Anita Roddick Quote | wealthymatters

Go Travel !

January 31, 2013 Leave a comment

Anita Roddick With The Masai

“It wasn’t only economic necessity that inspired the birth of The Body Shop. My early travels had given me a wealth of experience. I’ve always said that travel is the best university; getting from one place to another means more than physical movement. It also entails change, challenge, new ideas and inspirations….I had this idea of making little products like shampoo and so forth using ingredients I had found when I traveled.You change your values when you change your behaviour. When you’ve lived six months with a group that is rubbing their bodies with cocoa butter, and those bodies are magnificent, or you wash your hair with mud, and it works, you go on to break all sorts of conventions, from personal ethics to body care. Then, if you’re me, you develop this stunning love for anthropology.Because I have the interest of living with indigenous groups of people and pre-industrial groups, I learned so much. For example, when your shampoo is gone, you end up mashing up stuff to put in your hair. You put on mayonnaise, eggs, anything to clean and scrub. It is real experiences that change your values.”-Anita Roddick

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Maximum Creativity

January 31, 2013 Leave a comment

“We were most creative when our back was against the wall.”-Anita Roddick

Anita started the Body Shop to make the 300 Pounds per week she needed to support herself and her two children.The early days of the business was plainly about survival.In fact her survival instinct led to many of the innovations that would later become company trademarks.

For instance, favouring recycling came from Anita’s inability to afford more than 700 empty bottles.

When she began,Anita had only a few products.So she decided to have five sizes of everything.That way when a person entered the small 370 square foot shop, this give the illusion that the store carried over 120 products.

The green paint which is the trademark of her stores was chosen because it was the only colour that would hide the mould on all the damp patches on her shop walls.

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Anita On MBAs In Entrepreneurship

January 31, 2013 2 Comments

wealthymatters.com “I often get asked to talk about entrepreneurship – even by hallowed institutions like Harvard and Stanford – but I’m not all convinced it is a subject you can teach.How do you teach obsession, because more often than not it’s obsessions that drives an entrepreneur’s vision? Why would you march to a different drumbeat if you are instinctively part of the crowd?

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. There is a sort of terrorism that comes with the operations and the science of making money, but by not knowing any of that, I had an amazing freedom.In the business school model, entrepreneurs are most at home with a balance sheet, a cash-flow forecast and a business plan. They dream of profit forecasts and the day they can take the company public. You certainly must be able to wield these weapons. But these are just part of the toolbox of re-imagining the world. They are not the basic defining characteristic of entrepreneurship. Read more of this post

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There Are Many Ways To Keep Prices Low

January 31, 2013 Leave a comment

“If prices are not that good at the moment that’s because the bloody business is not very well run. It has nothing to do with the social agenda. We save a huge amount of money by not advertising and by not going around in Lear jets, or having obscene compensation packages like many others do.”-Anita Roddick

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Entrepreneurship Is Messy

January 31, 2013 2 Comments

“The Body Shop is a multi local business with over 2.045 stores serving over 77 million customers in 51 different markets in 25 different languages and across 12 time zones. And I haven’t a clue how we got here!”-Anita Roddick

Plans are good.But at the beginning its more important to just get started rather than plan every minor detail and tie up every last string.It just wont happen and the idea is more likely to die out when faced with perfectionism.Its better to work with the final goal in mind and a few flexible milestones along the way. Adjust to situations as they pan out and go with the flow.