Think Water And Waves, Not Just Fish

The Body Shop's bankruptcy illuminates a bigger sustainability challenge

Many years ago, Volans concluded that too much CSR and ESG work was focusing on individual “fish,” or businesses, at the expense of the “waters” in which they swim—that is, the markets in which such businesses operate. And the gap has not closed much since, al though we do hear more business leaders calling for “system change,” whatever they may think they may mean by that.

This contrast between corporate fish and the wider market landscapes they patrol has been underscored again with the collapse into financial administration of the UK arm of The Body Shop International. Companies are important, particularly this one, which has championed the ethical, social and environmental agendas for business since 1976—but are we obsessing with an individual business at the expense of what its plight tells us about wider market dynamics?

Having myself campaigned with Body Shop co-founder Anita Roddick, who contributed the foreword to our 1988 bestseller The Green Consumer Guide and turned over her UK shop windows to our Green Consumer campaign, I confess that I am far from surprised to hear the news—but find it very sad, even tragic.

Still, this outcome did become somewhat more likely once the business went public, particularly when it was acquired by L’Oréal. Brazil’s Natura may have been a better owner but it, too, struggled to turn The Body Shop around.

With some 2,500 stores in 70 countries, The Body Shop has certainly scaled since its origins in Littlehampton, near Brighton, and it is worth noting that this process of administration only affects the UK business. But it is hard not to conclude that the business as a whole has been overtaken by nimbler competitors who have been more adept at shaping market tastes, including Lush—whose founder, Mark Constantine, I first met when he was a supplier to the early Body Shop.

With considerable surprise now being expressed about the decision even by some of those most closely involved with the recent sale of the business to the private equity group, Aurelius, we must see what happens—and what the underlying financial realities turn out to be.

In the meantime, Anita Roddick’s legacy is all around us, in the much broader acceptance of a corporate responsibility agenda that seemed utterly outlandish to many other business people back into the Seventies and Eighties. I still remember the Body Shop’s pioneering—and voluminous—Values Report, published in 1996, way before most companies would have even dared contemplate such a thing.

On other fronts, such as refillability and circularity, things have gone way slower than such pioneers expected, not least because coherent, sustained government action was needed—and rarely delivered. That’s why we must open out our focus from heroic (or even devilish) companies to the markets they serve. Only if we evolve such market realities—as through carbon pricing regimes and tighter conditions on insurance and reinsurance—can we expect the broad mass of businesses to do the right thing as a matter of course.