases.
Body Shop's U.S. franchise offering documents provide details of other franchise dustups that actually made it to court. In one of several cases that allege breach of contract or fraud, Body Shop paid $878,900 in 1995 to its former Norwegian head franchisee. Earlier that year, Anne Downer, who had franchise rights for eight countries in Asia, collected $6.2 million (U.S.) to settle a dispute that exploded when Body Shop forced her to close her 12 Singapore stores.
Toni Lambert's case came to a head last June. Body Shop, which the Lamberts say had tried previously to petition them into personal bankruptcy in Michigan but failed, filed again in Canada. The Ontario Superior Court denied the company's motion. Judge Donald R. Cameron scolded Body Shop for attempting "an egregious breach of widely accepted commercial morality... not consonant with our system of justice and general moral outlook." Body Shop is appealing the decision. As a result of Judge Cameron's decision, the Lamberts, who say they owe Body Shop nothing, countersued in Michigan, claiming damages of $500,000 (U.S.).
These disputes have been costly for Body Shop. And they come on top of other outlays. In the past five years alone, Body Shop has paid out at least £80 million to acquire franchises, and another £20 million for restructuring. The way the restructuring costs have been accounted-as one-time rather than ongoing occurrences-has raised some eyebrows. "The recurring nature of the costs being treated as below-the-line led us to move some of them back above-the-line," says Matthew McEachran of Investec Henderson Crosthwaite in London.
Despite the prospect of further franchisee spats, London-based Seymour Pierce analyst Richard Ratner believes the company can at least stabilize its business if the founding couple's handpicked chief, Adrian Bellamy, "can keep the Roddicks at a distance." Considering that the founders hold 51.6% of the voting stock (including Bellamy's shares), and control the board, he's not optimistic about Bellamy's prospects. "In the end, the Roddicks are just not suited to be running a public company."
Bellamy did move quickly to address the franchisee situation. "I don't think we've used their knowledge and expertise as effectively as we might have," he said. Within a week of his assuming control, the Lamberts received a phone call from Body Shop Canada inquiring if they were open to a settlement, they say. "Bellamy wants to move on. He's a businessman," they quote Quig Tingley as saying. The Lamberts say they are continuing to press their legal case.
With its 25th anniversary just behind it, it's timely to consider the legacy of Body Shop and Anita Roddick. Mark Constantine, an original supplier of Roddick's who went on to found Lush, has mixed feelings. He often thinks back to those fun early days, mixing weird potions in his kitchen while Anita and Gordon looked on like kids in a candy store. "There is still a mass of innocence to those two despite it all," he sighed.
No one can take away Anita Roddick's success in building her empire. But it's increasingly doubtful that she will be remembered in her self-styled persona as the world's most socially responsible entrepreneur. Roddick may not always have been able to practise her social vision, but she was always able to promote it. She is assuming her place in history as one more beauty baroness who created her own myth to make an entrepreneurial dream come true.
"She stands full square between Estée Lauder and Elizabeth Arden," Constantine said. "They all wrote their own stories."
Jon Entine (runjonrun@earthlink.net) is contributing author to Case Histories in Business Ethics (Routledge, 2002). A previous article on The Body Shop, "Shattered Image", published in Business Ethics magazine in 1994, won a National Press Club Award in the United States.
soc.org.nonprofit ›REality Check on Working Assets1 post by 1 author  


Jon Entine 4/22/97

JON ENTINE 4/14/97NOT FOR PUBLICATION: SOURCE MATERIAL ONLYWORKING ASSETS and the POLITICS of “GREEN POWER”An opportunity to nurture the development of more energy options,especially renewable energy, is falling victim to politics within the“green power” and environmental movements. This bungled moment comesjust as a deregulation wave sweeps through the energy industry openingit to competition from alternative, green producers.In a desire to promote lower costs and bring more competition to theenergy industry, numerous states have embarked on pilot programs toderegulate the price of electricity. In the coming years, many stateswill introduce full-scale retail competition. Although there is atpresent considerable excess electric capacity, rates have long been keptartificially high, yet. According to energy experts, this excesscapacity will persist well into the next century.
De-regulation brings supply and demand more in balance, in effectallowing prices to float downward to reflect the current situation ofexcess energy. It opens the door for registered third parties – in thiscase Working Assets – to contract with local suppliers for their unusedcapacity, mark it up according to their own marketing standards, andresell it to pilot customers.
In 1996, New Hampshire became one of the first states to open up afraction of its market, 3%, to outside companies. These companiescontracted with the dozen+ companies that feed into the New Englandenergy pool grid known as NEPOOL.
That’s when the questionable green marketing story began.
Working Assets Long Distance becomes Working Assets Green Power
One of the 30-odd companies that jumped into the pilot project to buyand resell excess capacity was Working Assets Green Power, a division ofWorking Assets Funding Service, which operates Working Assets LongDistance. It promises to bring “clean” renewable energy to customers.Does it tell the truth?
CEO Laura Scher positions Working Assets as a leading sociallyresponsible company.’ WALD is a “pass through” telephone company, whichmeans it leases the phone lines from competitors (WALD contractsprimarily with Sprint, the target of considerable criticism fromactivist groups) and tacks on an “integrity” premium based on its brandmarketing as a ‘progressive’ company. That reputation is based largelyon its donation of 1% of its telephone bills to popular activist groups(and it gets the tax deduction for your contribution) and its vocalcampaigning on behalf of a myriad of high-profile social issues. Itadvertises heavily in New Age publications like Mother Jones and UtneReader. A look beneath the green veneer, however, raises disturbing questionsabout WALD’s basic integrity. Although WALD markets that its long distance rates are “lower” thancompetitors, its rates are consistently higher than the “big three” – asmuch as 300%+ higher when you compare overseas rates using itscompetitors popular “one rate” plans [compare WALD and AT&T on the UK].WALD’s low “basic rates” is functionally equivalent to “list price” onnew cars: nobody pays it. Even AT&T charges only 10 cents/ minute/24hours a day (plus $4.95 month). There are also at least two great “progressive” options for UScustomers: EarthTones charges 15 cents/minute with no monthly charge andAffinity, which is offered through environmental groups, will beat yourcurrent rate by 10% – meaning it would charge as little as 9.1 cents.Best of all, EarthTones gives all its profits to charity and Affinitygives 5% to its environmental sponsors – so you’re not lining thepockets of WALD which systematically overcharges its customers. WA CEO Laura Scher is also on the board of Community Products Inc.(CPI), the company created by Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s to sourceBrazil nuts for his ice cream and other “rainforest” products. WorkingAssets Funding Service invested $300,000 in CPI debentures in 1989 aspart of a deal that paid WA $30,000 a year with an additional $300,000bonus when WAFS cashed out in December 1995. During this period, CPI andBen & Jerry’s, with Scher’s apparent approval as board member, engagedin persistent marketing fraud by claiming that Ben & Jerry’s ice creamcontained Brazil nuts sourced directly from a co-op of indigenous AmazonIndians and that CPI gave 60% of its profits to charity. It turns out that Ben & Jerry’s sourced ZERO nuts from the co-op andbought all of its nuts off the commercial markets supplied by LatinAmerica’s most abusive agri-businesses. Moreover, CPI gives ZERO dollarsto charity today, and has given ZERO to charity since 1992. Previous tothat, CPI gave only 10% of its profits to charity. According to IRSdocuments that have been released as part of a fraud case against BenCohen and CPI, approximately $180,000 was given to Working Assets aspart of a marketing contract Peter Barnes (of Working Assets) worked outwith Cohen and Ben & Jerry’s, requiring WA to promote Ben & Jerry’s icecream. This was one of the key ingredients to Working Assets brilliant,and continued, promotional tie-in with Ben & Jerry’s. Today, CPI is on the verge of bankruptcy, the “rainforest harvest” hascollapsed, and the ill-fated project is blamed for consolidating andincreasing the control of right-wing agri-businesses over the Brazil nutmarket. University of Chicago anthropologist Terrence Turner (one of theworld’s leading Amazon experts) calls rainforest harvest projects by Ben& Jerry’s and Body Shop “Aid Not Trade,” a play on Body Shop’s Trade NotAid slogan -- “it’s aid by the exploited Indians in terms of their verymarketable images with almost no trade in return. These companies makemillions in free marketing.” The windfall that WALD has reaped from clever social marketing hasapparently opened its eyes to a similar windfall beckoning in anotherexplosively lucrative market: buying excess electric capacity as part ofelectric industry deregulation, marking it up higher than competitors,and selling it with a “green” label to idealistic and trustingcustomers. ******** This is what Working Assets claims in its marketing brochures and on itsweb page about its for-profit foray into offering “green” electricity inNew Hampshire: “Working Assets offers New Hampshire consumers NUCLEAR FREE Electricity.No coal or Hydro-Quebec power either. “We believe there are thousands ofNew Hampshire residents who would appreciate a chance to supportenvironmentally sustainable energy,” says Laura Scher, Working Assetschief executive officer. “These consumers would prefer not to supportthe nuclear power industry.” Under the company’s new “Working AssetsGreen Power” program, consumers will be guaranteed a lower price thanthey currently pay for their electricity. “We are offering people anopportunity to save money and save the environment at the same time,”says Scher. Here’s the not-very-green reality. Today, the amount of clean renewable technology in New England isminimal. Throughout New England, approximately 4% of electricity isgenerated by non-hydro renewables, primarily landfill gases and trashburning incinerators. WA did not contract with the few smaller alternative energy producers inNew England or propose a plan to nurture development of green energy.Instead, it contracted to buy ALL of its electricity for its NewHampshire customers from New England Power, a subsidiary of New EnglandEnergy. Working Assets brags it will save its customers money. It surely is in aposition to save them money, for it buys energy from New England Power,which is the lowest cost producer of energy in the region. Yet, WorkingAssets charges the MOST of all the pilot project participants, as muchas 53% MORE than competitors. Based on marketing materials sent out by the companies, Working Assetscharges 3.5 cents per kilowatt hour; its lowest cost competitor, WheeledElectric Power, charges as little as 2.29 cents. Interestingly, anotherNew England Energy subsidiary, Granite State Energy, is offeringelectricity for 2.5 cents, and provides energy sourced from the samecompany – New England Energy – as does WALD – plus, Granite State throwsin a $39 birdfeeder! Working Assets collects a huge “integrity tax” – as much as 53% – whichits idealistic consumers willingly pay because they believe WorkingAssets collects and distributes energy differently than NortheastUtiltities or New England Power for that manner. Those green dollars godirectly into WA’s bulging pockets. Here’s what WA’s idealistic customers actually get for paying as much as53% more: According to the NH Public Utilities Commission, 60% or more of theelectricity that actually goes into the homes of Working Assetscustomers is nuclear. Moreover, the electricity going into the homes ofWA customers has a substantial amount of coal and electricity sourcedfrom Hydro-Quebec. Working Assets does not tell its customers that ALL the electricity inNew England is fed off of the New England Pool (NEPOOL), which mixesenergy from all suppliers, from where it is sent through the grid tohomes. New England Power supplies into that grid. The energy that goesinto homes is a mix of all the energy in the region. Let’s say, for arguments sake, that there was a large wind and solarenergy company that sent its electrons into NEPOOL (according to the NHPUC, there is NOT ONE kilowatt of wind or solar power going into thegrid despite claims by WA, reported in numerous press releases andstories pulled up on the web, that it supplies wind and solar power toits NH customers). That energy would get mixed with nuclear, coal, oiland water power electrons, so every customer would get the same energy.IF a third party contracted with this wind-solar supplier, all theywould get would be the right to offer this third party’s “excess”capacity. The mix, including nuclear energy, would remain at the samepercentage. WORKING ASSETS STRIKES A DEAL TO OFFER THIS EXCESS CAPACITY FROM NEWENGLAND POWER. New England Power is a subsidiary of New England ElectricSystem (NEES: NYSE: NES) which is a $2.3 billion holding company, whosesubsidiaries comprise New England’s second largest electric utilitysystem. MASSPIRG calls NEES “the dirtiest utility in New England.” • It is part-owner of the SEABROOK 1 nuclear power plant. • It is part-owner of the Millstone 3 nuclear power plant. • It has a 30% interest in Yankee Atomic Electric Company which owns a185 MW nuclear generating station in Rowe, Massachusetts. • It is part-owner of Maine Yankee nuclear power plants. • NEES participates in rate-regulated oil and gas explorationdevelopment through a partnership with an non-affiliated oil company andhas coal interests. • NEES and its subsidiaries have been named by the EPA or theMassachusetts Department of Environmental Protection as responsible for22 hazardous waste sites. Legal proceedings are ongoing against NEES.NEES acknowledges at least 40 Superfund toxic waste sites altogether. Does Working Assets Stimulate the Production of Green Energy? How does the energy market in New Hampshire work, who benefits from thecurrent deregulation plan, and why are alternative energy producers socritical of the plan while some large environmental groups support itand Working Assets? There are some “green” competitors in the region. For instance,Northeast Utilities, primary owner of most of the nuclear capacity inthe region, maintains that it offers its Massachusetts customers as partof another pilot project (in which WA also participates) a 100% hydroproduct, although it too offers electricity off the NEPOOL grid. Itspromotion is no different in substance or energy provided than isWorking Assets – although it’s a lot less expensive. Is Working Assets investing in new wind or solar plants to replace coal,oil or nuclear facilities? NO. Would its current actions increasewind-solar development? NO. Could its actions ever reduce reliance oncoal or nuclear energy? Not for decades in the New England region,according to energy officials and activists, because of the excesscapacity. The electricity mix for the buying consumer didn’t change byONE electron as a result of Working Assets contractual relationship. Ineffect, it is an accounting function. Given the current oversupply, even a stand-alone wind or solar plantwould be so cost-inefficient that only a few boutique consumers wouldfoot the very high premium. Building an alternative energy plant isbeside the point, however, since Working Assets isn’t proposing to buildalternative energy plants. Just for a moment, imagine your reaction, disgust and horror if you sawa full-page ad from New England Power claiming that it offered “nuclearfree” energy at great savings to its customers...yet, you knew itoffered nuclear-filled energy and charged 53% more than companies whoprovided the same energy mix. In its defense, New England Power claimsthat it “promises” that all of the money that new “green” customers paidto them would not be utilized in any operations of its nuclear plants(they would use it, say, to pay off legal costs in their hazardous wastedisputes). Would you say, “hey, what a great company. Their greenwash marketinghelps create a “critical mass” of demand for alternative energy. NewEngland Power is a model progressive company. This sure promotes thegoal of sustainable energy.” Of course not. Now substitute ‘Working Assets Green Power’ for ‘New England Power.’ It turns out that New England Energy Systems and Laura Scher have otherintertwining interests. Joan Bok, NEES Chairman, is a board member ofBusiness for Social Responsibility along with Laura Scher. Bok is alsoon the board of Monsanto and numerous other organizations and companiesincluding the Urban League. The Politics of “Green” and “Alternative Energy” Working Assets is also behind a plan that California alternative energyactivists contend could force the shut down of some alternative energyplants and result in the generation of LESS, not more, renewable energy. In another cleverly-worded appeal, it has just sent its idealisticCalifornia phone customers an “action alert” which urges them to supportalternative energy subsidies in California. It NEVER discloses that themoney would end up in Working Assets coffers by way of its “Green Power”business. Working Assets has NOT disclosed just how it would supply alternativeenergy. In its two previous forays into “green” power – in New Hampshireand Massachusetts – it contracted with old-line nuclear and fossil-fuelenergy companies and not alternative suppliers. Many renewable energy companies in California, which now generate 10% ofthe state’s power, opposed Working Assets’s plan and say it would dry-upsupport for maintaining these plants, and for building new ones. It is revealing that renewable energy companies line upshoulder-to-shoulder in opposition to WALD’s scheme, yet many largeenvironmental groups are cautiously supportive of its strategy, butunaware of the breath of its less-than-honest marketing tactics. Theseenvironmental groups are, by and large, not involved in the actualproduction of alternative energy. Many are also in a position to receiveconsiderable financial support directly from Working Assets if WALD’Sclever but deceptive marketing scheme should spread. It is alsorevealing that WALD gives NO money to directly develop alternativeenergy. This raises serious conflict-of-interest issues and underscores thepotential of green dollars driving the issue instead of public policyand environmental concerns. Neither WALD nor mainstream environmental groups who regularly offer“objective opinions” on the relative merits of green marketing and greenpower disclose this insular relationship. Working Assets AND theseenvironmentalist groups should be REQUIRED to PUBLICLY reveal theSPECIFICS of any and all financial, “charity” and contractualrelationships, past and future. That would make it an OPEN process.That’s full disclosure. Bottom Line: Working Assets actions demonstrate that it believes thatsales of a smaller amount of renewable energy – by Working Assets ofcourse – is more important that actually GENERATING clean power. A recent study of the New Hampshire deregulation effort commissioned bythe Rhode Island environmental group “Save the Bay” concludes that“public education campaigns are needed to help consumers to understandthat their selection of an energy product can influence the futuregeneration of electricity.” In other words, the current approach doesNOT EFFECT THE CURRENT ENERGY MIX. That is NOT the message being sent toits customers, most of whom have swallowed the marketing pitch that theyare getting “nuclear free” energy. Working Assets had a wonderful opportunity in New Hampshire to educateits customers to the complexity of this issue. Instead, they issueddeceptive marketing come-ons. They are undercutting the credibility ofthe alternative energy movement which has worked diligently and honestlyto educate consumers that there is NO EASY FIX, as Working Assetssuggests. ******* Let’s be clear about what the issue is. Working Assets has no productsto speak of. It leases out other companies telephone lines – WALD iscalled a “pass through” company. In the electrical business, Working Assets “buys” electricity generatedby others and technically supplies it to customers. In fact, WA has donenothing to explore for new energy sources or provide a stronger energyinfrastructure. In effect, its only real product is its reputation forbeing ‘socially responsible’ and more honest that competitors. Apparently Laura Scher believes that it is okay for WALD to makemisleading and even fraudulent marketing claims on the grounds that her“intentions” are honorable. Whatever are the intention of Working Assets– and we can be certain that as a for-profit business, it has manyconflicting intentions including making a bundle of money – its actionshave not been above-board. Even now, as Scher feels the heat from these disclosures, she is makingthe rounds of energy activists and trying to strong-arm them.Organizations such as MASSPIRG (617-292-4800) have tried to get themessage out about the greenwashing activities of Working Assets andother “green” electricity marketers, but the ‘social responsibility’movement in general has been loathe to criticize one of its “friends.” Character demonstrated by actions, not by rhetoric or intentions, is theonly reliable measure of corporate ethics. Working Assets’ markets its“good intentions” as if it’s a “get-out-of-jail-free” card. Goodintentions demand FULL DISCLOSURE AND AN OPEN PROCESS.  “The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing,” Mark Twain oncesaid. “If you can fake these, you’ve got it made.” *********** Jon Entine is a maverick journalist who specializes in business ethics.He won a National Press Club award in 1995 for “Shattered Image: Is TheBody Shop Too Good to Be True?” published in Business Ethics magazine.[National Press Club Consumer Journalism Award: 1995 Honorable Mention.]He has also written extensively on the questionable marketing of Amazon“rainforest” products. His work appears in progressive journals likeUtne Reader, Dollars and Sense, and The Progressive Populist, as well asmainstream publications including The Chicago Tribune, The Sunday Times(UK), The Toronto Globe and Mail, and The Guardian (UK). Entine has also won more than a dozen major awards for his televisionreporting with ABC News and NBC News, including two Emmys fordocumentaries on reform movements in China and the former Soviet Union.He lectures on business and journalism ethics, has been a featuredspeaker at the Natural Products Expo, and is finishing a book forMacmillan on why blacks dominate sports based on his award-winning NBCdocumentary “Black Athletes: Fact and Fiction.” He is also an activemember of Business for Social Responsibility and Co-Op America. Entine can be reached at (614) 258-9492; Email: runj...@earthlink.net==The Queen of Bubble Bath She has been called "The Mother Theresa of capitalism". But in the past few years Anita Roddick's reputation has suffered more than a few bruises. The founder of Body Shop has been accused of several unethical business practices including the exploitation of the Brazilian Kayapo Indians. Jon Entine* "I'd rather promote human rights, environmental concerns, indigenous rights", whatever, says Anita Roddick breathlessly, as she opens yet another Body Shop, at a mall near San Francisco, "than promote a bubble bath." Roddick is framed by a shelf-full of bubble bath, one of fourteen varieties of soap suds sold by Body Shop; there is not a hint of irony in her voice. "Anita is a myth-o-maniac," says Mara Amats, a trade consultant who has worked closely with Roddick. Amats, like many Body Shop observers, struggles to understand why such a charismatic business woman continues to make one ethical misstep after another. For years, Body Shop had prospered because of the squeaky-clean reputation of its founder and CEO. Roddick even has long posted a sign in her office proclaiming that "we will be the most honest cosmetic company" in the world. But today, that rags-to-riches-to-Robin Hood corporate myth is in tatters as Roddick and her company struggle with scandal and organizational disarray. The past few years have certainly been a reversal of fortune for the Body Shop which had known only exponential growth and fawning publicity for most of its history. With the help of a $6,000 loan, Roddick opened a tiny cosmetic shop in 1976 in Brighton along England's south coast,. She catered to the hippie counter-culture, selling "natural" shampoos and lotions and offering "one-stop" ear piercing. Much to her surprise, her cash register rang madly. A decade of spectacular international expansion followed. In the late 1980s, Roddick expanded her "green" brand image by associating herself with social causes including an opposition to animal testing, recycling, promoting AIDS awareness, human rights. The centerpiece of Body Shop's marketing efforts, however, was the rainforest promotion with the Kayapo from whom she sourced a tiny amount of nut oil for her hair conditioner. The media loved her. Before long, this eccentric and outspoken entrepreneur emerged as the world's best known feminist business leader. "The Mother Teresa of capitalism," she was called. Roddick's socially responsible reputation became a gold mine. Body Shop is now a multinational beauty company with 1,407 shops in 45 countries, and a billion dollars in retail sales. Roddick herself has amassed a fortune estimated at more than $200 million. She owns a castle in Scotland and a flat in London, and her husband Gordon, Body Shop's Chairman, flies his favorite polo ponies around the world on a chartered airliner. But despite its enormous financial success, the Body Shop empire is beset by scandal and losses in its key US market. Until a few years ago, Body Shop's generated dozens of enthusiastic stories every year about its innovative, socially conscious, activities. Consumers were willing to pay a hefty premium for its commodity products because they believed its cosmetics were high quality and natural, and that it practiced social responsibility consistent with what it preached. But the image shattered irreparably in September, 1994 with the publication of my article "Shattered Image: Is The Body Shop Too Good to Be True?" in the US magazine Business Ethics. It detailed dramatic contradictions between BSI's idealistic public image and its operational practices, questioned the company's ethical reputation and challenged Anita Roddick' honesty, if not her sincerity. "Shattered Image" documented that the company stole the Body Shop name and marketing concept, fabricated the origins of key products, misrepresented its charitable contributions and fair trade programs, and has been beset by employee morale and franchise problems. Moreover, its lotions, shampoos and fragrances were never "natural." The breadth of misrepresentation is startling and covers every dimension of its operations. A few of the low-lights: "Natural" Products: Despite the green hype, its products are lackluster and drug-store quality. BSI uses only microscopic and ineffective levels of botanical extracts and combines them with extensive amounts of petrochemical ingredients such as isopropyl myristate, petrolatum, and triethanolmine. As recently as January of 1996, a Danish lab found two of its best selling products filled with formaldehyde, confirming findings by Oko-Test, a leading German consumer magazine. In April, the international trade publication Women's Wear Daily quotes an industry consultant as saying "You can't offer low-end products at a premium price, which is where they [Body Shop] are at." Charity: Rather than giving away "an inordinate amount of pre-tax profits to charity" as Roddick claimed, the company had given zero dollars to charity over its first 11 years and gave far less than the average company over its entire history. Franchising: Ninety percent of Body Shop's stores are franchised. In effect, it is an international wholesale operation in which its franchisees assume most of the risk of expansion. It's also led to huge problems: Recent franchise suits in Israel, Singapore, France, Canada and Norway have resulted in more than $10 million in settlements. The US Federal Trade Commission launched a 16-month fraud investigation of Body Shop. While the probe was ongoing, Body Shop revamped its franchise financial documents and all but ended expansion in the United States, where it has lost money for two years running. The Body Shop's vaunted Trade Not Aid promotion is particularly misrepresented. Gordon Roddick calls fair trade the "cornerstone" of the company. It is a tiny cornerstone indeed: according to its own statistics, fair trade represented less than 0.16% of turnover when my exposés appeared. Kirk Hanson, a Stanford University business lecturer hired by the company as a consultant characterizes its trading schemes as "small and few in number" and says they have not been forthrightly promoted. The problems with the Brazilian Kayapo project described by Saulo Petean are just the tip of the iceberg. Its micro-projects with the Pueblo Indians in the US and with natives in Tanzania and the Solomon Islands have been grossly exaggerated and beset by problems. Pauline Tiffen, who linked the Body Shop up with the Mexican Indian natives who were the subject of Body Shop's advertising campaign with American Express, has a harshly blunt, but not uncharacteristic observation. She calls Roddick "schizophrenic" and "sociopathic... She took the project we set up and tried to subvert it," according to Tiffen. In January, its shea butter project in Ghana became BSI's latest trade scheme to hit the headlines. The Toronto Globe and Mail, in an article entitled "Grief in Ghana" reports that Body Shop contracted to buy huge amounts of shea butter, only to renege, leaving the local economy devastated. Trade experts say it's a now familiar pattern. These problems are not just the mistakes of over-enthusiastic idealists. A particularly revealing story is Body Shop's first fair trade program. In 1987, Roddick began sourcing foot massagers, which she calls "footsie rollers", made in India at the Boys Town orphanage. In the early 1980s, when Richard Adams was head of the fair trade company Traidcraft (UK), he sourced a different Boys Town product, wood carvings. He soon discovered that Joe Homan, the project's director, was sourcing the carvings from sweat shops and was molesting the boys. He kept the police at bay by using a slush fund kept full by church agencies that were innocently sending him money. When Adams found out that the Roddicks had linked up with Homan, he was horrified. He immediately advised them of the problem. "I never heard back," he says. Two alarmed members of the Catholic order which had kicked out Homan years before also visited Roddicks at their home. Still, nothing was done. "Gordon was aware of Homan's reputation," writes Anne Downer, the former Body Shop head franchisee in Singapore, in a signed, legal affidavit. At the Roddicks invitation, Downer had accompanied the family in India for the dedication of Boys Town. "I slept in accommodations close to where some of the boys lived," writes Downer. "I was approached by one of the assistants to the project. He informed me about Homan's behavior and the sexual molestation. He was concerned and extremely anxious that I inform Gordon and Anita. I remember Gordon saying: "We've heard those rumors, but I don't believe it." Downer continues: "He didn't seem unduly concerned and didn't seem to take it seriously." Over the next few years, as Homan went about stealing charity funds and buggering orphan boys, the Roddicks sent out glowing reports to their franchisees. One idyllic account in 1989 reads: "Joe's work in Boys Town is ceaseless; he cares for the boys and girls and they really appreciate what he is doing for them." The roof caved in the next year when the story broke in the English and Indian press. The Roddicks first tried to suppress the story and then tried to turn it into a public relations advantage. "This story has not hit the.press yet, but could erupt at any time," read one memo to employees and franchisees. "It is important that you know your facts. Anita....blew the whistle on Joe." Many journalists, trade experts and social activists who have interacted closely with Body Shop have come away shaken. Geoffrey Brooks, president of Brooks Pharmaceuticals, which has processed the corn protein bought from the Pueblo Indians for use in Body Shop's blue corn Trade Not Aid' line, calls Roddick "a modern day colonialist." Stephen Corry, director of Survival International which once had a joint promotion with Body Shop, now calls the company "sleazy" and "no more ethical than heap of beans."
The ethical contradictions begin with the very founding of the company. According to Anita Roddick's friends and colleagues, she stole the company name, many of its product ideas, and its marketing tactics from a California company, also called The Body Shop. The California store was founded at the height of the hippie revolution in 1970 six years before Anita started her Body Shop, and the same year that the Roddicks visited the San Francisco bay area where the stores were located.
The misrepresentations don't end there. Two of Roddicks earliest partners, cosmetologist Mark Constantine and Janis Raven, head of Bubble Publicity who ran the Body Shop's public relations for seven years, contend that almost every one of Roddick's romantic stories about how she "discovered" her ingredients in visits to native lands was fabricated.
"What we were looking for was unusual ingredients," Raven remembers. The [pineapple] facial wash, you know, we talked about Anita Roddick going to Sri Lanka and seeing the women rubbing pineapples over them. You know, that kind of nonsense." Why was it nonsense? "Because it wasn't true. That was Mark's information and we just decided to make it a bit more romantic."
Michael Johnson, former editor of International Management magazine calls Body Shop a marketing fraud. He was threatened by Gordon Roddick in 1986 when he provided the first public details of its California hijack. "The Body Shop is a gangsterish operation hiding behind a veil of social responsibility," says Johnson.
That veil is there no longer. Today, the ethical realities of the Body Shop have been the subject of media and academic reports around the world. Moreover, Body Shop has lost many of its once loyal backers who remember the earlier, more innocent days.
"I was the first person who would have remained loyal, says Janis Raven with almost no bitterness in her voice. "It was a company we all built together. But Anita Roddick has no loyalty to anybody. Everybody is a slave, a new slave of the month comes around and you get dumped in favor of them."
"You know," Raven says, "Anita's gone a little bit over the top. She just disappeared up her own backside. She started to believe her own publicity and this is always the death knell to anybody. We used to joke that I've created a Frankenstein. If you start believing all this stuff that is written about you, you have got to go dotty, haven't you?"
Mark Constantine is sad about the turn of events. "I used to say to Janis, can't you do something about Anita?'" He erupts in a characteristic laugh then sighs, thinking back to those bloody fun early days, mixing weird potions in his kitchen while Anita and Gordon looked on like eager kids in a candy store. "There is still a mass of innocence to those two despite it all." Even with all the mounting problems, no one can take away Anita Roddick's success in building her cosmetic empire. She has amassed a fortune of almost unimaginable proportions. But when the history books are written, she is not likely to be remembered by today's public persona as the world's most socially responsible entrepreneur. Even if the Body Shop should retool its ethical framework, it is a company built on the shaky financial prospects of its franchisees and the betrayed expectations of its idealistic employees and customers. Anita Roddick never could decide whether she wanted to practice her social vision or merely exploit it. "She stands full square between Esteé Lauder and Elizabeth Arden," says Constantine. "They all wrote their own stories." Anita Roddick is one more beauty baroness who created her own myth to make her entrepreneurial dream come true. So ultimately, Anita is the baby boomers New Age queen of bubble bath? "That is exactly it. That's exactly it." *Jon Entine is a maverick journalist who specializes in business ethics, race and sports. His investigation of UK-based The Body Shop cosmetic company was awarded a National Press Club award in 1995. He has also written extensively on Ben & Jerry's Homemade for deceptive marketing and for sourcing Brazil nuts for its flagship Amazon "rainforest" ice cream from some of Latin America's most notorious agri-businesses. His recent articles have focused on cause-related marketing, ethical investing, corporate governance and social responsibility for both the popular and academic press. Entine has also won more than a dozen major awards for his television reporting with ABC News and NBC News, including two Emmys for documentaries on reform movements in China and former Soviet Union. Entine lectures on business and journalism ethics. He is also finishing a book for Macmillan on why blacks dominate sports, based on his award winning NBC documentary Black Athletes: Fact and Fiction. Entine lives in Columbus, Ohio with his wife Ellen Turner, a marketing executive, and his loyal dog Apollo. He can be reached by E-mail at: runjonrun@earthlink.net== Australian Financial Review Sydney, AustraliaDecember 18, 2002 Body Shop's Packaging Starts to Unravel Author: Jon Entine. Jon Entine [http://www.jonentine.com] is an independent writer, scholar-in-residence at Miami University (Ohio), and an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC. As the Body Shop International's stock craters, questions abound whether the ethical and financial problems of the parent will be visited upon Body Shop Australia. Jon Entine reports. Anita Roddick can expect a lump of coal in this year's Christmas stocking. The erosion of the financial prospects of Body Shop International the company she founded 26 years ago appears to be accelerating, its stock losing a third of its value in the past two months in anticipation of another dismal, underperforming holiday season. Touted a decade ago as the "shares that defy gravity", Body Shop has long since rediscovered Newton's Principia, plummeting from 372 pence to near 70p, a loss in valuation of more than GBP500 million ($314million). It's a long way from the days when Roddick was being hailed as the "Mother Teresa of Capitalism". Back in 1994, she was in San Francisco to open a freshly-minted Body Shop yet another franchise in what is now a 50-country, 2,000 shop chain, with 70 franchises in Australia. It was morning and the scent of patchouli filled the store. But the crowd was more Britney than bohemian. Girls in designer jeans chattered on purple cell phones, standing painted nails-to-painted nails beside mums with Gucci bags. It could have been any Body Shop from Tokyo to Sydney. Corporate executives? "Robber barons," Anita hissed. (Everyone calls her by her first name.) Investment bankers, who had helped make her wealthy? "Blood-sucking dinosaurs." Rough words but delivered with sincerity. There is a magnetic force about her. Charisma. It was still the best of times, with the media lauding her as a trail-blazing feminist who packaged politically correct causes in jars of facial cream. "I'd rather promote human rights, environmental concerns, indigenous rights than promote a bubble bath," she gushed. Here was a harbinger of the New Age, weaned on can-do chutzpah and do-right rhetoric. It was impossible not to notice that Roddick was framed by shelves of Body Shop bubble bath, fourteen varieties. The soap bubble has long since burst. That franchise is now gone, along with 200 others in the United States and the United Kingdom that have folded or been taken over by the British-based multinational. Body Shop International has eked out meagre operating profits in recent years, earning GBP26.7million on turnover of GBP400.7million in 2002. "On an ongoing basis, it is barely profitable," says Matthew MacEachran of Investec Henderson Crosthwaite in London. "Their extraordinary expenses, reorganisation charges, and costs of acquiring failing franchises have become recurring and commonplace." As the accounting saying goes, "profit is opinion, but cash is fact". In that regard, Body Shop is in precarious shape. Store profits and earnings per share, in decline since the mid-1990s, are sinking fast. In Britain and America 60 per cent of its business profits fell nearly 25 per cent last year. "They haven't had positive net cash flow for more than five years," says John Stevenson of ING Barings Charterhouse. "They've pissed away more than GBP110million." In August 2000, Roddick tacitly acknowledged the depths of the problems, deriding her creation as a "dysfunctional coffin". It was an odd comment as she and husband Gordon were desperately searching for a suitor to take the damaged goods off their hands. Not surprisingly, only bottom feeders expressed interest. After talks collapsed early this year, and facing grim prospects, the Roddicks announced that they were reducing their management roles once again. They installed yet another executive team on a short leash, the fourth corporate makeover in a decade. "As an innovative leader and growth company," says Stevenson, "they're a dead concept." Australians may be shocked at the turn of events at Body Shop, whose problems have gone unreported in the local press. According to University of Technology sociologist Eva Cox, now verifying her third "social audit" of the Australian franchises, employees retain a positive view of the company. "It's a young, female, energetic, healthy culture." Graeme Wise, who owns most Australian shops, seems "passionate about doing the right thing". Wise took control in 1999 after what insiders say was a bitter divorce from long-time business partner Barrie Thomas, who now owns 17 New Zealand franchises. Is this a tale of two inextricably linked but different cultures the once idealistic but now bumbling British parent and the younger, still enthusiastic Australian progeny? It's not clear if Australia suffers the grinding declines experienced by franchisees worldwide. Wise refuses to disclose the finances of his privately owned franchises other than to say that they are "performing well". BSI has not broken out Australasia data since 1998, when the region turned a profit of GBP1.8million on sales of GBP33.8million, 5 per cent of worldwide sales. While Body Shop is moving to a company-owned business model in its largest markets, most shops in smaller, less lucrative markets like Australia are run by franchisees. From the company's earliest days, franchising appeared to be the goose that laid the golden egg. According to Roddick's autobiography, Gordon realised that the best way to expand was through "self-financing". He all but gave away shops at first, positioning Body Shop as a low-risk wholesaler supplying franchisees who shouldered the start-up costs. Body Shop thrived on the idealism of young women like Anne Downer, a Brit living in Singapore. On a visit home in 1981, Downer wandered into a Covent Garden shop and fell in love. "I thought Anita was quite a maverick. I liked her wacky sense of let's do it differently'." The 22-year old hopped on a train to headquarters, eventually coming away with rights to eight Asian countries for a few hundred pounds.
Body Shop had a guaranteed outlet for wholesale products. It gradually jacked fees, pocketing hefty chunks of franchisee's investment. (US franchisees now pay as much as $US774,750 ($1.4 million) plus a 5 per cent sales royalty.) But as competition intensified, margins shrank. At first, BSI felt little pain for it continued to profit from expansion. But it was not long before often naive entrepreneurs, leveraged to the edge, realised they were at the mercy of a multinational company with its own agenda.
Over the past decade, franchisee blow-ups and suits have erupted throughout the world, except for Australasia. In 1995, Downer collected $US6.2million to settle a dispute after BSI occupied her Singapore stores and snatched her Asian franchise rights. It tried to force her into bankruptcy on Christmas Eve, which the courts denied. It paid $US878,900 to its former Norwegian head franchisee, who alleged breach of contract. Gordon agreed not to contest charges filed in an Israeli court accusing Body Shop of libel and kowtowing to the Arab boycott, which led to it being stripped of the right to operate in Israel.
"Body Shop may be a great platform for Roddick's whims, but as a business model it just doesn't work for most franchisees," contends Lyn O'Donnell, a British franchisee who settled a fraud suit against BSI for GBP301,000 in 1998.
All told, Body Shop has paid out more than GBP100million to settle 14 franchisee suits and buy out dissident franchisees and is on the verge of settling a US class action. Although details in each case are different, franchisees broadly contend that financial problems reflect deterioration in BSI's operating ethics. Product supply and quality of its cosmetics, which franchisees must source from the parent company, top their list.
Unlike premium firms that pitch themselves as natural, Body Shop relies on bright colours and heavy scents petrochemical laboratory creations. This is in direct contrast to its claims of being environmentally friendly. A spokesman responds that its products are "inspired by nature".
Choice magazine rated Body Shop's moisturiser and shower gels high but panned a shampoo, also noting its high cost. "Low-end at a premium price," sniffed America's Women's Wear Daily. Its eye gel came under attack from US Consumer Reports, which noted that chemical fumes that irritate the skin create its cooling sensation. The eye gel, moisturiser, and baby cream were the subject of scathing exposes by German consumer magazine Oko-Test (Green Test), which found cancer-causing formaldehyde. The investigating scientist said the formaldehyde resulted from overuse of synthetics to control system-wide bacterial contamination. "Their products are filled with bugs," says Dieter Wundrum, who later became a consultant for Body Shop before quitting in disgust.
Quality control has been a persistent problem. Its pumice foot scrub was regularly contaminated, according to BSI's founding cosmetologist Mark Constantine, a finding confirmed by managers and internal company memos. The US Food and Drug Administration cited Body Shop for eight health violations in 1993 after employees complained that it suspended standard microbiological procedures to pump production before Christmas. The company shipped and sold hundreds of bottles of contaminated banana shampoo before getting wind of the FDA investigation.
Body Shop claims it has put such problems in the past. But just last December, Denmark's Green Guide blasted its two best selling cosmetics for containing chemicals that it labelled "poison".
Roddick's reputation for charitable giving has also stirred resentment among franchisees, who often give generously in time and money but see the head office garner credit. Roddick has crowed that she "gives most of our profits away". But BSI didn't contribute to charity over its first 11 years and did not increase donations to average corporate levels until a wave of negative publicity in 1994.
Controversy has centred on its "Trade Not Aid" promotions, particularly its sourcing of Brazil nuts. The former face of this promotion, a Kayapo Amazon chief, successfully sued for exploiting his image. University of Chicago anthropologist Terrence Turner ridiculed its initiative as a gimmick, calling it "Aid Not Trade" aid by developing peoples to Body Shop with no real trade in return. Survival International's Stephen Corry, who once partnered with Body Shop in the Amazon, goes so far as to characterise the company as "sleazy" and "no more ethical than a heap of beans".
Much of Body Shop's good press flows from its reputation as a pioneer in social accounting, in which companies self-report social, environmental and financial performance. Here the story is mixed. A Financial Times survey ranks it second among companies for managing environmental resources. But questions linger. BSI has quashed at least two environmental audits after embarrassing problems turned up.
"I visited the plant a few years ago," wrote one former auditor, who asked to remain anonymous. "It was weird to see these truly gigantic extrusion machines, each the size of a family house, pumping out millions of plastic bottles, while 18-wheelers drove by outside painted with politically correct slogans."
David Brooks, a former Environmental Protection Agency lawyer, BSI's US environmental director in the early 1990s, dismisses its environmental initiatives as "window dressing". He detailed lacklustre recycling practices, and regular discharges of hazardous waste into the water system near its headquarters in New Jersey, then covered up by top executives.
With financial problems multiplying, BSI recently discontinued publishing assessments. Wise says he remains committed to the practice. Yet he refuses to release financial data, the environmental survey has no contextual information, and the social audit amounts to a survey of staff and consumer perceptions. It does not provide wage and benefit data or information from key stakeholders including vendors or sub-franchises.
"Their reports are clearly inadequate," says Simon Zadek, head of British-based Accountability, which wrote the standards Body Shop contends it follows. "Good practices require companies benchmark financial, social and environmental performance, not only internally but against outside measures and firms. They're not doing that."
Cox admits the shortcomings in the audits she verifies but says they're an important, if small, move towards corporate transparency. "All I can say is that it is perceived by current employees as being a good company. Many companies do these surveys, but they are used only internally. The positive here is that Body Shop releases this data publicly, which encourages accountability."
Few doubt Body Shop's idealism about broad principles, from human rights to empowering women. However, Anita Roddick, the symbol of the brand, has been dogged by ethical questions that begin with the very founding of the company. Just how ethical is it at its core?
Roddick boasts that Body Shop is her original creation. That is a clear fabrication. The Body Shop saga begins in 1970 when young Anita travelled to San Francisco with then boyfriend Gordon to visit his best friend, David Edward. Edward's former wife, Alma (now Dunstan-McDaniel), remembers dragging Anita to a favourite shop, filled with tie-dyed decorations and redolent with incense.
"That was the place to buy shampoo and body cream," Alma says. Owners Peggy Short and Jane Saunders had carved the original store out of a converted garage, calling it The Body Shop. Alma recalls Anita buying armfuls of hand-cut soaps, loofah sponges, and cosmetics in small plastic bottles with hand-written labels.
Roddick's copycat Body Shop with similar hand-sketched logo, plastic bottles, and "breakthrough" recycling policy emerged six years later. Comparisons of the brochures of the American original and Roddick's copycat store are telling. Four O'clock Astringent Lotion morphed into Five O'clock Astringent Lotion. Korean Washing Grains, uniquely developed by the women who sewed kimonos for the Americans, became Japanese Washing Grains. Roddick even lifted the blurb on the original brochure masthead, which noted: "All of our products are Biodegradable & made to our specifications"; "Bottles 20cents or bring your own." Anita's translation: "All our products are biologically soft and made to our specifications"; "Bottles 12p, or bring your own." Roddick copied product descriptions word-for-word, including grammatical errors.
For years, Short and Saunders were unaware of the brazen heist. As a result, when the Roddicks approached them in 1987 to buy the rights to the Body Shop name for $3.5million, they jumped. They renamed their shops Body Time. Only later did they stumble upon the copycat brochures.
"What really got them angry," says a colleague, "was the ongoing deception Anita's lie that she originated the idea, the green colour scheme, the products, all the things that gave the company its unique identity. Never in our wildest imagination did we think that Roddick, with all her claims about being so honest, would keep this fabrication going."
The Roddicks steadfastly deny "any knowledge" of the original sin, often brandishing a pre-discovery quote from the founders that Roddick "didn't rip us off". That brings a blunt response from Alma. "That's bullshit, because I took her [to the original]. She had a number of those products in her suitcase to go home. She made sure she had one of each. It was a lie from the start. Anita ripped them off."
Roddick would later embellish her founder's myth with claims that she had come up with exotic products during her wanderlust travels. According to recorded interviews with Constantine and public relationsdirector Janis Raven, her stories are fiction. "I was fully aware that she hadn't had the idea about wandering in Polynesia," Constantine told me, referencing one of many tall tales. "The wonderful joke with Janis Raven was always: Janis, can't you do something about Anita? You created all this bloody publicity thing.' You create the monster you can't control." Sitting in her London office, Raven chose her words carefully. "I think Anita Roddick is a very brilliant woman." She paused. "You know, Anita's gone over the top. We used to joke that I've created this Frankenstein. If you start believing all this stuff that is written about you, you have got to go dotty, haven't you? She started to believe her own publicity and this is always the death knell to anybody." Journalists who have probed these founder fabrications have been the target of personal attacks and legal threats. In its assessment of BSI's ethics, widely respected Trillium Asset Management assailed its "consistent use of character assassination" against reporters, franchisees and other critics. Even Body Shop's social auditor gave it a rock-bottom rating for aggressively defensive responses to criticism. Perhaps inevitably, Body Shop's ethical contradictions are intimately tied to its franchisee relations, raising doubts whether it can restore the trust necessary to revive. That link is underscored in an continuing battle over a 1997 bankruptcy filing by a Canadian couple, who once owned six shops. Last June, an Ontario judge blasted Body Shop for "egregious breach of widely accepted commercial morality ... not consonant with our system of justice and general moral outlook". Body Shop appealed. In a ruling on August 19, the Canadian Court of Appeal affirmed the finding that it had engaged in "dishonest and unconscionable" practices in dealings with its former franchisee. These endless dust-ups leave analysts aghast. "The Roddicks are just not suited to be running a public company," observes Seymour Pierce's Richard Ratner. "At the end of the day, Body Shop is tired and dysfunctional." Ratner believes it has a long shot at stabilising its business if new executive chairman Adrian Bellamy "can keep the Roddicks at a distance". That's unlikely. The Roddicks control more than 50 per cent of the voting stock and control the board with a minority of independent members. That's typical of public companies but contradicts corporate responsibility standards that Body Shop voices support for. Roddick's recently anointed herself creative consultant, offering "essential expertise in product, marketing and values" the issues at the heart of Body Shop's problems. "Being now a non-exec is going to be much more fun for me because you can be much more than a tyrant." This advice is expensive: she pockets GBP195,000, which combined with the Roddicks' board remuneration brings the couple's annual take to GBP465,000. Does the parent company's troubles threaten the survival of Body Shop Australia? Wise remains upbeat, claiming that "customers continue to shop with us in increasing numbers" he refused to supply details and that it will prosper as "an activist organisation and a retailer committed to customer service excellence". Asked about the controversies that swirl around the Roddicks, Wise offered unqualified support. "I have been inspired and motivated by the values inherent in the philosophies that Anita and Gordon Roddick brought into the business they built." Eva Cox for one is not convinced. "There is very real danger that their worldwide problems will damage them. After all, Roddick is the brand. Good corporate citizenship requires attention to actual stakeholders: its workers, customers, and suppliers." Her concerns extend beyond the parochial fate of the interlocked Body Shops. "In the end, you have to run your business with probity, and ethically. If Body Shop falls over, it will do tremendous harm to the cause of socially responsible business. It's all a bloody shame. I hope they can pull up their socks before it's too late."=== hit in Encyclopedia of leadership: A-E, Volume 1 edited by George R. Goethals, Georgia Jones Sorenson, James MacGregor Burns  with BIB! but few cites, some to himself==bib includes: ch 1, 1995 | Clark, Maureen fictions?| Copyright Minneapolis Peddling politics as much as beauty, Body Shop founder Anita Roddick took the cosmetics industry by storm and forged a popular icon of socially responsible business. "We believe that on issues you support--or are against--is a civic responsibility," says a spring 1994 Body Shop catalog insert. Yet when the press reported flaws in the Body Shop's progressive image, the company took on its critics as only a $700 million corporation can. Marjorie Kelly, editor and publisher of Business Ethics--a bimonthly magazine with a circulation of 14,000--incurred the Body Shop's wrath last fall when she published an article entitled, "Shattered Image: Is the Body Shop Too Good to Be True?" The article, by Emmy-award-winning journalist Jon Entine, alleged that some of the Body Shop's "natural" products contained cheap, petrochemicalladen ingredients; that lax quality-control resulted in the sale of some contaminated products; that charitable giving fell short of even the national corporate average; and that journalists who had tried to challenge the company's marketing hype had been silenced with libel threats. … all: Socially Responsible Business Brawl: Business Ethics' Magazine Criticizes Cosmetic Maker Body Shop By Maureen Clark Peddling politics as much as beauty, Body Shop founder Anita Roddick took the cosmetics industry by storm and forged a popular icon of socially responsible business. "We believe that on issues you support- -or are against--is a civic responsibility," says a spring 1994 Body Shop catalog insert. Yet when the press reported flaws in the Body Shop's progressive image, the company took on its critics as only a $700 million corporation can. Marjorie Kelly, editor and publisher of Business Ethics--a bimonthly magazine with a circulation of 14,000--incurred the Body Shop's wrath last fall when she published an article entitled, "Shattered Image: Is the Body Shop Too Good to Be True?" The article, by Emmy-award-winning journalist Jon Entine, alleged that some of the Body Shop's "natural" products contained cheap, petrochemicalladen ingredients; that lax quality-control resulted in the sale of some contaminated products; that charitable giving fell short of even the national corporate average; and that journalists who had tried to challenge the company's marketing hype had been silenced with libel threats. As if to demonstrate this last point, Body Shop lawyers sent Kelly two letters containing strongly worded legal threats" before she went to press with "Shattered Image," she says. But Kelly refused to back down. The Body Shop story had to be told, chiefly for the lessons it provided those who seek to promote ethical business practices," Kelly says. She checked and rechecked Entine's sources and scheduled the piece for her September/October 1994 issue. "I went to press in the face of threats from an enormous company because I knew that what we printed was true," she says. "Even if I was 100 percent correct, however, I could be put out of business. The cost of getting to the summary-judgment phase--where the judge says there is no basis for this charge--would run $100,000," an amount that would take the business right out of Business Ethics. The Body Shop's litigiousness helped persuade Vanity Fair to nix a version of Entine's investigation. With help from public-relations giant Hill and Knowlton--particularly from vice-chairman Frank Mankiewicz, a former president of National Public Radio--the Body Shop launched a full-scale counterattack on Entine's credibility. The Body Shop denied the charges, dismissed the credibility of Entine' s sources, and characterized Kelly's decision to publish the piece as an irresponsible attempt to garner attention for her small magazine. Shortly after publication, National Public Radio interviewed Entine on the air. After the program, Mankiewicz helped persuade NPR to run a follow-up story that included comment from Body Shop supporters. "Like any other company, we should go to any length to protect ourselves when we feel like we're being dealt with unjustly," says Body Shop spokesman Bryan Weaver. Kelly stands by the story she published: "For all its bluster, the Body Shop has failed to document a single error of fact in our article, " she says. Other organizations have since published independent research that corroborates many of Entine's conclusions. Franklin Research and Development, a Boston-based ethical investment firm, awarded the Body Shop its highest social ratings in 1991. But in 1994, Franklin's newslette supported many of Entine's charges against the company and rebuked the Body Shop for its combative stance toward critics: "The Body Shop' s bombastic tactics have set back any legitimate attempts by the company to change." In late September, Kelly discovered to her amazement that the Body Shop had acquired her subscriber list without her authorization. The Body Shop used the list to send out a ten-page refutation to the magazine' s readers. Signed by chairman Gordon Roddick, the letter stated that Entine's article was "filled with lies, distortions, and gross inaccuracies, " with "almost no attempt to observe the normal standards of journalism." The Business Ethics list manager, Stevens-Knox and Associates, learned of the mailing through employees whose names were planted on the list as decoys--a customary practice to guard against misuse of subscriber addresses. Ralph Stevens, president of Stevens-Knox, is incensed that his services were used against his client. "The Body Shop duped a prominent and legitimate list-brokerage company, a respected magazine, and they duped us," he says. "If this is any indication of the way they do business, of their regard for honesty and integrity, I give them a failing mark on all counts." Some members of the progressive business community have been reluctant, however, to see one of their leaders criticized. In a conciliatory forum hosted in the January/February issue of the Utne Reader, Eric Utne praised Roddick for "setting the standard for other businesses to follow." "Socially responsible business has not wanted to take the Body Shop on," says Kelly. "This article was such a bombshell because it doesn't fit the model in our heads--that socially responsible businesses are the good guys.... We have to throw out the good guy/bad guy paradigm. The Body Shop is doing things that need to be corrected  ==Business and Society: Ethics, Sustainability, and Stakeholder Management By Archie Carroll, Ann Buchholtz Cengage Learning, Jan 1, 2014 - Business & Economics - 720 pages1 Review Learn to make strong business decisions with a better understanding of business ethics, sustainability, and stakeholder management from a strong managerial perspective. BUSINESS AND SOCIETY: ETHICS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT, Ninth Edition, demonstrates how the most successful business decision makers balance and protect the interests of various stakeholders, including investors, employees, the community, and the environment--particularly as business recovers from a perilous financial period. The authors effectively balance strong coverage of ethics and the stakeholder model with an increased focus on one of business's most recent, urgent mandates: sustainability. Coverage highlights the connection between business and the natural, social, and financial environments, illustrating how all three must be maintained in balance to sustain current and future generations. New actual business cases, real applications, and today's latest business examples present you with specific business challenges that test your values and require you to focus your reasoning skills for ongoing success in today's workplace. H&K! ==http://www.onthemedia.org/story/131513-business-ethics-magazine/transcript/ < BUSINESS ETHICS MAGAZINETranscriptFriday, August 16, 2002 Marjorie Kelly is the co-founder and editor of Business Ethics, a national publication on corporate social responsibility launched in 1987 and read nationwide by high-level opinion leaders in business, academia, social investing, and the non-governmental organization community. For a decade and a half, Business Ethics has been the core publication of the movement to bring greater responsibility into business. Read by those both inside and outside business, the publication serves as a kind of meeting ground for all parties looking to make business more humane and accountable.  Marjorie is the author of  the book The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy, published November 2001 by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. The book explores why socially responsible practices have failed to take hold and identifies the problem as the mandate to maximize returns for shareholders, which is an aristocratic mandate to serve the interests of wealth-holders above all other interests. It offers many ideas on how to move toward economic democracy. Marjorie's writing has appeared in publications such as The Utne Reader, Harvard Business Review, The Progressive Populist, and Hope magazine. In 1995-96, she wrote a weekly column on business ethics for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune.  Her speaking engagements have included keynote addresses for the Minnesota Sustainable Communities Network and the National Conference on Ethics; a  commencement address for Cardinal Stritch College; as well as talks at the Taos Talking Pictures Film Fesitval, the Society for Business Ethics Conference, Textron Bell Helicopter, and many other venues. She was a Visiting Fellow in Applied Ethics at Ohio University and has often spoken at other business schools.  Marjorie is a board member of the Capital Ownership Group, which is working to promote broader capital ownership, and the International Institute for Corporate Governance and Accountability at George Washington University, which is exploring more accountable corporate governance models. Her memberships have included the Social Venture Network, Business for Social Responsibility, the International Association for Business and Society, and the Social Investment Forum. She holds a Master's degree in Magazine Journalism from the University of Missouri, where she won the Penney-Missouri Award for most promising young magazine journalist.--https://www.linkedin.com/pub/marjorie-kelly/3/836/6bb == Unwise Use - Article by Lorna Salzmanwww.lornasalzman.com/collectedwritings/unwise.html It is easy to ferret out these surrogates. All one has to do is look at who is being attacked and who is being ignored. Those who attack groups like Sierra Club or Greenpeace without ever mentioning corporations like Monsanto, Dupont, Shell Oil and Dow Chemical are the ones to look out for. True, hardly an organization or corporation exists that hasn't committed some errors in judgment or made some bad policy bloopers. And needless to say, no organization, no matter how noble its cause, should be exempt from criticism. But there is a world of difference between those corporations or groups who are basically good but exhibit occasional flaws, and those who are basically bad but sometimes do some good things. Unlike the Monsantos and Shell Oils of the world, the Sierra Clubs and Greenpeaces of the world, if left to their own devices, will not destroy the earth. The same goes for corporations. Here the good, bad and worst can also be rather easily distinguished. Some corporations may not be particularly admirable regarding their labor or management practices, while others may be destroying the world while being paragons of good management and worker relations. Here's a test: if you had to prevent the damage done by certain businesses, would you choose Ben & Jerry's and The Body Shop on the one hand, or Monsanto and Shell Oil? Take for instance Jon Entine, whose sophisticated atacks on liberals, ethical investors, anti-defense spending and anti- animal testing advocates, and anti-nuclear activists - as well as on The Body Shop (TBS), Council on Economic Priorities, Ben and Jerry's and others - have helped damage these organizations both in reputation and stock value, not to mention public trust. Where are these attacks really coming from? In Entine's case, clearly not from any love for the progressive movement or environmentalism. Entine's lengthy CV on the web emphasizes his television news experience prominently. His last full-time TV stint was at ABC television's Primetime Live, but what Entine doesn't report is that he was fired from ABC during his investigation of TBS for "mistakes in methodology". In a letter from London's The Sunday Times, the Deputy Editor explains how his paper was misled by Entine and how he misrepresented himself. "We now know what we did not know then: ABC discovered Entine had made a number of mistakes in his methodology so serious that they had in effect fired him some ten days before. Entine, probably unknown to ABC, was however still picking up his messages from a phone on his old desk in the ABC building. We now understand from ABC sources that Entine is regarded as out of control and has been running around saying some wild things" (Ivan Fallon, letter from Deputy Editor of The Sunday Times, October 8, 1993). Entine then sold the idea to Vanity Fair, a publication with many cosmetic advertisers who compete with TBS (Sandra Earley, "The Woman Who Wants to Save the World", Corporate Report Minnesota, June 1996). They rejected the story but paid Entine a $15,000 kill fee and $18,000 in expenses. (S.Earley, Corporate Report Minnesota, June 1996).It isn't as if Entine is some Norman Mailer ; his bio up until this article shows no other published stories but a recent book on black athletes got some media attention. Entine tried to bring the story to other magazines without success, and finally Business Ethics, a small financially struggling publication, paid him $300 for the story and published it. Entine then turned around and made a $1000 donation to the magazine (S.Earley, Corporate Report Minnesota, June 1996). The publication of this story, to which Business Ethics would not allow a rebuttal, damaged TBS' image and stock value. Two years after the article appeared, Entine's wife Ellen Turner was hired to be a marketing executive for The Limited, the parent company of TBS' largest US competitor, Bath and Body Works. Then, to use a favorite Entine word, a bizarre thing occurred during a 1997 lecture at Trent University in Canada: Entine stated that "Of course, The Body Shop is better than 99% of companies". But why doesn't he WRITE that? When pressed at Trent about why he doesn't pursue corporate criminals like Shell Oil over their Nigerian operations (an issue TBS has campaigned on since 1993), he had no answer. Kooky Left-Wing Organic Companies In Better World Zine, with Martha Nichols, Entine said: "Moreover, to begin to compare Body Shop with a GE or Dow Chemical or biotechnology companies, with Body Shop coming out BETTER in the comparison, is beyond liberal-think bizarre. GE and the rest are hardly pristine and I make NO wholesale defense of them. But the issue is social change. A 1% change in the behavior of GE will have more impact than creating a thousand new kooky left wing organic companies". (Jon Entine and Martha Nichols, Better World Zine, website) Note how Entine aligns "kooky left wing" and "organic companies". Smart readers will also ask just WHICH 1% change GE might have in mind: laying off 1% fewer employees than planned? Like others of his ilk, Entine skillfully uses the temperament, semantics and vehicles of progressive and investigative journalism to gain sympathy with editors and readers. Not all are fooled however; Jay Harris of Mother Jones magazine reports that Entine called him and that "he began our conversation with a 20-minute rant about The Body Shop being the most evil company (he had) ever encountered in 20 years of investigative reporting". Harris goes on: "Mother Jones has exposed the deadly explosive tendencies of the Pinto and broke the story on the Dalkon Shield. This guy is talking about a company that spilled a few gallons of Fuzzy Peach Shampoo. He clearly had an axe to grind and was willing to let that take precedence over the facts". In Entine's TBS attack, he referred to a Food & Drug Administration (FDA) investigation of a small shampoo spill from TBS' New Jersey operations. But he failed to say that it was HE who called in the complaint (later whiting out his name,a fact he concealed), that FDA found the TBS facility to actually be well-run, and that FDA, upon completing all inspections, is bound by law to make recommendations regardless of how clean the facility may be. (FDA Report Summary of Findings, 1123). Most recently, Entine took on Working Assets Long Distance for allegedly deceiving customers who subscribed to them without knowing that nuclear-generated electricity was included in the electricity mix delivered to customers. But Entine's own views on nuclear power are suspect. In comments on a draft energy policy paper written by an activist on Long Island he said, in reference to nuclear power: .."to me, measured up against the conceivable dangers of coal-generated electricity, it is a potentially attractive alternative". And to the undersigned he wrote: "Your myopia..on nuclear energy reminds me of the statement that being against defense spending is 'socially responsible' or 'liberal'. It's a ridiculously shallow statement...I am thankful that we developed enough of a military deterrent to curb the Soviet Union and to be able to have challenged Iraq". To the Association of Organizational Management he said: "There is a world of difference between the mutant nuclear energy facility at Seabrook..and, say, the ones operated by Duke Power. With new technology and potential for deep core disposal of nuclear waste, it is time that we revisit this as part of a long-range plan at future energy needs.." "Monsanto's Robert Shapiro is a 'CEO leading the charge into the new era of business ethics'", (Business Ethics Magazine, Jan.. 96). Entine's attacks on TBS, Greenpeace and other progressive organizations are in no way balanced by any critical analysis of major polluting or exploitive corporations. On the contrary, Entine's writings set up as shining examples corporations like DuPont, General Motors, Monsanto and Duke Power. Ignoring the fact that Monsanto, a leading chemical manufacturer and biotechnology giant (maker of Agent Orange) is pressuring the government to allow its products onto the market without adequate testing, fighting to prevent labelling of genetically engineered foods, has threatened small dairy farmers who want to label their milk as free of RBGH (the Monsanto artificial growth hormone) and has attempted to bribe the Canadian consumer agency into approving its products without testing, Entine says: "Mon2:12 PM 7/16/2014entine714 === what's impotant/diff about this guy? STATS? appears fair? attacked social entr Roddick! a capitalist //borelli see also STATS gmunat assoc of scholars pest conf aei? cf John Graham OMB stats (milloy) BA philosphy Trinity Vt 1974 (geo Will, Tucker Carson) claims a journalism award, worked for  "bs:  He has produced news magazine programs at ABC News and CBS News, an entertainment special for NBC (on the Miss America Pageant!), and was Tom Brokaw’s long-time producer at NBC News, where he was also the executive in charge of documentaries. "In 1989, Tom and Jon collaborated to write and produce Black Athletes: Fact and Fiction, named Best International Sports Film of 1989), which led to his best-selling book, Taboo: Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We are Afraid to Talk About It (Public Affairs, 2000), which was recently reissued. AEI has published two books written and edited by Jon: Pension Fund Politics: The Dangers of Socially Responsible Investing (AEI Press, 2005) on the growing influence of social investing in pension funds and Let Them Eat Precaution: How Politics Is Undermining the Genetic Revolution in Agriculture (AEI Press, 2006), which examines the debate over genetic modification (GMOs), food, and farming. In 2007, Jon published Abraham’s Children: Race, Identity and the DNA of the Chosen People..."]--latest on gmo corn french:http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonentine/2014/06/24/zombie-retracted-seralini-gmo-maize-rat-study-republished-to-hostile-scientist-reactions/==RODDICK worked for UN in field, tookreports on torture vics?)employees paid 1/2 day's wage to do comm serviceco $ to amnesty int'l and PETA The Limited copies; lease barred TBS Ben Cohen quit Biz Ethics mag David Moberg H&K got entine on NPR? why? 1994 ethics audit b/c they bought mail list?! jan 1995 utne forum entine publ a verson of art;l in trade mag; even before publ in BizEthics, stock price took a hit when an org sold stock biz ethics says checked all sources, but i can't confrom any?=== london greenpeace/ http://www.mcspotlight.org/beyond/companies/bs_ref.html cites entine repeatedly 46. The Body Shop has threatened legal action against many critics or potential critics such as the Sunday Times (UK, 1980), BBC 'Tomorrow's World' programme (UK, 1980), Mail on Sunday (UK, 1991), 'International Management' magazine (1986), 'Mandesbladet Press' (Denmark, 1994), the Guardian (UK, 1996), 'Oko-Test' magazine (Germany), Survival International (UK, 1992), 'Vanity Fair' (USA, 1994), and 'Business Ethics' magazine (USA, 1994). The company brought a libel action against Channel 4 (UK) in 1992/3. The Body Shop retained Hill & Knowlton, the giant PR company whose clients have included Idi Amin (Ugandan dictator), the Chinese government (after the Tiananmen Square massacre), and former Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier. Hill & Knowlton founded the American Tobacco Research Council (an arm of the tobacco lobby). The Body Shop's lawyers in the UK are Lovell White Durrant, who represented the notorious Robert Maxwell. After publication of the critical article 'Shattered Image' in 'Business Ethics' magazine, the Body Shop set up a fake charity in order to illegally obtain Business Ethics' mailing list; they then sent out a condemnatory letter to all 12,000 subscribers.  [Numerous articles by Jon Entine including "Squandering the Integrity Premium" (Feb 98); New Consumer (Autumn 94); Franklin Research's Insight (Sept 94); Body Shop letter to 'Business Ethics' subscribers (Sept 94); Letter from the editor of 'Business Ethics' magazine (13/9/94); "Survival International's contacts with the Body Shop" (Oct 94).] Survival International characterised the Body Shop's attitude towards them as "aggressive and bullying" ["Survival International's contacts with the Body Shop" (Oct 94).]  In his social assessment commissioned by the Body Shop, Kirk Hanson concludes that "the company has not demonstrated adequate openness and transparency, accuracy in its general communications and willingness to entertain constructive criticism." He notes that it has "reacted poorly to criticism even from 'friends', franchisees and employees" ["Social Evaluation: The Body Shop International 1995".]===Franklin Research and Development 711 Atlantic AvenueBoston, MA 02111617-423-6655www.frdc.com 404 Publishes Investing for a Better World and Franklin Research's Insight, monthly newsletters with information on socially responsible investing, stocks, community investing, and shareholder activism. Joan Bavaria, Eric Becker andSimon Billennessnow http://www.trilliuminvest.com/socially-responsible-investment-company/board/ Read more: http://www.utne.com/economy/socially-responsible-investing-2000.aspx#ixzz37g7i7w61 my copy cut and paste ok pdffile:///C:/DATAleno/BURKE1113/IMAGES/bodyshop.pdf end w/ 2 complaints; align perception w/ reality 9higher std?) and don't attack critics [but stock price] entine is evil? cast doubt on je as whisleblower? but also refutes main claims on trade not aid http://www.trilliuminvest.com/pdf/ifbw_9-94.pdf  62 gals==Durham, Michael and Jan Rocha. 1996. Amazon Chief Sues Body Shop: Anita Roddick Exploited Me, Claims Village Elder, The Observer (London), 3 March.== Business Ethics: The Magazine of Corporate ResponsibilityVolume 8, Issue 5, September/October 1994Shattered ImageJon EntinePages 23-28DOI: 10.5840/bemag19948558 === September 7, 1994National Public Radio Morning Edition Body Shop International Takes Heat With Ethics Charges ADDENDUM: The following story about Body Shop International contained an erroneous statement, due to a tape editing error, when it was originally broadcast. The story ran in Morning Edition, September 7, 1994 and a correction was run the next day, September 8, 1994, in Morning Edition. ALEX CHADWICK, Host: This is Morning Edition; I'm Alex Chadwick. The cosmetics company Body Shop International advertises itself as socially and environmentally responsible, but, an article in the Minnesota- based magazine Business Ethics challenges that claim. Among other things, the article alleges that Body Shop's products are not so natural, its policies not so environmentally conscious, and its business practices not so ethical. Nina Teicholz reports. NINA TEICHOLZ, Reporter: With more than a thousand outlets in 45 countries, the London-based Body Shop's trademark bright-green stores are well-known to many consumers. And, like many people, the customers in this Washington, D.C., shop say the company's socially responsible reputation is one of the main reasons they buy Body Shop products. BODY SHOP SHOPPER: I like to buy the ones that are made in, like, Third World countries and stuff like that. I think that's a really neat idea. 2nd BODY SHOP SHOPPER: I like their commitment to the environment. They're very conscious about that. 3rd BODY SHOP SHOPPER: And I like the fact that they don't use animal testing. I like to support that kind of business. TEICHOLZ: But, last week, that progressive image came under fire. In an article published by Business Ethics magazine, journalist John Entine [sp] reported that the company's image is more myth than reality. JOHN ENTINE, Journalist, Business Ethics' Magazine: The Body Shop is sleazy and bullying, and hides behind a veneer of rubbishy and manipulative propaganda. They are nothing more than a group of thugs.
TEICHOLZ: Here, Entine quotes a letter sent to him by Steven Corey [sp], director of the Indigenous Peoples Rights Organization, Survival International. The statement may sound like hyperbole, but, Entine says more than 125 interviews with former employees, franchisees, and others, support that view. For example, according to Entine, the company emphasizes its program to buy raw materials from the developing world. Yet, those products account for less than 1 percent of its overall purchases. And he says the Body Shop's so-called natural products' are apparently filled with petrochemicals. Mr. ENTINE: Its colorings, its fragrances, its preservative systems, its base ingredients, are all synthetics, are all petrochemicals. Yet, if you pick up a Body Shop brochure, or you look in their product catalogue, you don't see a word mentioning the petrochemicals. TEICHOLZ: The Body Shop's record as an environmental leader is also called into question. In 1991, for example, David Brook [sp] was hired by the company to develop environmental programs for the company' s U.S. branch. DAVID BROOK, Developed Environmental Programs for Body Shop International: The reality was that I had no budget to put those ideas and programs into place. At that point I began to question how sincerely committed the corporation was towards accomplishing those environmental objectives. TEICHOLZ: Brook says company officials stymied his attempts to improve recycling efforts which, to him, reflected the Body Shop's overall focus on the bottom line. Mr. BROOK: Some of the decisions that seemed to be made in the U.K. were based purely on economics and not on environmental concerns. And what I mean by that is that if it was cheaper to make a container out of a cheap plastic over there without regard to its recyclability, they would do it. TEICHOLZ: Perhaps most troublesome of John Entine's allegations is that the Body Shop abuses its franchisees around the world. Mr. ENTINE: The Body Shop just settled a breach of contract suit in Norway. French franchisees have banded together to take legal action. There are problems in Australia, Scotland- TEICHOLZ: Conversations with several U.S. franchisees, afraid to be named, confirmed this portrayal. Their revenue never came close to company projections, and when, nearing bankruptcy, they approached the company for help, they say the Body Shop responded with legal threats and intimidation tactics. A spokesman for the House Small Business Committee, currently reviewing franchising practices, says he's received complaints from almost a quarter of the 65 U.S. Body Shop franchisees, and the Federal Trade Commission is investigating those complaints. The Body Shop has launched a vigorous campaign of denial against the article, although company spokeswoman Angela Bawtry [sp] admits a rapidly expanding company sometimes makes mistakes. ANGELA BAWTRY, Spokesperson, Body Shop International: At the end of the day we are human beings, and I think, you know, in any company you're going to get small incidents that don't go the way you want them to go, and we admit that that's the case. I think what we have here is a completely flawed picture of those incidents being exaggerated; some of them actually being untrue. TEICHOLZ: She says the Body Shop fully discloses the contents of its products, and that synthetics and petrochemicals must sometimes be used for preservative purposes. She characterizes the company' s relationship with its franchisees as healthy and prosperous, and the Body Shop calls environmental manager David Brook a disgruntled former employee.' Consumer advocate Ralph Nader has criticized John Entine for picking on a decent, if imperfect, company, when so many other corporations engage in much more reprehensible business practices.
But, as Richard Adams [sp], publisher of U.K.-based New Consumer magazine says, the Body Shop must answer to a higher standard of accountability.
RICHARD ADAMS, Publisher, New Consumer' Magazine: The difficulty with the Body Shop is that it claims leadership of the social responsibility movement in business. To me, that means they have to be operating at really a very high level and, unfortunately, this doesn't seem to be the case. TEICHOLZ: Many in the socially responsible investment movement are dismayed by the company's continued resistance to outside scrutiny and criticism. They hope the dispute will be clarified by two investment house reports on the Body Shop due out later this month. For National Public Radio, this is Nina Teicholz reporting. CHADWICK: A correction now regarding our story yesterday about the Body Shop International, a producer of cosmetics and other beauty products. Due to a tape-editing error, the story created the impression that Body Shop products contain only petrochemicals and synthetics; in fact, the products do contain natural ingredients, as well as other substances. [The preceding text has been professionally transcribed. However, in order to meet rigid distribution and transmission deadlines, it has not been proofread against audiotape and cannot, for that reason, be guaranteed as to the accuracy of speakers' words or spelling.]  == May 31, 2002 R.O.B. - Toronto Globe and Mail's Report on Business Magazine, Body Flop: Anita Roddick proclaimed that business could be caring as well as capitalist. Today The Body Shop is struggling on both counts. By Jon Entine It was early one Sunday morning and the thick scent of patchouli filled The Body Shop. It evoked memories of my own hippie days, but the overflow crowd at this freshly minted franchise shop was more Britney than bohemian. Girls in designer jeans chattered away on purple cellphones, standing painted nails-to-painted nails beside moms carrying Gucci bags. Anita-everyone calls her by her first name-was there to open yet another store in what is now a 50-country cosmetics empire. This was San Francisco in 1994, but it could have been any time and any mall from the Eaton Centre in Toronto to the suburbs of Tokyo. Body Shops are packaged with a precision that would make Ronald McDonald blush with envy. Anita launched into a spirited attack. Corporate executives? "Robber barons," she shouted. Investment bankers, the ones who floated the stock that made her fabulously wealthy? "Blood-sucking dinosaurs." They were rough words, but delivered and received with an unmistakable sincerity. There is a magnetic force about her. Charisma. It was still the best of times for Anita, at least in the eyes of the media that had been so instrumental in the success of The Body Shop International PLC. She had created an empire by promoting herself as a trailblazing feminist who packaged an activist social philosophy in every bottle of facial cream. "I'd rather promote human rights, environmental concerns, indigenous rights, whatever, than promote a bubble bath," she gushed, her raven hair flying. It was impossible not to notice the shelf stacked high with bath bubble gel, one of 14 Body Shop varieties that framed Anita almost perfectly. The contradictory faces of Anita Roddick reappeared last February when she and her husband, Gordon, announced, not for the first time, that they were reducing their management roles. They stepped aside as co-chairmen, and director Adrian Bellamy, who oversaw Body Shop's recent strategy of sweeping up ailing U.S. franchises, was elevated to executive chairman. North American boss Peter Saunders, formerly chief operating officer of Eatons, took over as CEO. The announcement came after many months of failed negotiations to sell the company. A series of teams on a short leash had been installed over the years to reverse Body Shop's fortunes; now a new set would try. After a previous round of takeover talks collapsed last summer, Roddick herself was quoted calling Body Shop a "dysfunctional coffin." Only a decade ago, journalists were hailing her as the Mother Teresa of Capitalism. Here was a harbinger of the New Age, weaned on can-do chutzpah and do-right rhetoric. Then came an almost endless series of ethical blowups, franchisee spats and organizational make-overs. Body Shop stock peaked in 1992 at £3.72 on the London Stock Exchange. Once known as "the shares that defy gravity," they rediscovered Newton's Principia, plunging to their present level near 95 pence. That's a decline in market value of about £500 million. It's a big comedown from the time when Body Shop grew as lushly as the Amazon rain forest. Early on, Gordon Roddick realized that, with the young company's borrowing potential tapped out, the best way to expand was by shifting the cost to others through "self financing"-franchising. It was a brilliant formula for a while. During the boom times, when Body Shop was annually adding scores-sometimes hundreds-of stores, franchising was a cash cow. Body Shop International pocketed a chunk of each franchisee's start-up investment, which, in the U.S., now ranges from $318,700 to $774,750 (U.S.) per shop. In addition, franchisees are locked in as buyers of Body Shop's cosmetics and sundries, and pay royalties of 5% on sales. For the idealistic young women that Body Shop has attracted, such costs have been a daunting, sometimes insurmountable hurdle in the low-profit business of running storefront franchises. In the good times, many franchisees prospered in tandem with the company. But by the 1990s, Bath & Body Works in the U.S., Boots in Britain, and even some department stores had developed similar lines, backed by fresher promotions. Body Shop continued to expand, but per-store sales declined for much of the decade. The 119 Canadian franchised shops have had far less competition and have not been hit nearly as hard. Nonetheless, some Canadian franchisees say that Body Shop Canada, which is privately owned by Margot Franssen, her husband, Quig Tingley, and her sister, Betty-Ann Franssen, has been "entertaining offers" and has been "very hopeful of finding a buyer" in recent years. (Body Shop Canada declined my requests for interviews for this article.) The financial problems that began for Body Shop in the 1990s were compounded by its cosmetic line. When it came to phasing out synthetic colourings and artificial fragrances, the onetime innovator now appeared no better than premium competitors such as Aveda, Lush and Origins. That Body Shop had lost its edge became clear when even women's magazines, which had long lavished unqualified praise on the company, began taking potshots. In a 1995 article, Women's Wear Daily quoted a consultant who sniffed that Body Shop products are "low-end...at a premium price." The fading cachet of Body Shop products intensified the plight of those franchisees who struggled to cover their debt as sales slumped. Yet even as complaints mounted-one typical article, in Britain's Sunday Times in 1996, blared, "Roddick faces franchise rebellion"-Body Shop continued to sell new franchises, require ever-larger investments from franchisees, and push products through the pipeline. The rubber band has finally snapped. Over the past half-dozen years, Body Shop has been sweeping up hundreds of outlets around the world (some at just pennies on the dollar), shuttering its manufacturing operations, and adding debt. "They haven't had positive net cash flow for five years," noted John Stevenson, a London analyst with ING Barings Charterhouse Securities, in January. (In May, however, the company reported positive cash flow for fiscal 2002.) Body Shop remains a mostly franchised operation. Only 29% of its 1,954 stores are in company hands. Body Shop executives would not grant me an interview for this article, but the company did release a statement, which cited strengthening sales in major markets. Still, "Our earnings profile over the last three years has inevitably reflected the very significant changes taking place within the business." Stevenson, one of only three analysts who still follow the company, thinks that the issue is the company, not the sector. "Roddick is right, they're dysfunctional," he says. "And their competitors have a similar political message and products that are at least as good. As an innovative leader and growth company, Body Shop is a dead concept." Despite that assessment, Anita Roddick made it clear during the February shakeup that she has no intention of stepping into the shadows. In her new role as a consultant to the company, she will offer "essential expertise in product, marketing and values." She added: "Being now a non-exec is going to be much more fun for me because you can be much more of a tyrant." Anita Roddick's and Body Shop's stature as symbols of socially responsible business is not all hype. Body Shop is a pioneer of social and environmental accounting, in which companies report on their own ethics, warts and all. In a survey published in December by the Financial Times, media and non-government organizations ranked Body Shop second (after BP) among the world's companies for managing its environmental resources. Body Shop's reputation as a social marketer dates to a 1986 collaboration with Greenpeace U.K. It sold jojoba oil in a "save-the-whale" promotion (the oil was marketed as a substitute for whale spermaceti, which had not been used in mass-market cosmetics for years). The media lapped it up. Bolstered by the free publicity, Body Shop attracted waves of new customers. Ever since, the company has aligned itself with one politically correct cause after another: supporting the rain forest and recycling, battling domestic violence and globalization. At every turn, Roddick likens Body Shop to a grand experiment in "profits with principles." Such rhetoric makes former franchisee and Toronto native Toni Lambert wince. Lambert, who first became a franchisee in 1985, put her stores into bankruptcy protection five years ago and remains locked in a bitter legal wrangle with Body Shop. It's hardly surprising to find frustration among the hundreds of thousands of people who have bought franchises of one brand or another across North America. Franchising is often a precarious business. It's not long before eager but frequently naive entrepreneurs realize they are at the mercy of a big company with its own agenda. But Body Shop's hard-nosed tactics have come as a shock to franchisees attracted by its progressive reputation. The company has faced suits by at least 15 franchisees-and many additional threatened suits-over the last decade, including an action involving nine U.S. franchises that is set to go to trial as early as this fall. Lambert was a management trainee at Royal Bank in the early 1980s when she wandered into a Body Shop and was charmed by its sense of fun. "I was 24 years old and for the first time, I knew that this is what I wanted to do," she says. Lambert came to own two Toronto-area franchises. These were the golden days for Body Shop and its partners. Franchisees, then paying a pittance for the right to open a shop, often made out famously. But as evolving franchisors are apt to do, Body Shop began to enforce stricter specifications on store design and the myriad details necessary to create a consistent shopping experience. Being a Body Shop franchisee gradually became more costly. Lambert says that the Franssen-Tingley trio, which then also controlled franchise rights for the northeastern United States, approached her about buying two flagging shops near Detroit, with a promise of rights to the entire region. She jumped at the chance. In 1992, Lambert convinced her husband, John, to quit his job as head of trading and sales at Nomura Canada, a Bay Street brokerage. They sold the Toronto stores and moved to Detroit. Business went like gangbusters-at first. Within a year, the Lamberts were offered a third shop, which they also revived. The problems started, they say, when they agreed to take over a struggling location in a crime-ridden mall. "No cherry picking," Toni Lambert says they were told. Rather, the company said, they'd be looked on favourably for future stores if they took over the money-losing one. Despite the erosion showing up in other franchises, the Lamberts took the deal. Even as her profits began to slide, Lambert added two more stores. She also reached out to other franchisees as a member of the Committee for Progress, which the company set up as an advisory board to field franchisees' beefs. The committee presented Body Shop with a list of issues that mirror complaints by franchisees over the years: poor marketing and advertising, competition from company-owned stores and catalogues that operate with larger margins, and supply-chain screwups. According to court filings in the U.S. action involving nine franchises, Body Shop consistently understocked franchisees by as much as 40% and discriminated against them in favour of company-owned stores. "The playing field between corporate and franchise stores was not even," Lambert contends. "It was like they were running two separate businesses." The final blow came in a disastrous 1996 Christmas season. The Lamberts ended up with a warehouse full of inventory. With Body Shop unwilling to help ease them out of their plight, she contends, Lambert and her husband put their business in bankruptcy protection. "We felt we had no choice. Under the basic franchise agreement, Body Shop had the right to take our assets and terminate our franchise at any time [if any of certain conditions of the wide-ranging agreement were breached]. They could have taken the stores." (Many companies' franchise agreements have such clauses.) "For 12 years, I put everything I owned into that company-my life, my home," Lambert says. "I even adopted a new country." Body Shop International's position on the dispute is that the Lamberts "reneged on a debt of over $1 million owed to us and subsequently moved to Canada." The company expects to prevail in court. Toni Lambert is one of dozens of franchisees who have contacted me to tell their own Body Shop saga. The calls began in 1993 and led to the publication of my article "Shattered Image" in Business Ethics magazine. Some callers had complaints that were strictly business-franchisee revolts were simmering in the U.S., Asia and Europe. But more often, they painted a picture of Body Shop that was at odds with the company's image. The file grew fatter over the years. Some examples: While Body Shop has touted its products as "naturally based" and "inspired by Nature," many of its bright colours and thick fragrances are produced in the laboratory. There have been instances of product contamination over the years, according to Food and Drug Administration inspection reports, interviews and documents from quality control managers, and statements from disgruntled franchisees. In the early '90s, various guides, including Consumer Reports, criticized Body Shop products on overall quality or for liberal use of synthetics.David Brook, a former Environmental Protection Agency lawyer who was Body Shop's manager of environmental affairs in the U.S. in the early 1990s, dismissed the company's environmental claims as "window dressing." He provided environmental-agency records documenting discharges of pollutants into the local water system at Body Shop's former U.S. headquarters in New Jersey. He says that after management blew off these and other problems, he quit in frustration.There is sometimes a gap between Body Shop's assertions that it "campaigns for human rights all over the world," and company practices. After Roddick, in a 1993 speech before the Congress of the International Chamber of Commerce, applauded companies that refused to trade with nations led by "torturers and despots," such as China, enraged employees sent me photocopies of supply manuals indicating Body Shop bought many of its gift baskets from Chinese companies. The Roddicks later said that, rather than boycott entire countries, Body Shop would require suppliers to sign a labour-standards code of conduct.The most famous of Body Shop's media-celebrated "Trade Not Aid" initiatives, sourcing Brazil nuts for hair conditioner from an Amazon tribe, has been rife with controversy. The face of its promotion, a grinning Kayapo chief, filed suit over the use of his image. A Kayapo expert from the University of Chicago ridiculed the fair-trade initiative as "Aid Not Trade"-aid from developing peoples to Body Shop. According to a U.K. fair-trade research group, Body Shop's 1993 payments to Third World producers amounted to 0.165% of its retail sales.Even Body Shop's reputation for charitable giving has been an issue. In 1994, reporters quoted Roddick as saying, "so what else do I do with the money than give it away to groups and projects relevant and right for our times." The record told a more penurious story. Whatever the Roddicks personally may have given away, the company says it has no record of making financial donations prior to 1986, a year in which it gave 0.4% of pretax profits to charity. Its giving averaged 1.46% a year in the following decade. (The percentage recently has gone up, albeit from a smaller profit pie.)Cumulatively, these episodes made Body Shop less of a magnet for the well-informed conscientious consumer: Maybe Body Shop wasn't about doing business differently after all. In 1987, the Roddicks made a fateful expansion decision: They moved into the world's most lucrative but most competitive market, the United States. But before they did, they had to deal with their long-simmering "Berkeley problem." One of the foundations of the Anita Roddick myth is that she invented the Body Shop concept. In fact, the saga began not in Brighton in 1976 but one day early in that decade in the Bay Area of California. That's when the young Anita Perella, with a child in tow and pregnant, travelled with her boyfriend, Gordon, to visit Gordon's best friend, David Edward, in San Francisco. David's former wife, Alma Dunstan-McDaniel, remembers dragging Anita to her favourite shop, a tiny toiletries store filled with tie-dyed decorations and redolent with incense. Anita was taken by the shelves stacked high with hand-cut soaps, loofah sponges, and exotic-sounding potions in small plastic bottles with hand-written labels. "We were young women and that was the place to buy your shampoo and your body cream, and it was hip and cool," Dunstan-McDaniel says. The owners, Peggy Short and Jane Saunders, had carved the original store in the little chain out of a converted garage, cleverly calling their creation The Body Shop. Years later, back in England, a close friend of Roddick's remembers her excitedly going through dog-eared, hand-drawn brochures of the original Bay Area Body Shops. The breakthrough recycling policy, the products, and, most important, the California Body Shop's fun ethos all predated the version Roddick would launch in 1976. Comparisons of the brochures of the two Body Shops are telling. Short and Saunders broke out their products under the categories "For the Hair," "For the Bath," "Creams," "Lotions" and "Essential Perfume Oils." They cut freshly made glycerine soaps in lemon, rose and strawberry scents, and poured perfume oils scented with linden, magnolia, "woody sandalwood" and ylang-ylang. Roddick's brochures, put out years later, had nearly identical categories and many identical product names-or variations. Berkeley had "Four O'clock Astringent Toner"; England, "Five O'clock Witchazel Astringent." Berkeley offered "Beauty Grains: A natural cleanser made from finely ground Japanese Azuki beans." Brighton did too, save for the word "Japanese." The top of a California brochure stated, "All of our products are Biodegradable & made to our specifications in Berkeley"; and "Bottles 20¢ or bring your own." The top of a U.K. brochure read, "All our products are biologically soft and made to our specifications"; and "Bottles 12p, or bring your own." In 1987, when Short and Saunders were happy proprietors of six Body Shops, the Roddicks offered them $3.5 million (U.S.) in exchange for the name. They snapped up the offer, converting their own stores to Body Time over a period of five years. It is not illegal to copy a business concept; nor is it generally illegal to use a company name in a country where it has not been trademarked. Over the years, however, these otherwise mild-mannered women became resentful when customers accused them of stealing Anita Roddick's concept. Some would even show them comparison copies of the brochures. "What really got them angry," says a colleague, "was the ongoing deception-Anita's lie that she originated the idea, the colour scheme, the products, all the things that gave the company its unique identity. Never in our wildest imagination did we think that Roddick, with all her claims about being so honest, would keep this fabrication going." Body Shop has been adamant that its concept and name did not originate in California, and has used legal warnings to prevent or water down published reports to the contrary. The claim brings a blunt response from Dunstan-McDaniel, the witness to the borrowing. "That's bullshit, because I took her there. It felt unsavoury from the beginning. Anita ripped them off." The buyout proved a short-lived triumph for Roddick. Like other European retailers who invaded the U.S. market-Benetton, Laura Ashley, Tie Rack, Sock Shop-Body Shop stumbled. Look-alike competitors, in particular Bath & Body Works, whose locations now outnumber Body Shop in the U.S. by about 5 to 1, came to dominate the premier malls, offering fresher products with sharper marketing and pricing. In recent years, Body Shop has bought out or shuttered 160 franchisee stores in the U.S. Threatened suits by franchisees, including one by the Careless Group in England, and others in France, Spain, Germany and Austria, have also led to buyouts in some cases. Body Shop's U.S. franchise offering documents provide details of other franchise dustups that actually made it to court. In one of several cases that allege breach of contract or fraud, Body Shop paid $878,900 in 1995 to its former Norwegian head franchisee. Earlier that year, Anne Downer, who had franchise rights for eight countries in Asia, collected $6.2 million (U.S.) to settle a dispute that exploded when Body Shop forced her to close her 12 Singapore stores. Toni Lambert's case came to a head last June. Body Shop, which the Lamberts say had tried previously to petition them into personal bankruptcy in Michigan but failed, filed again in Canada. The Ontario Superior Court denied the company's motion. Judge Donald R. Cameron scolded Body Shop for attempting "an egregious breach of widely accepted commercial morality... not consonant with our system of justice and general moral outlook." Body Shop is appealing the decision. As a result of Judge Cameron's decision, the Lamberts, who say they owe Body Shop nothing, countersued in Michigan, claiming damages of $500,000 (U.S.). These disputes have been costly for Body Shop. And they come on top of other outlays. In the past five years alone, Body Shop has paid out at least £80 million to acquire franchises, and another £20 million for restructuring. The way the restructuring costs have been accounted-as one-time rather than ongoing occurrences-has raised some eyebrows. "The recurring nature of the costs being treated as below-the-line led us to move some of them back above-the-line," says Matthew McEachran of Investec Henderson Crosthwaite in London. Despite the prospect of further franchisee spats, London-based Seymour Pierce analyst Richard Ratner believes the company can at least stabilize its business if the founding couple's handpicked chief, Adrian Bellamy, "can keep the Roddicks at a distance." Considering that the founders hold 51.6% of the voting stock (including Bellamy's shares), and control the board, he's not optimistic about Bellamy's prospects. "In the end, the Roddicks are just not suited to be running a public company." Bellamy did move quickly to address the franchisee situation. "I don't think we've used their knowledge and expertise as effectively as we might have," he said. Within a week of his assuming control, the Lamberts received a phone call from Body Shop Canada inquiring if they were open to a settlement, they say. "Bellamy wants to move on. He's a businessman," they quote Quig Tingley as saying. The Lamberts say they are continuing to press their legal case. With its 25th anniversary just behind it, it's timely to consider the legacy of Body Shop and Anita Roddick. Mark Constantine, an original supplier of Roddick's who went on to found Lush, has mixed feelings. He often thinks back to those fun early days, mixing weird potions in his kitchen while Anita and Gordon looked on like kids in a candy store. "There is still a mass of innocence to those two despite it all," he sighed. No one can take away Anita Roddick's success in building her empire. But it's increasingly doubtful that she will be remembered in her self-styled persona as the world's most socially responsible entrepreneur. Roddick may not always have been able to practise her social vision, but she was always able to promote it. She is assuming her place in history as one more beauty baroness who created her own myth to make an entrepreneurial dream come true. "She stands full square between Estée Lauder and Elizabeth Arden," Constantine said. "They all wrote their own stories." Jon Entine (runjonrun@earthlink.net) is contributing author to Case Histories in Business Ethics (Routledge, 2002). A previous article on The Body Shop, "Shattered Image", published in Business Ethics magazine in 1994, won a National Press Club Award in the United States.== soc.org.nonprofit ›REality Check on Working Assets1 post by 1 author   Jon Entine 4/22/97 JON ENTINE 4/14/97NOT FOR PUBLICATION: SOURCE MATERIAL ONLYWORKING ASSETS and the POLITICS of “GREEN POWER”An opportunity to nurture the development of more energy options,especially renewable energy, is falling victim to politics within the“green power” and environmental movements. This bungled moment comesjust as a deregulation wave sweeps through the energy industry openingit to competition from alternative, green producers.In a desire to promote lower costs and bring more competition to theenergy industry, numerous states have embarked on pilot programs toderegulate the price of electricity. In the coming years, many stateswill introduce full-scale retail competition. Although there is atpresent considerable excess electric capacity, rates have long been keptartificially high, yet. According to energy experts, this excesscapacity will persist well into the next century. De-regulation brings supply and demand more in balance, in effectallowing prices to float downward to reflect the current situation ofexcess energy. It opens the door for registered third parties – in thiscase Working Assets – to contract with local suppliers for their unusedcapacity, mark it up according to their own marketing standards, andresell it to pilot customers. In 1996, New Hampshire became one of the first states to open up afraction of its market, 3%, to outside companies. These companiescontracted with the dozen+ companies that feed into the New Englandenergy pool grid known as NEPOOL. That’s when the questionable green marketing story began. Working Assets Long Distance becomes Working Assets Green Power One of the 30-odd companies that jumped into the pilot project to buyand resell excess capacity was Working Assets Green Power, a division ofWorking Assets Funding Service, which operates Working Assets LongDistance. It promises to bring “clean” renewable energy to customers.Does it tell the truth? CEO Laura Scher positions Working Assets as a leading sociallyresponsible company.’ WALD is a “pass through” telephone company, whichmeans it leases the phone lines from competitors (WALD contractsprimarily with Sprint, the target of considerable criticism fromactivist groups) and tacks on an “integrity” premium based on its brandmarketing as a ‘progressive’ company. That reputation is based largelyon its donation of 1% of its telephone bills to popular activist groups(and it gets the tax deduction for your contribution) and its vocalcampaigning on behalf of a myriad of high-profile social issues. Itadvertises heavily in New Age publications like Mother Jones and UtneReader.
A look beneath the green veneer, however, raises disturbing questionsabout WALD’s basic integrity.
Although WALD markets that its long distance rates are “lower” thancompetitors, its rates are consistently higher than the “big three” – asmuch as 300%+ higher when you compare overseas rates using itscompetitors popular “one rate” plans [compare WALD and AT&T on the UK].WALD’s low “basic rates” is functionally equivalent to “list price” onnew cars: nobody pays it. Even AT&T charges only 10 cents/ minute/24hours a day (plus $4.95 month).
There are also at least two great “progressive” options for UScustomers: EarthTones charges 15 cents/minute with no monthly charge andAffinity, which is offered through environmental groups, will beat yourcurrent rate by 10% – meaning it would charge as little as 9.1 cents.Best of all, EarthTones gives all its profits to charity and Affinitygives 5% to its environmental sponsors – so you’re not lining thepockets of WALD which systematically overcharges its customers.
WA CEO Laura Scher is also on the board of Community Products Inc.(CPI), the company created by Ben Cohen of Ben & Jerry’s to sourceBrazil nuts for his ice cream and other “rainforest” products. WorkingAssets Funding Service invested $300,000 in CPI debentures in 1989 aspart of a deal that paid WA $30,000 a year with an additional $300,000bonus when WAFS cashed out in December 1995. During this period, CPI andBen & Jerry’s, with Scher’s apparent approval as board member, engagedin persistent marketing fraud by claiming that Ben & Jerry’s ice creamcontained Brazil nuts sourced directly from a co-op of indigenous AmazonIndians and that CPI gave 60% of its profits to charity.
It turns out that Ben & Jerry’s sourced ZERO nuts from the co-op andbought all of its nuts off the commercial markets supplied by LatinAmerica’s most abusive agri-businesses. Moreover, CPI gives ZERO dollarsto charity today, and has given ZERO to charity since 1992. Previous tothat, CPI gave only 10% of its profits to charity. According to IRSdocuments that have been released as part of a fraud case against BenCohen and CPI, approximately $180,000 was given to Working Assets aspart of a marketing contract Peter Barnes (of Working Assets) worked outwith Cohen and Ben & Jerry’s, requiring WA to promote Ben & Jerry’s icecream. This was one of the key ingredients to Working Assets brilliant,and continued, promotional tie-in with Ben & Jerry’s.
Today, CPI is on the verge of bankruptcy, the “rainforest harvest” hascollapsed, and the ill-fated project is blamed for consolidating andincreasing the control of right-wing agri-businesses over the Brazil nutmarket. University of Chicago anthropologist Terrence Turner (one of theworld’s leading Amazon experts) calls rainforest harvest projects by Ben& Jerry’s and Body Shop “Aid Not Trade,” a play on Body Shop’s Trade NotAid slogan -- “it’s aid by the exploited Indians in terms of their verymarketable images with almost no trade in return. These companies makemillions in free marketing.”
The windfall that WALD has reaped from clever social marketing hasapparently opened its eyes to a similar windfall beckoning in anotherexplosively lucrative market: buying excess electric capacity as part ofelectric industry deregulation, marking it up higher than competitors,and selling it with a “green” label to idealistic and trustingcustomers.

This is what Working Assets claims in its marketing brochures and on itsweb page about its for-profit foray into offering “green” electricity inNew Hampshire:
“Working Assets offers New Hampshire consumers NUCLEAR FREE Electricity.No coal or Hydro-Quebec power either. “We believe there are thousands ofNew Hampshire residents who would appreciate a chance to supportenvironmentally sustainable energy,” says Laura Scher, Working Assetschief executive officer. “These consumers would prefer not to supportthe nuclear power industry.” Under the company’s new “Working AssetsGreen Power” program, consumers will be guaranteed a lower price thanthey currently pay for their electricity. “We are offering people anopportunity to save money and save the environment at the same time,”says Scher.
Here’s the not-very-green reality.
Today, the amount of clean renewable technology in New England isminimal. Throughout New England, approximately 4% of electricity isgenerated by non-hydro renewables, primarily landfill gases and trashburning incinerators.
WA did not contract with the few smaller alternative energy producers inNew England or propose a plan to nurture development of green energy.Instead, it contracted to buy ALL of its electricity for its NewHampshire customers from New England Power, a subsidiary of New EnglandEnergy. Working Assets brags it will save its customers money. It surely is in aposition to save them money, for it buys energy from New England Power,which is the lowest cost producer of energy in the region. Yet, WorkingAssets charges the MOST of all the pilot project participants, as muchas 53% MORE than competitors.
Based on marketing materials sent out by the companies, Working Assetscharges 3.5 cents per kilowatt hour; its lowest cost competitor, WheeledElectric Power, charges as little as 2.29 cents. Interestingly, anotherNew England Energy subsidiary, Granite State Energy, is offeringelectricity for 2.5 cents, and provides energy sourced from the samecompany – New England Energy – as does WALD – plus, Granite State throwsin a $39 birdfeeder!
Working Assets collects a huge “integrity tax” – as much as 53% – whichits idealistic consumers willingly pay because they believe WorkingAssets collects and distributes energy differently than NortheastUtiltities or New England Power for that manner. Those green dollars godirectly into WA’s bulging pockets.
Here’s what WA’s idealistic customers actually get for paying as much as53% more:
According to the NH Public Utilities Commission, 60% or more of theelectricity that actually goes into the homes of Working Assetscustomers is nuclear. Moreover, the electricity going into the homes ofWA customers has a substantial amount of coal and electricity sourcedfrom Hydro-Quebec.
Working Assets does not tell its customers that ALL the electricity inNew England is fed off of the New England Pool (NEPOOL), which mixesenergy from all suppliers, from where it is sent through the grid tohomes. New England Power supplies into that grid. The energy that goesinto homes is a mix of all the energy in the region.
Let’s say, for arguments sake, that there was a large wind and solarenergy company that sent its electrons into NEPOOL (according to the NHPUC, there is NOT ONE kilowatt of wind or solar power going into thegrid despite claims by WA, reported in numerous press releases andstories pulled up on the web, that it supplies wind and solar power toits NH customers). That energy would get mixed with nuclear, coal, oiland water power electrons, so every customer would get the same energy.IF a third party contracted with this wind-solar supplier, all theywould get would be the right to offer this third party’s “excess”capacity. The mix, including nuclear energy, would remain at the samepercentage.
WORKING ASSETS STRIKES A DEAL TO OFFER THIS EXCESS CAPACITY FROM NEWENGLAND POWER. New England Power is a subsidiary of New England ElectricSystem (NEES: NYSE: NES) which is a $2.3 billion holding company, whosesubsidiaries comprise New England’s second largest electric utilitysystem. MASSPIRG calls NEES “the dirtiest utility in New England.”
• It is part-owner of the SEABROOK 1 nuclear power plant.
• It is part-owner of the Millstone 3 nuclear power plant.
• It has a 30% interest in Yankee Atomic Electric Company which owns a185 MW nuclear generating station in Rowe, Massachusetts.
• It is part-owner of Maine Yankee nuclear power plants.
• NEES participates in rate-regulated oil and gas explorationdevelopment through a partnership with an non-affiliated oil company andhas coal interests.
• NEES and its subsidiaries have been named by the EPA or theMassachusetts Department of Environmental Protection as responsible for22 hazardous waste sites. Legal proceedings are ongoing against NEES.NEES acknowledges at least 40 Superfund toxic waste sites altogether.
Does Working Assets Stimulate the Production of Green Energy?
How does the energy market in New Hampshire work, who benefits from thecurrent deregulation plan, and why are alternative energy producers socritical of the plan while some large environmental groups support itand Working Assets?
There are some “green” competitors in the region. For instance,Northeast Utilities, primary owner of most of the nuclear capacity inthe region, maintains that it offers its Massachusetts customers as partof another pilot project (in which WA also participates) a 100% hydroproduct, although it too offers electricity off the NEPOOL grid. Itspromotion is no different in substance or energy provided than isWorking Assets – although it’s a lot less expensive.
Is Working Assets investing in new wind or solar plants to replace coal,oil or nuclear facilities? NO. Would its current actions increasewind-solar development? NO. Could its actions ever reduce reliance oncoal or nuclear energy? Not for decades in the New England region,according to energy officials and activists, because of the excesscapacity. The electricity mix for the buying consumer didn’t change byONE electron as a result of Working Assets contractual relationship. Ineffect, it is an accounting function.
Given the current oversupply, even a stand-alone wind or solar plantwould be so cost-inefficient that only a few boutique consumers wouldfoot the very high premium. Building an alternative energy plant isbeside the point, however, since Working Assets isn’t proposing to buildalternative energy plants.
Just for a moment, imagine your reaction, disgust and horror if you sawa full-page ad from New England Power claiming that it offered “nuclearfree” energy at great savings to its customers...yet, you knew itoffered nuclear-filled energy and charged 53% more than companies whoprovided the same energy mix. In its defense, New England Power claimsthat it “promises” that all of the money that new “green” customers paidto them would not be utilized in any operations of its nuclear plants(they would use it, say, to pay off legal costs in their hazardous wastedisputes).
Would you say, “hey, what a great company. Their greenwash marketinghelps create a “critical mass” of demand for alternative energy. NewEngland Power is a model progressive company. This sure promotes thegoal of sustainable energy.”
Of course not.
Now substitute ‘Working Assets Green Power’ for ‘New England Power.’
It turns out that New England Energy Systems and Laura Scher have otherintertwining interests. Joan Bok, NEES Chairman, is a board member ofBusiness for Social Responsibility along with Laura Scher. Bok is alsoon the board of Monsanto and numerous other organizations and companiesincluding the Urban League.
The Politics of “Green” and “Alternative Energy”
Working Assets is also behind a plan that California alternative energyactivists contend could force the shut down of some alternative energyplants and result in the generation of LESS, not more, renewable energy. In another cleverly-worded appeal, it has just sent its idealisticCalifornia phone customers an “action alert” which urges them to supportalternative energy subsidies in California. It NEVER discloses that themoney would end up in Working Assets coffers by way of its “Green Power”business.
Working Assets has NOT disclosed just how it would supply alternativeenergy. In its two previous forays into “green” power – in New Hampshireand Massachusetts – it contracted with old-line nuclear and fossil-fuelenergy companies and not alternative suppliers.
Many renewable energy companies in California, which now generate 10% ofthe state’s power, opposed Working Assets’s plan and say it would dry-upsupport for maintaining these plants, and for building new ones.
It is revealing that renewable energy companies line upshoulder-to-shoulder in opposition to WALD’s scheme, yet many largeenvironmental groups are cautiously supportive of its strategy, butunaware of the breath of its less-than-honest marketing tactics. Theseenvironmental groups are, by and large, not involved in the actualproduction of alternative energy. Many are also in a position to receiveconsiderable financial support directly from Working Assets if WALD’Sclever but deceptive marketing scheme should spread. It is alsorevealing that WALD gives NO money to directly develop alternativeenergy.
This raises serious conflict-of-interest issues and underscores thepotential of green dollars driving the issue instead of public policyand environmental concerns.
Neither WALD nor mainstream environmental groups who regularly offer“objective opinions” on the relative merits of green marketing and greenpower disclose this insular relationship. Working Assets AND theseenvironmentalist groups should be REQUIRED to PUBLICLY reveal theSPECIFICS of any and all financial, “charity” and contractualrelationships, past and future. That would make it an OPEN process.That’s full disclosure.
Bottom Line: Working Assets actions demonstrate that it believes thatsales of a smaller amount of renewable energy – by Working Assets ofcourse – is more important that actually GENERATING clean power.
A recent study of the New Hampshire deregulation effort commissioned bythe Rhode Island environmental group “Save the Bay” concludes that“public education campaigns are needed to help consumers to understandthat their selection of an energy product can influence the futuregeneration of electricity.” In other words, the current approach doesNOT EFFECT THE CURRENT ENERGY MIX. That is NOT the message being sent toits customers, most of whom have swallowed the marketing pitch that theyare getting “nuclear free” energy.
Working Assets had a wonderful opportunity in New Hampshire to educateits customers to the complexity of this issue. Instead, they issueddeceptive marketing come-ons. They are undercutting the credibility ofthe alternative energy movement which has worked diligently and honestlyto educate consumers that there is NO EASY FIX, as Working Assetssuggests.

Let’s be clear about what the issue is. Working Assets has no productsto speak of. It leases out other companies telephone lines – WALD iscalled a “pass through” company.
In the electrical business, Working Assets “buys” electricity generatedby others and technically supplies it to customers. In fact, WA has donenothing to explore for new energy sources or provide a stronger energyinfrastructure. In effect, its only real product is its reputation forbeing ‘socially responsible’ and more honest that competitors.
Apparently Laura Scher believes that it is okay for WALD to makemisleading and even fraudulent marketing claims on the grounds that her“intentions” are honorable. Whatever are the intention of Working Assets– and we can be certain that as a for-profit business, it has manyconflicting intentions including making a bundle of money – its actionshave not been above-board.
Even now, as Scher feels the heat from these disclosures, she is makingthe rounds of energy activists and trying to strong-arm them.Organizations such as MASSPIRG (617-292-4800) have tried to get themessage out about the greenwashing activities of Working Assets andother “green” electricity marketers, but the ‘social responsibility’movement in general has been loathe to criticize one of its “friends.”
Character demonstrated by actions, not by rhetoric or intentions, is theonly reliable measure of corporate ethics. Working Assets’ markets its“good intentions” as if it’s a “get-out-of-jail-free” card. Goodintentions demand FULL DISCLOSURE AND AN OPEN PROCESS.
 “The secret of success is honesty and fair dealing,” Mark Twain oncesaid. “If you can fake these, you’ve got it made.”

Jon Entine is a maverick journalist who specializes in business ethics.He won a National Press Club award in 1995 for “Shattered Image: Is TheBody Shop Too Good to Be True?” published in Business Ethics magazine.[National Press Club Consumer Journalism Award: 1995 Honorable Mention.]He has also written extensively on the questionable marketing of Amazon“rainforest” products. His work appears in progressive journals likeUtne Reader, Dollars and Sense, and The Progressive Populist, as well asmainstream publications including The Chicago Tribune, The Sunday Times(UK), The Toronto Globe and Mail, and The Guardian (UK).
Entine has also won more than a dozen major awards for his televisionreporting with ABC News and NBC News, including two Emmys fordocumentaries on reform movements in China and the former Soviet Union.He lectures on business and journalism ethics, has been a featuredspeaker at the Natural Products Expo, and is finishing a book forMacmillan on why blacks dominate sports based on his award-winning NBCdocumentary “Black Athletes: Fact and Fiction.” He is also an activemember of Business for Social Responsibility and Co-Op America.
Entine can be reached at (614) 258-9492; Email: runj...@earthlink.netThe Queen of Bubble Bath
She has been called "The Mother Theresa of capitalism". But in the past few years Anita Roddick's reputation has suffered more than a few bruises. The founder of Body Shop has been accused of several unethical business practices including the exploitation of the Brazilian Kayapo Indians.
Jon Entine
"I'd rather promote human rights, environmental concerns, indigenous rights", whatever, says Anita Roddick breathlessly, as she opens yet another Body Shop, at a mall near San Francisco, "than promote a bubble bath." Roddick is framed by a shelf-full of bubble bath, one of fourteen varieties of soap suds sold by Body Shop; there is not a hint of irony in her voice.
"Anita is a myth-o-maniac," says Mara Amats, a trade consultant who has worked closely with Roddick. Amats, like many Body Shop observers, struggles to understand why such a charismatic business woman continues to make one ethical misstep after another. For years, Body Shop had prospered because of the squeaky-clean reputation of its founder and CEO. Roddick even has long posted a sign in her office proclaiming that "we will be the most honest cosmetic company" in the world. But today, that rags-to-riches-to-Robin Hood corporate myth is in tatters as Roddick and her company struggle with scandal and organizational disarray.
The past few years have certainly been a reversal of fortune for the Body Shop which had known only exponential growth and fawning publicity for most of its history. With the help of a $6,000 loan, Roddick opened a tiny cosmetic shop in 1976 in Brighton along England's south coast,. She catered to the hippie counter-culture, selling "natural" shampoos and lotions and offering "one-stop" ear piercing. Much to her surprise, her cash register rang madly. A decade of spectacular international expansion followed.
In the late 1980s, Roddick expanded her "green" brand image by associating herself with social causes including an opposition to animal testing, recycling, promoting AIDS awareness, human rights. The centerpiece of Body Shop's marketing efforts, however, was the rainforest promotion with the Kayapo from whom she sourced a tiny amount of nut oil for her hair conditioner. The media loved her. Before long, this eccentric and outspoken entrepreneur emerged as the world's best known feminist business leader. "The Mother Teresa of capitalism," she was called.
Roddick's socially responsible reputation became a gold mine. Body Shop is now a multinational beauty company with 1,407 shops in 45 countries, and a billion dollars in retail sales. Roddick herself has amassed a fortune estimated at more than $200 million. She owns a castle in Scotland and a flat in London, and her husband Gordon, Body Shop's Chairman, flies his favorite polo ponies around the world on a chartered airliner. But despite its enormous financial success, the Body Shop empire is beset by scandal and losses in its key US market.
Until a few years ago, Body Shop's generated dozens of enthusiastic stories every year about its innovative, socially conscious, activities. Consumers were willing to pay a hefty premium for its commodity products because they believed its cosmetics were high quality and natural, and that it practiced social responsibility consistent with what it preached. But the image shattered irreparably in September, 1994 with the publication of my article "Shattered Image: Is The Body Shop Too Good to Be True?" in the US magazine Business Ethics. It detailed dramatic contradictions between BSI's idealistic public image and its operational practices, questioned the company's ethical reputation and challenged Anita Roddick' honesty, if not her sincerity.
"Shattered Image" documented that the company stole the Body Shop name and marketing concept, fabricated the origins of key products, misrepresented its charitable contributions and fair trade programs, and has been beset by employee morale and franchise problems. Moreover, its lotions, shampoos and fragrances were never "natural."
The breadth of misrepresentation is startling and covers every dimension of its operations. A few of the low-lights:
"Natural" Products:
Despite the green hype, its products are lackluster and drug-store quality. BSI uses only microscopic and ineffective levels of botanical extracts and combines them with extensive amounts of petrochemical ingredients such as isopropyl myristate, petrolatum, and triethanolmine. As recently as January of 1996, a Danish lab found two of its best selling products filled with formaldehyde, confirming findings by Oko-Test, a leading German consumer magazine. In April, the international trade publication Women's Wear Daily quotes an industry consultant as saying "You can't offer low-end products at a premium price, which is where they [Body Shop] are at."
Charity:
Rather than giving away "an inordinate amount of pre-tax profits to charity" as Roddick claimed, the company had given zero dollars to charity over its first 11 years and gave far less than the average company over its entire history.
Franchising:
Ninety percent of Body Shop's stores are franchised. In effect, it is an international wholesale operation in which its franchisees assume most of the risk of expansion. It's also led to huge problems: Recent franchise suits in Israel, Singapore, France, Canada and Norway have resulted in more than $10 million in settlements. The US Federal Trade Commission launched a 16-month fraud investigation of Body Shop. While the probe was ongoing, Body Shop revamped its franchise financial documents and all but ended expansion in the United States, where it has lost money for two years running.
The Body Shop's vaunted Trade Not Aid promotion is particularly misrepresented. Gordon Roddick calls fair trade the "cornerstone" of the company. It is a tiny cornerstone indeed: according to its own statistics, fair trade represented less than 0.16% of turnover when my exposés appeared. Kirk Hanson, a Stanford University business lecturer hired by the company as a consultant characterizes its trading schemes as "small and few in number" and says they have not been forthrightly promoted.
The problems with the Brazilian Kayapo project described by Saulo Petean are just the tip of the iceberg. Its micro-projects with the Pueblo Indians in the US and with natives in Tanzania and the Solomon Islands have been grossly exaggerated and beset by problems. Pauline Tiffen, who linked the Body Shop up with the Mexican Indian natives who were the subject of Body Shop's advertising campaign with American Express, has a harshly blunt, but not uncharacteristic observation. She calls Roddick "schizophrenic" and "sociopathic... She took the project we set up and tried to subvert it," according to Tiffen.
In January, its shea butter project in Ghana became BSI's latest trade scheme to hit the headlines. The Toronto Globe and Mail, in an article entitled "Grief in Ghana" reports that Body Shop contracted to buy huge amounts of shea butter, only to renege, leaving the local economy devastated. Trade experts say it's a now familiar pattern.
These problems are not just the mistakes of over-enthusiastic idealists. A particularly revealing story is Body Shop's first fair trade program. In 1987, Roddick began sourcing foot massagers, which she calls "footsie rollers", made in India at the Boys Town orphanage. In the early 1980s, when Richard Adams was head of the fair trade company Traidcraft (UK), he sourced a different Boys Town product, wood carvings. He soon discovered that Joe Homan, the project's director, was sourcing the carvings from sweat shops and was molesting the boys. He kept the police at bay by using a slush fund kept full by church agencies that were innocently sending him money.
When Adams found out that the Roddicks had linked up with Homan, he was horrified. He immediately advised them of the problem. "I never heard back," he says. Two alarmed members of the Catholic order which had kicked out Homan years before also visited Roddicks at their home. Still, nothing was done.
"Gordon was aware of Homan's reputation," writes Anne Downer, the former Body Shop head franchisee in Singapore, in a signed, legal affidavit. At the Roddicks invitation, Downer had accompanied the family in India for the dedication of Boys Town. "I slept in accommodations close to where some of the boys lived," writes Downer. "I was approached by one of the assistants to the project. He informed me about Homan's behavior and the sexual molestation. He was concerned and extremely anxious that I inform Gordon and Anita. I remember Gordon saying: "We've heard those rumors, but I don't believe it." Downer continues: "He didn't seem unduly concerned and didn't seem to take it seriously."
Over the next few years, as Homan went about stealing charity funds and buggering orphan boys, the Roddicks sent out glowing reports to their franchisees. One idyllic account in 1989 reads: "Joe's work in Boys Town is ceaseless; he cares for the boys and girls and they really appreciate what he is doing for them." The roof caved in the next year when the story broke in the English and Indian press. The Roddicks first tried to suppress the story and then tried to turn it into a public relations advantage. "This story has not hit the.press yet, but could erupt at any time," read one memo to employees and franchisees. "It is important that you know your facts. Anita....blew the whistle on Joe."
Many journalists, trade experts and social activists who have interacted closely with Body Shop have come away shaken. Geoffrey Brooks, president of Brooks Pharmaceuticals, which has processed the corn protein bought from the Pueblo Indians for use in Body Shop's blue corn Trade Not Aid' line, calls Roddick "a modern day colonialist." Stephen Corry, director of Survival International which once had a joint promotion with Body Shop, now calls the company "sleazy" and "no more ethical than heap of beans." The ethical contradictions begin with the very founding of the company. According to Anita Roddick's friends and colleagues, she stole the company name, many of its product ideas, and its marketing tactics from a California company, also called The Body Shop. The California store was founded at the height of the hippie revolution in 1970 six years before Anita started her Body Shop, and the same year that the Roddicks visited the San Francisco bay area where the stores were located. The misrepresentations don't end there. Two of Roddicks earliest partners, cosmetologist Mark Constantine and Janis Raven, head of Bubble Publicity who ran the Body Shop's public relations for seven years, contend that almost every one of Roddick's romantic stories about how she "discovered" her ingredients in visits to native lands was fabricated. "What we were looking for was unusual ingredients," Raven remembers. The [pineapple] facial wash, you know, we talked about Anita Roddick going to Sri Lanka and seeing the women rubbing pineapples over them. You know, that kind of nonsense." Why was it nonsense? "Because it wasn't true. That was Mark's information and we just decided to make it a bit more romantic." Michael Johnson, former editor of International Management magazine calls Body Shop a marketing fraud. He was threatened by Gordon Roddick in 1986 when he provided the first public details of its California hijack. "The Body Shop is a gangsterish operation hiding behind a veil of social responsibility," says Johnson. That veil is there no longer. Today, the ethical realities of the Body Shop have been the subject of media and academic reports around the world. Moreover, Body Shop has lost many of its once loyal backers who remember the earlier, more innocent days. "I was the first person who would have remained loyal, says Janis Raven with almost no bitterness in her voice. "It was a company we all built together. But Anita Roddick has no loyalty to anybody. Everybody is a slave, a new slave of the month comes around and you get dumped in favor of them." "You know," Raven says, "Anita's gone a little bit over the top. She just disappeared up her own backside. She started to believe her own publicity and this is always the death knell to anybody. We used to joke that I've created a Frankenstein. If you start believing all this stuff that is written about you, you have got to go dotty, haven't you?" Mark Constantine is sad about the turn of events. "I used to say to Janis, can't you do something about Anita?'" He erupts in a characteristic laugh then sighs, thinking back to those bloody fun early days, mixing weird potions in his kitchen while Anita and Gordon looked on like eager kids in a candy store. "There is still a mass of innocence to those two despite it all."
Even with all the mounting problems, no one can take away Anita Roddick's success in building her cosmetic empire. She has amassed a fortune of almost unimaginable proportions. But when the history books are written, she is not likely to be remembered by today's public persona as the world's most socially responsible entrepreneur. Even if the Body Shop should retool its ethical framework, it is a company built on the shaky financial prospects of its franchisees and the betrayed expectations of its idealistic employees and customers. Anita Roddick never could decide whether she wanted to practice her social vision or merely exploit it.
"She stands full square between Esteé Lauder and Elizabeth Arden," says Constantine. "They all wrote their own stories." Anita Roddick is one more beauty baroness who created her own myth to make her entrepreneurial dream come true. So ultimately, Anita is the baby boomers New Age queen of bubble bath? "That is exactly it. That's exactly it."
Jon Entine is a maverick journalist who specializes in business ethics, race and sports. His investigation of UK-based The Body Shop cosmetic company was awarded a National Press Club award in 1995. He has also written extensively on Ben & Jerry's Homemade for deceptive marketing and for sourcing Brazil nuts for its flagship Amazon "rainforest" ice cream from some of Latin America's most notorious agri-businesses.
His recent articles have focused on cause-related marketing, ethical investing, corporate governance and social responsibility for both the popular and academic press. Entine has also won more than a dozen major awards for his television reporting with ABC News and NBC News, including two Emmys for documentaries on reform movements in China and former Soviet Union. Entine lectures on business and journalism ethics. He is also finishing a book for Macmillan on why blacks dominate sports, based on his award winning NBC documentary Black Athletes: Fact and Fiction.
Entine lives in Columbus, Ohio with his wife Ellen Turner, a marketing executive, and his loyal dog Apollo. He can be reached by E-mail at: runjonrun@earthlink.net
Australian Financial Review Sydney, AustraliaDecember 18, 2002
Body Shop's Packaging Starts to Unravel
Author: Jon Entine. Jon Entine [http://www.jonentine.com] is an independent writer, scholar-in-residence at Miami University (Ohio), and an adjunct fellow at the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, DC.
As the Body Shop International's stock craters, questions abound whether the ethical and financial problems of the parent will be visited upon Body Shop Australia. Jon Entine reports.
Anita Roddick can expect a lump of coal in this year's Christmas stocking. The erosion of the financial prospects of Body Shop International the company she founded 26 years ago appears to be accelerating, its stock losing a third of its value in the past two months in anticipation of another dismal, underperforming holiday season.
Touted a decade ago as the "shares that defy gravity", Body Shop has long since rediscovered Newton's Principia, plummeting from 372 pence to near 70p, a loss in valuation of more than GBP500 million ($314million).
It's a long way from the days when Roddick was being hailed as the "Mother Teresa of Capitalism".
Back in 1994, she was in San Francisco to open a freshly-minted Body Shop yet another franchise in what is now a 50-country, 2,000 shop chain, with 70 franchises in Australia.
It was morning and the scent of patchouli filled the store. But the crowd was more Britney than bohemian. Girls in designer jeans chattered on purple cell phones, standing painted nails-to-painted nails beside mums with Gucci bags. It could have been any Body Shop from Tokyo to Sydney.
Corporate executives? "Robber barons," Anita hissed. (Everyone calls her by her first name.)
Investment bankers, who had helped make her wealthy? "Blood-sucking dinosaurs." Rough words but delivered with sincerity. There is a magnetic force about her. Charisma.
It was still the best of times, with the media lauding her as a trail-blazing feminist who packaged politically correct causes in jars of facial cream. "I'd rather promote human rights, environmental concerns, indigenous rights than promote a bubble bath," she gushed. Here was a harbinger of the New Age, weaned on can-do chutzpah and do-right rhetoric. It was impossible not to notice that Roddick was framed by shelves of Body Shop bubble bath, fourteen varieties.
The soap bubble has long since burst. That franchise is now gone, along with 200 others in the United States and the United Kingdom that have folded or been taken over by the British-based multinational. Body Shop International has eked out meagre operating profits in recent years, earning GBP26.7million on turnover of GBP400.7million in 2002.
"On an ongoing basis, it is barely profitable," says Matthew MacEachran of Investec Henderson Crosthwaite in London. "Their extraordinary expenses, reorganisation charges, and costs of acquiring failing franchises have become recurring and commonplace."
As the accounting saying goes, "profit is opinion, but cash is fact". In that regard, Body Shop is in precarious shape. Store profits and earnings per share, in decline since the mid-1990s, are sinking fast.
In Britain and America 60 per cent of its business profits fell nearly 25 per cent last year. "They haven't had positive net cash flow for more than five years," says John Stevenson of ING Barings Charterhouse. "They've pissed away more than GBP110million."
In August 2000, Roddick tacitly acknowledged the depths of the problems, deriding her creation as a "dysfunctional coffin". It was an odd comment as she and husband Gordon were desperately searching for a suitor to take the damaged goods off their hands. Not surprisingly, only bottom feeders expressed interest. After talks collapsed early this year, and facing grim prospects, the Roddicks announced that they were reducing their management roles once again. They installed yet another executive team on a short leash, the fourth corporate makeover in a decade.
"As an innovative leader and growth company," says Stevenson, "they're a dead concept."
Australians may be shocked at the turn of events at Body Shop, whose problems have gone unreported in the local press. According to University of Technology sociologist Eva Cox, now verifying her third "social audit" of the Australian franchises, employees retain a positive view of the company. "It's a young, female, energetic, healthy culture."
Graeme Wise, who owns most Australian shops, seems "passionate about doing the right thing". Wise took control in 1999 after what insiders say was a bitter divorce from long-time business partner Barrie Thomas, who now owns 17 New Zealand franchises.
Is this a tale of two inextricably linked but different cultures the once idealistic but now bumbling British parent and the younger, still enthusiastic Australian progeny?
It's not clear if Australia suffers the grinding declines experienced by franchisees worldwide. Wise refuses to disclose the finances of his privately owned franchises other than to say that they are "performing well". BSI has not broken out Australasia data since 1998, when the region turned a profit of GBP1.8million on sales of GBP33.8million, 5 per cent of worldwide sales.
While Body Shop is moving to a company-owned business model in its largest markets, most shops in smaller, less lucrative markets like Australia are run by franchisees.
From the company's earliest days, franchising appeared to be the goose that laid the golden egg. According to Roddick's autobiography, Gordon realised that the best way to expand was through "self-financing".
He all but gave away shops at first, positioning Body Shop as a low-risk wholesaler supplying franchisees who shouldered the start-up costs.
Body Shop thrived on the idealism of young women like Anne Downer, a Brit living in Singapore. On a visit home in 1981, Downer wandered into a Covent Garden shop and fell in love. "I thought Anita was quite a maverick. I liked her wacky sense of let's do it differently'." The 22-year old hopped on a train to headquarters, eventually coming away with rights to eight Asian countries for a few hundred pounds. Body Shop had a guaranteed outlet for wholesale products. It gradually jacked fees, pocketing hefty chunks of franchisee's investment. (US franchisees now pay as much as $US774,750 ($1.4 million) plus a 5 per cent sales royalty.) But as competition intensified, margins shrank. At first, BSI felt little pain for it continued to profit from expansion. But it was not long before often naive entrepreneurs, leveraged to the edge, realised they were at the mercy of a multinational company with its own agenda. Over the past decade, franchisee blow-ups and suits have erupted throughout the world, except for Australasia. In 1995, Downer collected $US6.2million to settle a dispute after BSI occupied her Singapore stores and snatched her Asian franchise rights. It tried to force her into bankruptcy on Christmas Eve, which the courts denied. It paid $US878,900 to its former Norwegian head franchisee, who alleged breach of contract. Gordon agreed not to contest charges filed in an Israeli court accusing Body Shop of libel and kowtowing to the Arab boycott, which led to it being stripped of the right to operate in Israel. "Body Shop may be a great platform for Roddick's whims, but as a business model it just doesn't work for most franchisees," contends Lyn O'Donnell, a British franchisee who settled a fraud suit against BSI for GBP301,000 in 1998. All told, Body Shop has paid out more than GBP100million to settle 14 franchisee suits and buy out dissident franchisees and is on the verge of settling a US class action. Although details in each case are different, franchisees broadly contend that financial problems reflect deterioration in BSI's operating ethics. Product supply and quality of its cosmetics, which franchisees must source from the parent company, top their list. Unlike premium firms that pitch themselves as natural, Body Shop relies on bright colours and heavy scents petrochemical laboratory creations. This is in direct contrast to its claims of being environmentally friendly. A spokesman responds that its products are "inspired by nature". Choice magazine rated Body Shop's moisturiser and shower gels high but panned a shampoo, also noting its high cost. "Low-end at a premium price," sniffed America's Women's Wear Daily. Its eye gel came under attack from US Consumer Reports, which noted that chemical fumes that irritate the skin create its cooling sensation. The eye gel, moisturiser, and baby cream were the subject of scathing exposes by German consumer magazine Oko-Test (Green Test), which found cancer-causing formaldehyde. The investigating scientist said the formaldehyde resulted from overuse of synthetics to control system-wide bacterial contamination. "Their products are filled with bugs," says Dieter Wundrum, who later became a consultant for Body Shop before quitting in disgust. Quality control has been a persistent problem. Its pumice foot scrub was regularly contaminated, according to BSI's founding cosmetologist Mark Constantine, a finding confirmed by managers and internal company memos. The US Food and Drug Administration cited Body Shop for eight health violations in 1993 after employees complained that it suspended standard microbiological procedures to pump production before Christmas. The company shipped and sold hundreds of bottles of contaminated banana shampoo before getting wind of the FDA investigation. Body Shop claims it has put such problems in the past. But just last December, Denmark's Green Guide blasted its two best selling cosmetics for containing chemicals that it labelled "poison". Roddick's reputation for charitable giving has also stirred resentment among franchisees, who often give generously in time and money but see the head office garner credit. Roddick has crowed that she "gives most of our profits away". But BSI didn't contribute to charity over its first 11 years and did not increase donations to average corporate levels until a wave of negative publicity in 1994. Controversy has centred on its "Trade Not Aid" promotions, particularly its sourcing of Brazil nuts. The former face of this promotion, a Kayapo Amazon chief, successfully sued for exploiting his image. University of Chicago anthropologist Terrence Turner ridiculed its initiative as a gimmick, calling it "Aid Not Trade" aid by developing peoples to Body Shop with no real trade in return. Survival International's Stephen Corry, who once partnered with Body Shop in the Amazon, goes so far as to characterise the company as "sleazy" and "no more ethical than a heap of beans". Much of Body Shop's good press flows from its reputation as a pioneer in social accounting, in which companies self-report social, environmental and financial performance. Here the story is mixed. A Financial Times survey ranks it second among companies for managing environmental resources. But questions linger. BSI has quashed at least two environmental audits after embarrassing problems turned up. "I visited the plant a few years ago," wrote one former auditor, who asked to remain anonymous. "It was weird to see these truly gigantic extrusion machines, each the size of a family house, pumping out millions of plastic bottles, while 18-wheelers drove by outside painted with politically correct slogans." David Brooks, a former Environmental Protection Agency lawyer, BSI's US environmental director in the early 1990s, dismisses its environmental initiatives as "window dressing". He detailed lacklustre recycling practices, and regular discharges of hazardous waste into the water system near its headquarters in New Jersey, then covered up by top executives. With financial problems multiplying, BSI recently discontinued publishing assessments. Wise says he remains committed to the practice. Yet he refuses to release financial data, the environmental survey has no contextual information, and the social audit amounts to a survey of staff and consumer perceptions. It does not provide wage and benefit data or information from key stakeholders including vendors or sub-franchises. "Their reports are clearly inadequate," says Simon Zadek, head of British-based Accountability, which wrote the standards Body Shop contends it follows. "Good practices require companies benchmark financial, social and environmental performance, not only internally but against outside measures and firms. They're not doing that." Cox admits the shortcomings in the audits she verifies but says they're an important, if small, move towards corporate transparency. "All I can say is that it is perceived by current employees as being a good company. Many companies do these surveys, but they are used only internally. The positive here is that Body Shop releases this data publicly, which encourages accountability." Few doubt Body Shop's idealism about broad principles, from human rights to empowering women. However, Anita Roddick, the symbol of the brand, has been dogged by ethical questions that begin with the very founding of the company. Just how ethical is it at its core? Roddick boasts that Body Shop is her original creation. That is a clear fabrication. The Body Shop saga begins in 1970 when young Anita travelled to San Francisco with then boyfriend Gordon to visit his best friend, David Edward. Edward's former wife, Alma (now Dunstan-McDaniel), remembers dragging Anita to a favourite shop, filled with tie-dyed decorations and redolent with incense. "That was the place to buy shampoo and body cream," Alma says. Owners Peggy Short and Jane Saunders had carved the original store out of a converted garage, calling it The Body Shop. Alma recalls Anita buying armfuls of hand-cut soaps, loofah sponges, and cosmetics in small plastic bottles with hand-written labels. Roddick's copycat Body Shop with similar hand-sketched logo, plastic bottles, and "breakthrough" recycling policy emerged six years later. Comparisons of the brochures of the American original and Roddick's copycat store are telling. Four O'clock Astringent Lotion morphed into Five O'clock Astringent Lotion. Korean Washing Grains, uniquely developed by the women who sewed kimonos for the Americans, became Japanese Washing Grains. Roddick even lifted the blurb on the original brochure masthead, which noted: "All of our products are Biodegradable & made to our specifications"; "Bottles 20cents or bring your own." Anita's translation: "All our products are biologically soft and made to our specifications"; "Bottles 12p, or bring your own." Roddick copied product descriptions word-for-word, including grammatical errors. For years, Short and Saunders were unaware of the brazen heist. As a result, when the Roddicks approached them in 1987 to buy the rights to the Body Shop name for $3.5million, they jumped. They renamed their shops Body Time. Only later did they stumble upon the copycat brochures. "What really got them angry," says a colleague, "was the ongoing deception Anita's lie that she originated the idea, the green colour scheme, the products, all the things that gave the company its unique identity. Never in our wildest imagination did we think that Roddick, with all her claims about being so honest, would keep this fabrication going." The Roddicks steadfastly deny "any knowledge" of the original sin, often brandishing a pre-discovery quote from the founders that Roddick "didn't rip us off". That brings a blunt response from Alma. "That's bullshit, because I took her [to the original]. She had a number of those products in her suitcase to go home. She made sure she had one of each. It was a lie from the start. Anita ripped them off." Roddick would later embellish her founder's myth with claims that she had come up with exotic products during her wanderlust travels. According to recorded interviews with Constantine and public relationsdirector Janis Raven, her stories are fiction. "I was fully aware that she hadn't had the idea about wandering in Polynesia," Constantine told me, referencing one of many tall tales. "The wonderful joke with Janis Raven was always: Janis, can't you do something about Anita? You created all this bloody publicity thing.' You create the monster you can't control."
Sitting in her London office, Raven chose her words carefully. "I think Anita Roddick is a very brilliant woman." She paused. "You know, Anita's gone over the top. We used to joke that I've created this Frankenstein. If you start believing all this stuff that is written about you, you have got to go dotty, haven't you? She started to believe her own publicity and this is always the death knell to anybody."
Journalists who have probed these founder fabrications have been the target of personal attacks and legal threats. In its assessment of BSI's ethics, widely respected Trillium Asset Management assailed its "consistent use of character assassination" against reporters, franchisees and other critics. Even Body Shop's social auditor gave it a rock-bottom rating for aggressively defensive responses to criticism.
Perhaps inevitably, Body Shop's ethical contradictions are intimately tied to its franchisee relations, raising doubts whether it can restore the trust necessary to revive. That link is underscored in an continuing battle over a 1997 bankruptcy filing by a Canadian couple, who once owned six shops. Last June, an Ontario judge blasted Body Shop for "egregious breach of widely accepted commercial morality ... not consonant with our system of justice and general moral outlook". Body Shop appealed. In a ruling on August 19, the Canadian Court of Appeal affirmed the finding that it had engaged in "dishonest and unconscionable" practices in dealings with its former franchisee.
These endless dust-ups leave analysts aghast. "The Roddicks are just not suited to be running a public company," observes Seymour Pierce's Richard Ratner. "At the end of the day, Body Shop is tired and dysfunctional." Ratner believes it has a long shot at stabilising its business if new executive chairman Adrian Bellamy "can keep the Roddicks at a distance".
That's unlikely. The Roddicks control more than 50 per cent of the voting stock and control the board with a minority of independent members. That's typical of public companies but contradicts corporate responsibility standards that Body Shop voices support for. Roddick's recently anointed herself creative consultant, offering "essential expertise in product, marketing and values" the issues at the heart of Body Shop's problems. "Being now a non-exec is going to be much more fun for me because you can be much more than a tyrant." This advice is expensive: she pockets GBP195,000, which combined with the Roddicks' board remuneration brings the couple's annual take to GBP465,000.
Does the parent company's troubles threaten the survival of Body Shop Australia? Wise remains upbeat, claiming that "customers continue to shop with us in increasing numbers" he refused to supply details and that it will prosper as "an activist organisation and a retailer committed to customer service excellence". Asked about the controversies that swirl around the Roddicks, Wise offered unqualified support. "I have been inspired and motivated by the values inherent in the philosophies that Anita and Gordon Roddick brought into the business they built."
Eva Cox for one is not convinced. "There is very real danger that their worldwide problems will damage them. After all, Roddick is the brand. Good corporate citizenship requires attention to actual stakeholders: its workers, customers, and suppliers." Her concerns extend beyond the parochial fate of the interlocked Body Shops. "In the end, you have to run your business with probity, and ethically. If Body Shop falls over, it will do tremendous harm to the cause of socially responsible business. It's all a bloody shame. I hope they can pull up their socks before it's too late."=
hit in Encyclopedia of leadership: A-E, Volume 1 edited by George R. Goethals, Georgia Jones Sorenson, James MacGregor Burns  with BIB! but few cites, some to himselfbib includes:
ch 1, 1995 | Clark, Maureen fictions?| Copyright
Minneapolis
Peddling politics as much as beauty, Body Shop founder Anita Roddick took the cosmetics industry by storm and forged a popular icon of socially responsible business. "We believe that on issues you support--or are against--is a civic responsibility," says a spring 1994 Body Shop catalog insert. Yet when the press reported flaws in the Body Shop's progressive image, the company took on its critics as only a $700 million corporation can.
Marjorie Kelly, editor and publisher of Business Ethics--a bimonthly magazine with a circulation of 14,000--incurred the Body Shop's wrath last fall when she published an article entitled, "Shattered Image: Is the Body Shop Too Good to Be True?"
The article, by Emmy-award-winning journalist Jon Entine, alleged that some of the Body Shop's "natural" products contained cheap, petrochemicalladen ingredients; that lax quality-control resulted in the sale of some contaminated products; that charitable giving fell short of even the national corporate average; and that journalists who had tried to challenge the company's marketing hype had been silenced with libel threats. …
all: Socially Responsible Business Brawl: Business Ethics' Magazine Criticizes Cosmetic Maker Body Shop
By Maureen Clark
Peddling politics as much as beauty, Body Shop founder Anita Roddick took the cosmetics industry by storm and forged a popular icon of socially responsible business. "We believe that on issues you support- -or are against--is a civic responsibility," says a spring 1994 Body Shop catalog insert. Yet when the press reported flaws in the Body Shop's progressive image, the company took on its critics as only a $700 million corporation can.
Marjorie Kelly, editor and publisher of Business Ethics--a bimonthly magazine with a circulation of 14,000--incurred the Body Shop's wrath last fall when she published an article entitled, "Shattered Image: Is the Body Shop Too Good to Be True?"
The article, by Emmy-award-winning journalist Jon Entine, alleged that some of the Body Shop's "natural" products contained cheap, petrochemicalladen ingredients; that lax quality-control resulted in the sale of some contaminated products; that charitable giving fell short of even the national corporate average; and that journalists who had tried to challenge the company's marketing hype had been silenced with libel threats.
As if to demonstrate this last point, Body Shop lawyers sent Kelly two letters containing strongly worded legal threats" before she went to press with "Shattered Image," she says. But Kelly refused to back down. The Body Shop story had to be told, chiefly for the lessons it provided those who seek to promote ethical business practices," Kelly says. She checked and rechecked Entine's sources and scheduled the piece for her September/October 1994 issue.
"I went to press in the face of threats from an enormous company because I knew that what we printed was true," she says. "Even if I was 100 percent correct, however, I could be put out of business. The cost of getting to the summary-judgment phase--where the judge says there is no basis for this charge--would run $100,000," an amount that would take the business right out of Business Ethics.
The Body Shop's litigiousness helped persuade Vanity Fair to nix a version of Entine's investigation. With help from public-relations giant Hill and Knowlton--particularly from vice-chairman Frank Mankiewicz, a former president of National Public Radio--the Body Shop launched a full-scale counterattack on Entine's credibility.
The Body Shop denied the charges, dismissed the credibility of Entine' s sources, and characterized Kelly's decision to publish the piece as an irresponsible attempt to garner attention for her small magazine.
Shortly after publication, National Public Radio interviewed Entine on the air. After the program, Mankiewicz helped persuade NPR to run a follow-up story that included comment from Body Shop supporters.
"Like any other company, we should go to any length to protect ourselves when we feel like we're being dealt with unjustly," says Body Shop spokesman Bryan Weaver.
Kelly stands by the story she published: "For all its bluster, the Body Shop has failed to document a single error of fact in our article, " she says.
Other organizations have since published independent research that corroborates many of Entine's conclusions. Franklin Research and Development, a Boston-based ethical investment firm, awarded the Body Shop its highest social ratings in 1991. But in 1994, Franklin's newslette supported many of Entine's charges against the company and rebuked the Body Shop for its combative stance toward critics: "The Body Shop' s bombastic tactics have set back any legitimate attempts by the company to change."
In late September, Kelly discovered to her amazement that the Body Shop had acquired her subscriber list without her authorization. The Body Shop used the list to send out a ten-page refutation to the magazine' s readers. Signed by chairman Gordon Roddick, the letter stated that Entine's article was "filled with lies, distortions, and gross inaccuracies, " with "almost no attempt to observe the normal standards of journalism." The Business Ethics list manager, Stevens-Knox and Associates, learned of the mailing through employees whose names were planted on the list as decoys--a customary practice to guard against misuse of subscriber addresses.
Ralph Stevens, president of Stevens-Knox, is incensed that his services were used against his client. "The Body Shop duped a prominent and legitimate list-brokerage company, a respected magazine, and they duped us," he says. "If this is any indication of the way they do business, of their regard for honesty and integrity, I give them a failing mark on all counts."
Some members of the progressive business community have been reluctant, however, to see one of their leaders criticized. In a conciliatory forum hosted in the January/February issue of the Utne Reader, Eric Utne praised Roddick for "setting the standard for other businesses to follow."
"Socially responsible business has not wanted to take the Body Shop on," says Kelly. "This article was such a bombshell because it doesn't fit the model in our heads--that socially responsible businesses are the good guys.... We have to throw out the good guy/bad guy paradigm. The Body Shop is doing things that need to be corrected  Business and Society: Ethics, Sustainability, and Stakeholder Management By Archie Carroll, Ann Buchholtz
Cengage Learning, Jan 1, 2014 - Business & Economics - 720 pages1 Review
Learn to make strong business decisions with a better understanding of business ethics, sustainability, and stakeholder management from a strong managerial perspective. BUSINESS AND SOCIETY: ETHICS, SUSTAINABILITY, AND STAKEHOLDER MANAGEMENT, Ninth Edition, demonstrates how the most successful business decision makers balance and protect the interests of various stakeholders, including investors, employees, the community, and the environment--particularly as business recovers from a perilous financial period. The authors effectively balance strong coverage of ethics and the stakeholder model with an increased focus on one of business's most recent, urgent mandates: sustainability. Coverage highlights the connection between business and the natural, social, and financial environments, illustrating how all three must be maintained in balance to sustain current and future generations. New actual business cases, real applications, and today's latest business examples present you with specific business challenges that test your values and require you to focus your reasoning skills for ongoing success in today's workplace.
H&K!
http://www.onthemedia.org/story/131513-business-ethics-magazine/transcript/
< BUSINESS ETHICS MAGAZINETranscriptFriday, August 16, 2002
Marjorie Kelly is the co-founder and editor of Business Ethics, a national publication on corporate social responsibility launched in 1987 and read nationwide by high-level opinion leaders in business, academia, social investing, and the non-governmental organization community.
For a decade and a half, Business Ethics has been the core publication of the movement to bring greater responsibility into business. Read by those both inside and outside business, the publication serves as a kind of meeting ground for all parties looking to make business more humane and accountable. 
Marjorie is the author of  the book The Divine Right of Capital: Dethroning the Corporate Aristocracy, published November 2001 by Berrett-Koehler Publishers. The book explores why socially responsible practices have failed to take hold and identifies the problem as the mandate to maximize returns for shareholders, which is an aristocratic mandate to serve the interests of wealth-holders above all other interests. It offers many ideas on how to move toward economic democracy.
Marjorie's writing has appeared in publications such as The Utne Reader, Harvard Business Review, The Progressive Populist, and Hope magazine. In 1995-96, she wrote a weekly column on business ethics for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune. 
Her speaking engagements have included keynote addresses for the Minnesota Sustainable Communities Network and the National Conference on Ethics; a  commencement address for Cardinal Stritch College; as well as talks at the Taos Talking Pictures Film Fesitval, the Society for Business Ethics Conference, Textron Bell Helicopter, and many other venues. She was a Visiting Fellow in Applied Ethics at Ohio University and has often spoken at other business schools. 
Marjorie is a board member of the Capital Ownership Group, which is working to promote broader capital ownership, and the International Institute for Corporate Governance and Accountability at George Washington University, which is exploring more accountable corporate governance models. Her memberships have included the Social Venture Network, Business for Social Responsibility, the International Association for Business and Society, and the Social Investment Forum. She holds a Master's degree in Magazine Journalism from the University of Missouri, where she won the Penney-Missouri Award for most promising young magazine journalist.--https://www.linkedin.com/pub/marjorie-kelly/3/836/6bb

Unwise Use - Article by Lorna Salzmanwww.lornasalzman.com/collectedwritings/unwise.html

It is easy to ferret out these surrogates. All one has to do is look at who is being attacked and who is being ignored. Those who attack groups like Sierra Club or Greenpeace without ever mentioning corporations like Monsanto, Dupont, Shell Oil and Dow Chemical are the ones to look out for.
True, hardly an organization or corporation exists that hasn't committed some errors in judgment or made some bad policy bloopers. And needless to say, no organization, no matter how noble its cause, should be exempt from criticism. But there is a world of difference between those corporations or groups who are basically good but exhibit occasional flaws, and those who are basically bad but sometimes do some good things. Unlike the Monsantos and Shell Oils of the world, the Sierra Clubs and Greenpeaces of the world, if left to their own devices, will not destroy the earth.
The same goes for corporations. Here the good, bad and worst can also be rather easily distinguished. Some corporations may not be particularly admirable regarding their labor or management practices, while others may be destroying the world while being paragons of good management and worker relations. Here's a test: if you had to prevent the damage done by certain businesses, would you choose Ben & Jerry's and The Body Shop on the one hand, or Monsanto and Shell Oil?
Take for instance Jon Entine, whose sophisticated atacks on liberals, ethical investors, anti-defense spending and anti- animal testing advocates, and anti-nuclear activists - as well as on The Body Shop (TBS), Council on Economic Priorities, Ben and Jerry's and others - have helped damage these organizations both in reputation and stock value, not to mention public trust. Where are these attacks really coming from? In Entine's case, clearly not from any love for the progressive movement or environmentalism.
Entine's lengthy CV on the web emphasizes his television news experience prominently. His last full-time TV stint was at ABC television's Primetime Live, but what Entine doesn't report is that he was fired from ABC during his investigation of TBS for "mistakes in methodology". In a letter from London's The Sunday Times, the Deputy Editor explains how his paper was misled by Entine and how he misrepresented himself.
"We now know what we did not know then: ABC discovered Entine had made a number of mistakes in his methodology so serious that they had in effect fired him some ten days before. Entine, probably unknown to ABC, was however still picking up his messages from a phone on his old desk in the ABC building. We now understand from ABC sources that Entine is regarded as out of control and has been running around saying some wild things" (Ivan Fallon, letter from Deputy Editor of The Sunday Times, October 8, 1993).
Entine then sold the idea to Vanity Fair, a publication with many cosmetic advertisers who compete with TBS (Sandra Earley, "The Woman Who Wants to Save the World", Corporate Report Minnesota, June 1996). They rejected the story but paid Entine a $15,000 kill fee and $18,000 in expenses. (S.Earley, Corporate Report Minnesota, June 1996).It isn't as if Entine is some Norman Mailer ; his bio up until this article shows no other published stories but a recent book on black athletes got some media attention.
Entine tried to bring the story to other magazines without success, and finally Business Ethics, a small financially struggling publication, paid him $300 for the story and published it. Entine then turned around and made a $1000 donation to the magazine (S.Earley, Corporate Report Minnesota, June 1996). The publication of this story, to which Business Ethics would not allow a rebuttal, damaged TBS' image and stock value. Two years after the article appeared, Entine's wife Ellen Turner was hired to be a marketing executive for The Limited, the parent company of TBS' largest US competitor, Bath and Body Works.
Then, to use a favorite Entine word, a bizarre thing occurred during a 1997 lecture at Trent University in Canada: Entine stated that "Of course, The Body Shop is better than 99% of companies". But why doesn't he WRITE that? When pressed at Trent about why he doesn't pursue corporate criminals like Shell Oil over their Nigerian operations (an issue TBS has campaigned on since 1993), he had no answer.
Kooky Left-Wing Organic Companies
In Better World Zine, with Martha Nichols, Entine said: "Moreover, to begin to compare Body Shop with a GE or Dow Chemical or biotechnology companies, with Body Shop coming out BETTER in the comparison, is beyond liberal-think bizarre. GE and the rest are hardly pristine and I make NO wholesale defense of them. But the issue is social change. A 1% change in the behavior of GE will have more impact than creating a thousand new kooky left wing organic companies". (Jon Entine and Martha Nichols, Better World Zine, website)
Note how Entine aligns "kooky left wing" and "organic companies". Smart readers will also ask just WHICH 1% change GE might have in mind: laying off 1% fewer employees than planned? Like others of his ilk, Entine skillfully uses the temperament, semantics and vehicles of progressive and investigative journalism to gain sympathy with editors and readers. Not all are fooled however; Jay Harris of Mother Jones magazine reports that Entine called him and that "he began our conversation with a 20-minute rant about The Body Shop being the most evil company (he had) ever encountered in 20 years of investigative reporting". Harris goes on: "Mother Jones has exposed the deadly explosive tendencies of the Pinto and broke the story on the Dalkon Shield. This guy is talking about a company that spilled a few gallons of Fuzzy Peach Shampoo. He clearly had an axe to grind and was willing to let that take precedence over the facts".
In Entine's TBS attack, he referred to a Food & Drug Administration (FDA) investigation of a small shampoo spill from TBS' New Jersey operations. But he failed to say that it was HE who called in the complaint (later whiting out his name,a fact he concealed), that FDA found the TBS facility to actually be well-run, and that FDA, upon completing all inspections, is bound by law to make recommendations regardless of how clean the facility may be. (FDA Report Summary of Findings, 1123).
Most recently, Entine took on Working Assets Long Distance for allegedly deceiving customers who subscribed to them without knowing that nuclear-generated electricity was included in the electricity mix delivered to customers. But Entine's own views on nuclear power are suspect. In comments on a draft energy policy paper written by an activist on Long Island he said, in reference to nuclear power: .."to me, measured up against the conceivable dangers of coal-generated electricity, it is a potentially attractive alternative". And to the undersigned he wrote: "Your myopia..on nuclear energy reminds me of the statement that being against defense spending is 'socially responsible' or 'liberal'. It's a ridiculously shallow statement...I am thankful that we developed enough of a military deterrent to curb the Soviet Union and to be able to have challenged Iraq". To the Association of Organizational Management he said: "There is a world of difference between the mutant nuclear energy facility at Seabrook..and, say, the ones operated by Duke Power. With new technology and potential for deep core disposal of nuclear waste, it is time that we revisit this as part of a long-range plan at future energy needs.."
"Monsanto's Robert Shapiro is a 'CEO leading the charge into the new era of business ethics'", (Business Ethics Magazine, Jan.. 96).
Entine's attacks on TBS, Greenpeace and other progressive organizations are in no way balanced by any critical analysis of major polluting or exploitive corporations. On the contrary, Entine's writings set up as shining examples corporations like DuPont, General Motors, Monsanto and Duke Power. Ignoring the fact that Monsanto, a leading chemical manufacturer and biotechnology giant (maker of Agent Orange) is pressuring the government to allow its products onto the market without adequate testing, fighting to prevent labelling of genetically engineered foods, has threatened small dairy farmers who want to label their milk as free of RBGH (the Monsanto artificial growth hormone) and has attempted to bribe the Canadian consumer agency into approving its products without testing, Entine says: "Monsanto has made a lot of progress in developing pro-active models to limit chemical pollution". Entine boasts of his friend Paul Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce, who was a paid Monsanto consultant, and claims Hawken's work for Monsanto has resulted in its instituting "significant environmental reforms". But there is no mention of Monsanto's ongoing efforts to subvert the political process in order to get its untested genetically engineered products and dangerous chemicals to a wider market. Meanwhile, Ben & Jerry's, who Entine has called "slippery and unethical" (Jon Entine, Students for Responsible Business website), recently fought and won, against Monsanto's wrath, the right to label their products to be free of recombinant bovine growth hormone, a right that was won against Monsanto and for all US dairy farmers and consumers.
Multicultural Cabal=bs santo has made a lot of progress in developing pro-active models to limit chemical pollution". Entine boasts of his friend Paul Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce, who was a paid Monsanto consultant, and claims Hawken's work for Monsanto has resulted in its instituting "significant environmental reforms". But there is no mention of Monsanto's ongoing efforts to subvert the political process in order to get its untested genetically engineered products and dangerous chemicals to a wider market. Meanwhile, Ben & Jerry's, who Entine has called "slippery and unethical" (Jon Entine, Students for Responsible Business website), recently fought and won, against Monsanto's wrath, the right to label their products to be free of recombinant bovine growth hormone, a right that was won against Monsanto and for all US dairy farmers and consumers.
Multicultural Cabal=bs ===Anita Roddick (born 1942, died 2007) was<ul style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0.3em 0px 0.5em 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANAQMAAABb8jbLAAAABlBMVEX///8AUow5QSOjAAAAAXRSTlMAQObYZgAAABNJREFUCB1jYEABBQw/wLCAgQEAGpIDyT0IVcsAAAAASUVORK5CYII=); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">a founder of the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Body_Shop" title="Body Shop" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Body Shop</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Advisory Council, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Demos" title="Demos" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Demos</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Advisory Board, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Centre_on_Housing_Rights_and_Evictions" title="Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions</a> <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anita_Roddick#cite_note-1" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[1]</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Campaigner against corporate globalization / unfair trade. <a rel="nofollow" class="external autonumber" href="http://www.anitaroddick.com/" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; background: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC) 100% 50% no-repeat;">[1]</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Former Trustee, <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Peace_Direct" title="Peace Direct" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Peace Direct</a> <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anita_Roddick#cite_note-2" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[2]</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Winner of the 1993 <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Audubon_Medal" title="Audubon Medal" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Audubon Medal</a></li></ul>Roddick publicly supported the <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Greenpeace" title="Greenpeace" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Greenpeace</a>-backed boycott of <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Exxon_Mobil" title="Exxon Mobil" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Exxon Mobil</a> over the company's opposition to the Kyoto Protocol on <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Climate_change" title="Climate change" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">climate change</a> and its failure to invest in renewable energy sources. <a rel="nofollow" class="external autonumber" href="http://media.guardian.co.uk/marketingandpr/story/0,7494,516847,00.html" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; background: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC) 100% 50% no-repeat;">[2]</a> Her daughter is <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Sam_Roddick" title="Sam Roddick" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Sam Roddick</a> and her husband was <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Gordon_Roddick" title="Gordon Roddick" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Gordon Roddick</a>.<div id="toc" class="toc" style="font-size: 12px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px; border: 1px solid rgb(170, 170, 170); padding: 7px; display: table; zoom: 1; background-color: rgb(249, 249, 249);"><div id="toctitle" style="direction: ltr; text-align: center;"><h2 style="margin: 0px 0px 0.6em; overflow: hidden; padding: 0px; border: none; font-size: 12px; display: inline; background: none;">Contents</h2>  [<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anita_Roddick#" class="internal" id="togglelink" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">hide</a>] </div><ul style="line-height: 1.5em; list-style-type: none; margin: 0.3em 0px 0.5em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none;"><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-1" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anita_Roddick#Other_Affiliations.5B3.5D" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">1 Other Affiliations [3]</a><ul style="line-height: 1.5em; list-style-type: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none;"><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-2" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anita_Roddick#Trustee.2FBoard_Member" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">1.1 Trustee/Board Member</a></li><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-3" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anita_Roddick#Patron" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">1.2 Patron</a></li></ul></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-4" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anita_Roddick#External_links" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">2 External links</a></li><li class="toclevel-1 tocsection-5" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anita_Roddick#Resources_and_articles" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">3 Resources and articles</a><ul style="line-height: 1.5em; list-style-type: none; margin: 0px 0px 0px 2em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none;"><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-6" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anita_Roddick#Related_Sourcewatch_articles" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">3.1 Related Sourcewatch articles</a></li><li class="toclevel-2 tocsection-7" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anita_Roddick#References" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">3.2 References</a></li></ul></li></ul></div><h2 style="font-size: 19px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.6em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Other Affiliations <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anita_Roddick#cite_note-3" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); white-space: nowrap; background: none;">[3]</a></h2><h3 style="font-size: 17px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px; margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Trustee/Board Member</h3><ul style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0.3em 0px 0.5em 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANAQMAAABb8jbLAAAABlBMVEX///8AUow5QSOjAAAAAXRSTlMAQObYZgAAABNJREFUCB1jYEABBQw/wLCAgQEAGpIDyT0IVcsAAAAASUVORK5CYII=); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">1984 - present - The <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Body_Shop_International" title="Body Shop International" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Body Shop International</a> Plc</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">1989 - present - The <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Body_Shop_Foundation" title="Body Shop Foundation" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Body Shop Foundation</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">1994 - 2001 - <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Mother_Jones_Magazine" title="Mother Jones Magazine" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Mother Jones Magazine</a> - <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Foundation_for_National_Progress" title="Foundation for National Progress" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Foundation for National Progress</a>, USA</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">1996 - 1997 - <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Human_Rights_Watch" title="Human Rights Watch" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Human Rights Watch</a>, USA</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">1999 - present - The <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Ruckus_Society" title="Ruckus Society" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Ruckus Society</a>, USA</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">2003 - present - <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Nuclear_Age_Peace_Foundation" title="Nuclear Age Peace Foundation" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Nuclear Age Peace Foundation</a>, USA</li></ul><h3 style="font-size: 17px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px; margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Patron</h3><ul style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0.3em 0px 0.5em 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANAQMAAABb8jbLAAAABlBMVEX///8AUow5QSOjAAAAAXRSTlMAQObYZgAAABNJREFUCB1jYEABBQw/wLCAgQEAGpIDyT0IVcsAAAAASUVORK5CYII=); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">1991 - present - <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Schumacher_College_for_Human_Scale_Education" title="Schumacher College for Human Scale Education" class="mw-redirect" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Schumacher College for Human Scale Education</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">1994 - present - <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Association_for_Creation_Spirituality&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Association for Creation Spirituality (page does not exist)" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(165, 88, 88); background: none;">Association for Creation Spirituality</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">1996 - present - <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Body_and_Soul&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Body and Soul (page does not exist)" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(165, 88, 88); background: none;">Body and Soul</a> (women & families with HIV and AIDS)</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">1998 - present - EMMA (<a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Ethnic_Minority_Media_Awards&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="Ethnic Minority Media Awards (page does not exist)" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(165, 88, 88); background: none;">Ethnic Minority Media Awards</a>)</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">2002 - present - <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Findhorn_Foundation_College" title="Findhorn Foundation College" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Findhorn Foundation College</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">2002 - present - <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=My_Acre_Of_Africa&action=edit&redlink=1" class="new" title="My Acre Of Africa (page does not exist)" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(165, 88, 88); background: none;">My Acre Of Africa</a>, South Africa</li></ul><h2 style="font-size: 19px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.6em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">External links</h2><ul style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0.3em 0px 0.5em 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANAQMAAABb8jbLAAAABlBMVEX///8AUow5QSOjAAAAAXRSTlMAQObYZgAAABNJREFUCB1jYEABBQw/wLCAgQEAGpIDyT0IVcsAAAAASUVORK5CYII=); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">Press release, "<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewire.com/releases/rel_display.php?relid=30412&hilite=" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; background: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC) 100% 50% no-repeat;">Dame Anita Roddick questions effectiveness of Corporate Social Responsibility in online video</a>," Big Picture TV via SourceWire PR, March 22, 2007.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Jon_Entine" title="Jon Entine" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Jon Entine</a>, "<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.dailymail.co.uk/pages/live/femail/article.html?in_article_id=482012&in_page_id=1879" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; background: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC) 100% 50% no-repeat;">Queen of Green Roddick's 'unfair trade' started when she copied Body Shop formula</a>," Daily Mail (UK), September 15, 2007.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">John Entine, "Let them eat Brazil nuts:The rainforest harvest and other myths of green marketing," Dollars and Sense, March/April 1996.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;">John Entine, "Shattered Image: Is the Body Shop too good to be true?" Business Ethics, September/October 1994.</li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Stephen_Corry" title="Stephen Corry" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Stephen Corry</a>, "<a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.exacteditions.com/exact/browse/307/308/5346/3/30" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; background: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC) 100% 50% no-repeat;">The Rainforest harvest: Who reaps the benefit?</a>", <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/The_Ecologist" title="The Ecologist" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">The Ecologist</a>, July/August 1993.</li></ul><h2 style="font-size: 19px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px; font-weight: normal; margin: 0px 0px 0.6em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-width: 1px; border-bottom-style: solid; border-bottom-color: rgb(170, 170, 170); background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Resources and articles</h2><h3 style="font-size: 17px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px; margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">Related Sourcewatch articles</h3><ul style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0.3em 0px 0.5em 1.6em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAUAAAANAQMAAABb8jbLAAAABlBMVEX///8AUow5QSOjAAAAAXRSTlMAQObYZgAAABNJREFUCB1jYEABBQw/wLCAgQEAGpIDyT0IVcsAAAAASUVORK5CYII=); background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Roddick_Foundation" title="Roddick Foundation" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Roddick Foundation</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Corporate_Social_Responsibility" title="Corporate Social Responsibility" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">Corporate Social Responsibility</a></li><li style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/David_Murphy" title="David Murphy" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">David Murphy</a></li></ul><h3 style="font-size: 17px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px; margin: 0px 0px 0.3em; overflow: hidden; padding-top: 0.5em; padding-bottom: 0.17em; border-bottom-style: none; background-image: none; background-attachment: initial; background-color: initial; background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;">References</h3><ol class="references" style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 1.5em; margin: 0.3em 0px 0.5em 3.2em; padding: 0px; list-style-image: none; background-color: rgb(255, 255, 255);"><li id="cite_note-1" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anita_Roddick#cite_ref-1" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up↑</a> <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.cohre.org/advisoryboard" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; background: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC) 100% 50% no-repeat;">Advisory Board</a>, Centre on Housing Rights and Evictions, accessed August 28, 2009.</li><li id="cite_note-2" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anita_Roddick#cite_ref-2" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up↑</a> <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.peacedirect.org/peace-direct/Peace%20Direct%20Finacial%20Statements%202004.pdf" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; background: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAQAAAAnOwc2AAAATklEQVR4XmXKQQqAMAwF0X/7XsSz9CSKiyIIFRFcjMmihmiGbB5fqDCaQJ4j46pzYLUWe+cXZ6OVBhTS0srY2Njp/+XxXXZOLu6EUWAOPX1vnwTBe6qQAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC) 100% 50% no-repeat;">PEACE DIRECT FINANCIAL STATEMENTS 2004</a>, Peace Direct, accessed February 22, 2008.</li><li id="cite_note-3" style="margin-bottom: 0.1em;"><a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Anita_Roddick#cite_ref-3" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;"><span class="cite-accessibility-label" style="top: -99999px; clip: rect(1px 1px 1px 1px); overflow: hidden; position: absolute !important; padding: 0px !important; border: 0px !important; height: 1px !important; width: 1px !important;">Jump up↑</a> <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.anitaroddick.com/aboutanita.php?PHPSESSID=6fa09ab18321af66e94c5d549e8e1406" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; background: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC) 100% 50% no-repeat;">About</a>, Anita Roddick Website, accessed February 23, 2008.</li></ol><table style="font-size: 13px; line-height: 19.200000762939453px; margin: 0.5em 0.57em 0.5em 0.7em; border-collapse: collapse; border: 1px solid rgb(218, 210, 109); background-image: initial; background-attachment: initial; background-color: rgb(255, 250, 205); background-size: initial; background-origin: initial; background-clip: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial;"><tbody><tr><td width="100%" style="padding: 0.25em;">This article is a <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/SourceWatch:Find_or_fix_a_stub" title="SourceWatch:Find or fix a stub" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">stub</a>. You can <a href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/SourceWatch:Find_or_fix_a_stub" title="SourceWatch:Find or fix a stub" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(11, 0, 128); background: none;">help</a> by <a rel="nofollow" class="external text" href="http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php?title=Anita_Roddick&action=edit" style="text-decoration: none; color: rgb(102, 51, 102); padding-right: 13px; background: url(data:image/png;base64,iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAAAoAAAAKCAYAAACNMs+9AAAAVElEQVR42n3PgQkAIAhEUXdqJ3dqJ3e6IoTPUSQcgj4EQ5IlUiLE0Jil3PECXhcHGBhZ8kg4hwxAu3MZeCGeyFnAXp4hqNQPnt7QL0nADpD6wHccLvnAKksq8iiaAAAAAElFTkSuQmCC) 100% 50% no-repeat;">expanding it</a>.</td><td>

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