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Ms. Anita Roddick
Founder, The Body Shop International Plc

Ms. Anita Roddick established The Body Shop International Plc, the cosmetics company with a conscience, in the year 1976, in UK. While Ms. Roddick’s foray into entrepreneurship was a lesson in survival that nurtured her creative thinking and business acumen, her company The Body Shop gave the world eco-friendly ways of looking good.

Ms. Roddick, a relentless campaigner against human rights abuses and exploitation of the weak, started The Body Shop in 1976 and continues to travel the globe in search of new cosmetic products-- and also for worthy causes to support in
                                                     a business-friendly manner.

Voted as second most-trusted brand in the UK and 28th top brand in the world, The Body Shop, today, is a multi-local business with 1,980 stores serving over 77 million customers in 50 different markets in 25 different languages and across 12 time zones. Its stores and products too help communicate human rights and environmental issues.

The Body Shop community trade initiatives are running in 26 countries with 42 current projects and aim to make community trade relationships more mainstream. Homogenous people are encouraged to preserve their natural environment and culture while developing commercial projects.

In 1993, Ms. Roddick joined hands with the Ogini people of Nigeria whose lands were being ravaged due to oil exploration by multinational Shell. The campaign was turned into an international cause and in 1997, after unrelenting pressure, Shell issued a revised operating charter committing the company to human rights and sustainable development. Ms. Roddick also spoke against WTO at Seattle in 1999.

Fascinated by the publishing industry, Ms. Roddick published her autobiography ‘Business As Unusual’ in 2000 and edited ‘Take it Personally’, a collection of provoking thought pieces to challenge the myths of globalisation and the power of the WTO in 2001.

In the same year, she joined forces with The Body Shop and Greenpeace, and many thousands of other organisations and individual consumers in an international campaign against Exxon-Mobil. And in 2003, she was created a DBE by the Queen.

Ms. Roddick also has a communications company, Anita Roddick Publications that aspires to advance the ideals and motivations that The Body Shop has always strived towards such as human rights, the environment, and creative dissent.

Ms. Anita Roddick currently spends her time in generating new businesses and spearheading community based campaigns. She will continue fighting for human rights and against economic initiatives and structures that abuse and ignore them, as her lifelong goals.

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