Profile: Gordon Roddick

REGRET and relief are mingled in the moment when Body Shop co-chairman Gordon Roddick describes stepping down after 26 years in financial control of one of Britain’s most famous businesses.

As late as last Monday evening the Dumfriesshire-born entrepreneur and his wife Anita were still locked in negotiations with two parties that wanted to acquire the company and campaigning organisation they had spent more than a quarter of a century building. But eventually the pair decided that neither the price nor the development plans put on the table were right.

Instead they agreed to hand over the reins to Adrian Bellamy and Peter Saunders - respectively chairman and chief executive of the US group - with a mandate to restore the quoted retailer’s flagging fortunes. The emotionally tangled but rationally straightforward decision frees Roddick to add fresh business and charitable ventures to a list that already includes marketing Mates condoms with Richard Branson, launching the Big Issue with editor-in-chief John Bird, and producing and distributing the Trevor Baylis-designed clockwork radio in remote regions of Africa and South America.

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"Plan B was that we got on with our lives," says Roddick, who now lives in Sussex. "I’ve got little or no ego about going to bed as a co-chairman and waking up as a non-executive director. I’m a major shareholder so I’m very practical and I’m very happy to hand over to Adrian. I’ll be as useful in the company as Adrian wants me to be."

Roddick, who with Anita still owns 25% the company, is not completely cutting himself off from an organisation with which he so closely identifies both ethically and commercially. Although the succession is decided, he is anxious to retain some influence over the company’s overall philosophy because, ever since the first store opened in Brighton selling natural beauty products in recyclable packaging, the pair have used the Body Shop to demonstrate that capitalism need not be incompatible with human rights and environmental awareness.

As a non-executive board member he will still spend around 90 days a year working on business projects including a planned expansion in Asia and an ongoing liaison with the company’s extensive network of franchisees.

He will also remain involved in the Body Shop Foundation’s charitable work in Brazil and India. There have been whispers in the City that the acrimony surrounding the decision by ice-cream entrepreneurs Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield to hand their ethical company to corporate giant Unilever persuaded the Roddicks not to sell the Body Shop.

But Roddick, whose passion for the environment was nurtured by a stint as a sheep farmer in Australia and by canoeing down the Amazon, insists that similar concerns did not scupper talks with the Body Shop’s potential suitors. "I wouldn’t cast aspersions on any that were talking to us. It was a combination of timing, price, commitment and philosophy rather than ethics," says Roddick, who refuses to confirm speculation that French private equity firm Paribas Affaires Industrielles and UK retailer Lush were the parties concerned. "Ben didn’t know Unilever or the players that took over the business but we’ve worked with Adrian for a long time. It’s not a big stretch to see Adrian and Peter in charge."

With the company safe in familiar hands one of the first projects Roddick plans to tackle is a collaboration with Big Issue chief and long-standing friend John Bird to launch a new venture capital fund called Social Brokers. The 30m vehicle will expand on the pair’s homeless magazine initiative by investing in business projects that will promote social justice and empower the disenfranchised. Roddick and Bird will begin approaching private individuals in the spring and the fund is expected to close at the end of the year.

"It’s going to offer seed money to projects that might be based on alternative technology or renewable energy," explains Roddick, who is unlikely to be involved in the fund’s day-to-day management. "We want to find 300 other ideas like the Big Issue." Roddick remains rightly proud of his role in the creation of the Big Issue, which he was inspired to launch after picking up a similar publication, Street News, during a trip to New York back in 1990.

A feasibility study by the Body Shop Foundation concluded that a similar project would never work in Britain, but Roddick, undaunted, called his old friend Bird whom he first met twenty years ago in Paddy’s Bar in Edinburgh, and asked him to help. Today, after Roddick’s initial investment of around 300,000, the paper has thriving editions in seven UK cities including Edinburgh and London.

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"We nearly had a fight when we first met but we ended up as friends," Bird recalls. "He’s one of the most creative, perceptive thinkers I know. He’s got so many ambitions he wants to use his time and his opportunities on and I’ve told him he should build on that." Roddick has already used his creative energies to pick and back several ethical ventures including a fair-trade chocolate range called Divine; Freeplay, the company that manufactures and distributes clockwork radios; and a wind farm in Wales in which the Body Shop has a 15% stake.

But he warns entrepreneurs not to be seduced by City glamour. "Don’t put the business before your family," says Roddick, who has two grown-up daughters including Sam, the founder of upmarket London-based sex store Coco de Mer. "Don’t grow too big too quickly, and don’t go public. If you join that game there are certain rules you have to adhere to, but I’m not one who sits and cries about being in a public company."

Roddick, a wine fanatic with a second home near one of California’s wine valleys, will also retain his stake in the Alternative Hotel Company, owner of the boutique Hotel du Vin chain which is renowned, unsurprisingly, for its extensive wine list. Owners Robin Hutson and Gerard Basset have already launched four operations and the fifth, in Brighton, is scheduled to open later this year.

But his best achievements and happiest memories, he says, have sprung from the Body Shop’s campaigning ethos. "I was jumping up and down in Tokyo airport when I heard that the Amnesty campaign to save the Ogoni 20 had succeeded," recalls Roddick, referring to the Nigerian human rights campaigners. "And when it was announced that they had changed the laws on animal testing it was very salutatory. I don’t hear of many companies that come together like ours," he says.

"Many of our franchise meetings feel like I’m in the company of friends. I still get Messianic about it after 26 years."

If past history is any guide, he will be applying his missionary zeal to more new ventures in the coming months.