Explore popular quotes and sayings by an English businesswoman Anita Roddick.
Last updated on December 24, 2024.
Dame Anita Lucia Roddick was a British businesswoman, human rights activist and environmental campaigner, best known as the founder of the British version of The Body Shop, now The Body Shop International Limited, a cosmetics company producing and retailing natural beauty products which shaped ethical consumerism. The company was one of the first to prohibit the use of ingredients tested on animals in some of its products and one of the first to promote fair trade with developing countries.
I am still looking for the modern equivalent of those Quakers who ran successful businesses, made money because they offered honest products and treated their people decently... This business creed, sadly, seems long forgotten.
Years ago nobody was elected on the economic ticket. It was either the education platform, or it was health or it was other issues. It is only recently that economic values have superceded every other human value.
The market controls everything, but the market has no heart.
Nobody talks of entrepreneurship as survival, but that's exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking.
But if you can create an honorable livelihood, where you take your skills and use them and you earn a living from it, it gives you a sense of freedom and allows you to balance your life the way you want.
If I had learned more about business ahead of time, I would have been shaped into believing that it was only about finances and quality management.
At The Body Shop we had always been measured by how many jobs we had created, and I got a major award from the Queen on that.
Consumers have not been told effectively enough that they have huge power and that purchasing and shopping involve a moral choice.
I believe in businesses where you engage in creative thinking, and where you form some of your deepest relationships. If it isn't about the production of the human spirit, we are in big trouble.
All through history, there have always been movements where business was not just about the accumulation of proceeds but also for the public good.
The movement for the environment really only started in the mid 1970's.
Look at the Quakers - they were excellent business people that never lied, never stole; they cared for their employees and the community which gave them the wealth. They never took more money out than they put back in.
The end result of kindness is that it draws people to you.
I didn't go to business school, didn't care about financial stuff and the stock market.
The Body Shop Foundation is run by our staff and supports social activism and environmental activism. We don't tend to support big agencies.
When you run an entrepreneurial business, you have hurry sickness - you don't look back, you advance and consolidate. But it is such fun.
I traveled enormously during the 1960's, when you measured everything by where you traveled and what you did as travelers.
Since the governments are in the pockets of businesses, who's going to control this most powerful institution? Business is more powerful than politics, and it's more powerful than religion. So it's going to have to be the vigilante consumer.
I want to work for a company that contributes to and is part of the community. I want something not just to invest in. I want something to believe in.
If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito.
Over the past decade... while many businesses have pursued what I call 'business as usual,' I have been part of a different, smaller business movement, one that tried to put idealism back on the agenda.
If I can't do something for the public good, what the hell am I doing?
But the minute we went public on the stock market, which is how our wealth was created, it was no longer how many people you employed, it was how much you were worth and how much your company was worth.
If you do things well, do them better. Be daring, be first, be different, be just.
The money that we make from the company goes into The Body Shop Foundation, which isn't one of those awful tax shelters like some in America. It just functions to take the money and give it away.
There is no scientific answer for success. You can't define it. You've simply got to live it and do it.
Be daring. Be first. Be different.
To run this business ... you need ... optimism, humanism, enthusiasm, intuition, curiosity, love, humour, magic and fun, and that secret ingredient-euph oria.
Speed, agility and responsiveness are the keys to future success.
It is true that there is a fine line between entrepreneurship and insanity. Crazy people see and feel things that others don't. But you have to believe that everything is possible. If you believe it, those around you will believe it too.
Creativity comes by breaking the rules, by saying that you're in love with the anarchist.
To succeed you have to believe in something with such a passion that it becomes a reality.
Entrepreneurs are visionaries - they see things other people don't see.
Three components make an entrepreneur: the person, the idea and the resources to make it happen.
I have always found that my view of success has been iconoclastic: success to me is not about money or status or fame, its about finding a livelihood that brings me joy and self-sufficiency and a sense of contributing to the world.
By creating conversation, we let our customers spread our message by word of mouth.
We entrepreneurs are loners, vagabonds, troublemakers. Success is simply a matter of finding and surrounding ourselves with those open-minded and clever souls who can take our insanity and put it to good use.
There are only two ways of making money: the hard way and the very hard way!
My passionate belief is that business can be fun, it can be conducted with love and a powerful force for good.
Whatever you do, be different - that was the advice my mother gave me, and I can't think of better advice for an entrepreneur. If you're different, you will stand out.
First, you have to have fun. Second, you have to put love where your labour is. Third, you have to go in the opposite direction to everyone else.
Be courageous. It's one of the only places left uncrowded.
You educate people, especially young people, by stirring their passions, so you take every opportunity to grab the imagination of your employees, you get them to feel they are doing something important, that they are not a lone voice, that they are the most powerful and potent people on the planet.
If I had to choose my driving force, it would be passion.
I have no interest in being the biggest, the most profitable or the largest retailer. I just want The Body Shop to be the best, most breathlessly exciting company - and one that changes the way business is carried out.
We communicate with passion and passion persuades.
A vision is something you see and others don't. Some people would say that's a pocket definition of lunacy. But it also defines entrepreneurial spirit.
A woman in advancing old age is unstoppable by any earthly force. I love it.
Being good is good business
Be special. Be anything but mediocre.
Never feel too small or powerless to make a difference.
You have to look at leadership through the eyes of the followers and you have to live the message. What I have learned is that people become motivated when you guide them to the source of their own power and when you make heroes out of employees who personify what you want to see in the organization.
Get informed. Get outraged. Get inspired. Get active.
If you don't believe one person can make a difference, you have never been in bed with a mosquito.
Whatever you do, be different. If you're different, you will stand out.
Every time you buy something consider it a vote of confidence in the company that produced it.
I think it is completely immoral for a shop to trade in the middle of a community, to take money and make profits from that community and then ignore the existence of that community, its needs and problems.
The business of business should not be about money. It should be about responsibility. It should be about public good, not private greed
If you really didn't ever want to get wrinkles, then you should have stopped smiling years ago!
There are 3 billion women in the world who don't look like supermodels and only 8 that do.