10,000 Hours of Play by OP Hero: Anita Roddick

In March 1976 a 33-year-old former teacher opened a shop at 22 Kensington Gardens in Brighton with a £4,000 bank loan, fifteen products, and walls painted dark green to hide the damp.

The shop sat between two funeral parlours, and the undertakers complained that a business called The Body Shop had no place beside theirs.

She invited the local newspaper to cover the dispute, the Evening Argus ran the story, and the first Body Shop had its first free publicity before it had a second shop.

Thirty years later L’Oréal paid £652 million for the company, and the woman who built it had already announced that she would give her fortune away.

Read through the six Steps, Anita Roddick’s run is worth studying for the order in which she made her decisions, and for what two public fights, in 1994 and 2006, cost her.

About Yu-kai Chou

Yu-kai Chou is the author of 10,000 Hours of Play — the book that treats your life as the most important game you’ll ever build a character in, and gives you the 6-Step framework (Game · Attributes · Role · Skills · Allies · Quests) to play it on purpose. He has spent two decades developing the system through which this post analyzes its OP Hero, and applies it to his own life and to the lives of the people he advises around the world.

Chou’s other framework, the Octalysis Framework, has been applied by LEGO, Microsoft, Porsche, Coca-Cola, Salesforce, and MrBeast, impacting over 1.5 Billion Users. He has taught the methodology at Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Tesla, Google, BCG, and IDEO, and has advised governments in eight nations including Ukraine, the United Kingdom, the Kingdom of Bahrain, Singapore, Taiwan, the Netherlands, Kazakhstan, and South Korea.

His work has been cited by Harvard, Stanford, MIT, Forbes, Wall Street Journal, Wired, US Department of Energy, NIST, NSF, NCBI, US Department of Education, ClinicalTrials.gov, and Google Scholar — with 3,700+ more academic publications. Explore his books here.

Anita Roddick is in this series because she solved a problem I watch founders struggle with constantly: she never let the product become the Game. The shop was the engine and the campaign was the point, and that ordering is why a store selling bubble bath could end up delivering a four-million-signature petition to the European Commission. The move I would lift from her character sheet is the Beacon Flare she fired in her first month, when two undertakers complained about her sign and she turned the complaint into a newspaper story instead of a lawyer’s letter.

Step 1: The Game — What Anita Roddick Was Actually Playing

Anita Roddick’s Game is easy to misfile under cosmetics, because cosmetics is what the shops sold.

The Game she chose was to show that a business could be run as an instrument of social and environmental change, and to use its customers, its windows and its profits to push causes that had nothing to do with moisturiser.

She was blunt about which of the two came first. In a 1996 interview she said she would “rather promote bloody human rights than a bubble bath,” and in the same conversation she called her own industry “totally useless” if you talked about its products as though they were sacred.

That ranking was in place from the start, even though the first shop opened in 1976 to earn a living for her and her two daughters while her husband was away.

The refill bottles and minimal packaging that later read as environmental principle began as a cash problem. “We recycled everything, not because we were environmentally friendly, but because we didn’t have enough bottles,” she said in the same 1996 interview.

The Game took its final shape once the company had money. The 1984 flotation funded the first sponsorship, a run of Greenpeace posters in 1985, and from 1986 the shops ran the Save the Whale campaign with Greenpeace, promoting jojoba oil as a substitute for sperm whale oil.

Her own summary of the rule, from Business as Unusual, was that “the business of business should not be about money, it should be about responsibility.”

She paid for that ranking twice, once in a 1994 exposé that questioned the gap between the claims and the practice, and once in 2006 when selling to L’Oréal made her look, to many of her own customers, like a sell-out. Both are in the Quest log below.

Step 2: Attributes — The Innate Stats

Attributes are the stats a player carries in before any training, and Roddick’s showed early.

She was born on 23 October 1942 in Littlehampton, Sussex, to Italian immigrant parents who ran a café, and she grew up working in it after school and at weekends.

The first stat is the outsider energy of an immigrant family’s kid. She failed the eleven-plus, went to Maude Allen Secondary Modern School, and later made her immigrant, working-class start a central part of how she explained her distrust of corporate convention.

The second stat is a restlessness that kept her moving for most of her twenties. After teacher training at Newton Park College of Education in Bath she worked in the clippings library of the International Herald Tribune in Paris, spent a year on an Israeli kibbutz, had a spell at the International Labour Organization in Geneva, and then travelled through Tahiti, the New Hebrides, New Caledonia, Australia and South Africa.

By her own account the South African leg ended when she was expelled from the country after attending a “black night” at a Johannesburg jazz club.

Those travelling years were where she first watched women use plant oils and local ingredients for skin and hair care, and that became the raw material for the first product line.

The third stat is a theatrical instinct for provocation, which showed up before the business did: she had tried and failed to get into the Central School of Speech and Drama before settling for teacher training.

The fourth stat is resourcefulness under scarcity, and the first shop is the exhibit. The first shop’s stock came from a herbalist she found in the Yellow Pages, went into urine-sample bottles, and sat in a room painted dark green to hide the mould on the walls.

The Talent Triangle Method asks which of your attributes is the edge the others serve. In Roddick’s case the answer is the provocation instinct: the restlessness supplied the material and the resourcefulness kept the doors open, but the willingness to make a scene is what turned a Brighton shop into a campaign.

Step 3: Role(s) — The Character Class Across Chapters

Roddick’s role changed every few years, and the sequence matters because each one trained the next.

She was a teacher before she was anything else. After Newton Park she taught English and history, and the habit of standing in front of a room and explaining things never left her products, which carried stories on their labels and were sold by staff trained to tell them.

She was then a traveller and a researcher, with the Herald Tribune, the ILO and the long route through the Pacific and southern Africa.

The third role was hospitality operator, and it came with a partner. She met Gordon Roddick at the El Cubana nightclub in Littlehampton, married him in a Reno wedding chapel in 1970, and together they ran a bed-and-breakfast and a restaurant called Paddington’s.

Running a restaurant taught her the cash discipline that later produced five bottle sizes from fifteen products.

Shopkeeper came in March 1976, and it was meant to be temporary. Gordon had set off to ride a horse from Buenos Aires to New York, and the shop existed to pay the bills while he was gone.

The ride ended early when his horse died in the Andes, and he was home in 1977 to find a second shop already trading in Chichester.

From 1978 the role shifted to franchisor, which is the role that built the chain. The first overseas franchise opened as a kiosk in Brussels that year, and the model let the chain grow without the company paying for every shop.

The April 1984 flotation made her a public-company founder, and from 1986 campaigner-in-chief became the role she preferred. She stepped back from day-to-day management in 1998, left the co-chair role in 2002, and spent her last years as author, consultant and philanthropist.

Estée Lauder played the same industry with the opposite class: Lauder was a Warrior who sold glamour one counter at a time, while Roddick was a Paladin who sold a cause and let the cosmetics ride along.

Step 4: Skills — The Real-Life Game Skills Anita Roddick Mastered

Five Real-Life Game Skills do most of the work in Roddick’s build, and each one has a dated moment attached.

Beacon Flare (Ranger) is PR that cuts through noise, and she fired it in her first month: when the undertakers next door complained about the name, she took the dispute to the Evening Argus and got coverage a new shop could never have bought.

For the rest of her tenure the company was known for largely avoiding conventional paid advertising, relying on press, windows and word of mouth instead.

Adaptive Foraging (Ranger) is finding the right resources for the challenge in front of you. The first product line came from a herbalist she found in the Yellow Pages, the packaging came from urine-sample bottles, and the five sizes existed to make fifteen products look like a range.

Loremaster (Druid) is weaving stories people want to carry. Roddick put the origin of an ingredient on the label and into the staff training, so that buying a bar of soap came with the name of the community that supplied the oil.

By 1996 she was telling interviewers that “shopping is now a moral choice” and predicting that customers would increasingly look for “the story behind the product.”

Greed Alchemy (Warlock) is using borrowed money and other people’s capital to produce exponential growth. Franchising from the late 1970s let other people’s capital open the shops, and the April 1984 flotation on the Unlisted Securities Market, priced at 95p, saw the shares reach £1.65 on the first day and funded the campaigns that followed.

Terraform (Warlock) is influencing rule-makers to change the ground itself. The Against Animal Testing campaign collected roughly four million signatures and delivered them to the European Commission in 1996, and the United Kingdom banned the animal testing of cosmetics in November 1998.

How much of that ban the company can claim is contested, but the petition is on the record.

On the Skills Spectrum, Roddick was a Master of one craft, campaigning through retail, which is the craft behind the 1986 whale posters and the 1996 petition, and a deliberate Dabbler in the chemistry, which is why she hired a herbalist for the formulas and spent her own hours on the campaigns.

Step 5: Allies — The People Who Multiplied Anita Roddick

Roddick’s story is usually told as a solo act, and the record says otherwise.

Gordon Roddick is the first ally and the most underrated. He helped negotiate the original £4,000 loan before he left for South America, and on his return in 1977 he built the franchising and financial systems that turned a two-shop business into a chain.

In 1991 he co-founded The Big Issue with John Bird, with the company’s backing, which gave homeless vendors a street newspaper to sell.

Ian McGlinn is the second ally, and the one most people have never heard of. A local businessman and former garage owner, he put in £4,000 when the business needed capital for the Chichester shop and took a stake in return, which he held through the company’s entire life as an independent business.

The campaigning partners supplied credibility she could not have manufactured, which is the test of who to build allies with in the first place. Greenpeace lent the first major cause in 1986, Amnesty International anchored the first human-rights campaign in 1988, and from 1993 the company put its windows behind Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni people’s campaign against Shell’s operations in Nigeria, up to and past his execution on 10 November 1995.

Her mother Gilda ran the café where she learned to work, and her daughters Justine and Samantha were the original reason the first shop had to make money.

Russell Miller co-wrote Body and Soul with her in 1991, the book that fixed the company’s founding story in public memory.

In the final chapter the allies were professional managers. Patrick Gournay took over as chief executive in 1998, and Adrian Bellamy and Peter Saunders led the board after the Roddicks stepped down in 2002, through to the L’Oréal sale.

Step 6: Quests — The Milestones That Shaped the Saga

The first Quest was the shop itself, opened in March 1976 on a £4,000 loan with fifteen products in five sizes, followed by a second shop in Chichester within six months.

The second Quest was scale, and it ran for most of a decade. The first overseas franchise opened as a kiosk in Brussels in 1978, new shops were opening at about two a month by 1982, and the April 1984 flotation at 95p reached £1.65 on its first day.

By 1991 there were around 700 branches, and by 1996 the company counted more than 1,300 shops in 45 countries.

The third Quest was the campaigns: Greenpeace in 1986, Amnesty in 1988, Children on the Edge founded in 1990 after she visited Romanian orphanages, The Big Issue in 1991, the Ogoni campaign from 1993, and the four-million-signature animal-testing petition in 1996.

The fourth Quest was the setback that every campaigning brand eventually meets. In 1994 Jon Entine’s article “Shattered Image” in Business Ethics magazine argued that the products were less natural than the marketing implied, that charitable giving was small relative to the image, and that the animal-testing policy rested on a definition rather than proof.

The company disputed the piece, but the gap between claim and practice became a permanent part of the story, and how a public figure deals with public critics after that point shapes the rest of the run.

There was an earlier wound of the same kind. In 1987 she paid a reported $3.5 million for the United States rights to the name, to the Berkeley, California shop founded in 1970 that had used “The Body Shop” first and which then renamed itself Body Time.

The fifth Quest was the handover and the sale. She gave up the chief executive role in 1998 and the co-chair role in 2002, and on 17 March 2006 L’Oréal agreed to buy the company for 300p a share, £652 million in total, with the Roddicks’ 18 per cent stake worth around £117 million.

Critics pointed at L’Oréal’s animal-testing history and at Nestlé’s stake in L’Oréal. She answered that she did not see the deal as selling out and described herself as a kind of Trojan horse inside the buyer.

The sixth Quest was giving it away. In December 2005 she had announced that she would give away her fortune, then estimated at £51 million.

In February 2007 she disclosed that she had hepatitis C, contracted from a blood transfusion in 1971 after the birth of her younger daughter, and on 10 September 2007 she died of a brain haemorrhage at St Richard’s Hospital in Chichester, aged 64, and her estate went to charity as she had said it would.

She had been appointed a Dame in 2003, four years before her death.

What You Can Steal From Anita Roddick’s Build

Three moves from her character sheet transfer to anyone building something.

The first is to decide what the business is for before it is profitable, because the decision is free then and expensive later. Roddick chose the campaign over the product in a shop that could not afford bottles, and the choice held through a flotation and a takeover.

The second is to treat every constraint as a Beacon Flare opportunity. The undertakers, the damp walls and the missing bottles each became part of the story the company told about itself, and the story did the advertising.

The third is to borrow credibility you have not yet earned. Greenpeace and Amnesty had decades of trust in 1986 and 1988, a ten-year-old retailer did not, and the alliance moved both sides forward.

The caution is the 1994 lesson: when the campaign is the brand, every gap between claim and practice is a front-page story, and the standards you set in public are the ones you will be measured against.

Where this framework comes from

Related Reading

• All OP Hero Profiles: the 10,000 Hours of Play hub
• 10,000 Hours of Play by OP Hero: Sara Blakely
• 10,000 Hours of Play by OP Hero: Howard Schultz
• 10,000 Hours of Play by OP Hero: Pierre Omidyar
• Real-Life Game Skills: The 96-Skill System Behind 10,000 Hours of Play
• What’s Your Edge Strength? The Talent Triangle Method

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