So the other day a few things popped up in this antiMLM group I’m in and I commented on several posts about The Body Shop and their MLM side.
Whilst I appreciate that the Body Shop does not have an MLM side in every country around the world, but it definitely does in the U.K., USA, Canada and Australia, and I want to make people aware as the posts clearly showed a lot of people surprised and confused. Also there’s some more little known facts about the Body Shop that people ought to be aware of, before they continue to buy and support and even praise this company.
I’ll start with the reason why I’ve included this Natura&Co image and why Avon is in the image, because that, right there is the connection, Avon and The Body Shop, both MLMs are owned by the parent company Natura&Co, a Brazilian MLM conglomerate. Natura is an MLM cosmetics brand in Brazil in its own right and this company also owns the brand Aesop.
Natura&Co bought the Body Shop from L’Oreal in 2017, L’Oreal owned the Body Shop from 2006 to 2017, before this the company was owned by Anita Roddick and her husband. Anita passed away shortly after selling the business to L’Oreal.
Just so you are aware, buying ANYTHING from any of these brands in any STORE or via an MLM Rep, yes that also goes for buying these brands via Alta or even Amazon…
You’re putting money in the pockets of an MLM… there is no way around it.
Now The Body Shop Story.
First of all: the MLM side started in 1994 by Anita Roddick herself. So it’s not new, its not something started after Anita Roddick passed away, it’s not a recent development, even in the USA they’ve had an MLM side before, which closed down. The MLM side has only just recently reopened in the USA and being rolled out across other countries and that is entirely down to Natura&Co.
Secondly: the company is NOT ETHICAL.
Never has been and probably never will be.
On Ethical Consumer it scores 6.5 out of 15 points, every brand starts with 14 points and points are deducted for unethical business practices. An outstanding ethical company that goes beyond can get an extra point, so a total of 15 points can be scored for extra ethical businesses.
Historically the ethics of this company have never been great, from the start when Anita Roddick basically stole the concept and name from a small business in Berkeley, California.
Forcing them to change their company name after buying the rights to the name and paying the ladies who REALLY started the Body Shop a mighty $3.5 million. They started the Body Shop in 1970, Anita started her business in 1976, so 6 years later.
Read the story of the OG Body Shop here:
Sadly the company has now closed; 
Anita also lied about giving most of her profits to charity, she didn’t pay anything to charity for the first 11 years of the Body Shop’s lifetime, so between 1976 and 1987 any claims that she paid lots to charities were lies. The British Charity Commission records are evidence of this, they record all donations to charities and there were none recorded for Anita or the Body Shop.
There are photos on the Body Shop website showing Anita pouring products into smaller containers, you might think that Anita made the Body Shop products herself… think again! The first Body Shop products were created by the people who are behind the brand Lush. Mark Constantine (photo), co-founder of Lush was once Anita Roddick’s first cosmetics advisor!
Almost every Body Shop store is a franchise, there are some corporate owned shops, bht especially with the franchises there have been a lot of problems over the years. Some of the issues are described in this CNN Money article:
There’s an article published in Business Ethics magazine in Sept/Oct 1994 by journalist Jon Entine called:
It became the source of my research and fact checking exercise and I owe Jon Entine a lot of gratitude for having done all this research before me. You can download and read it here, but you need to have membership of the site and pay, so not ideal:
Or you may be able to get a copy at your local library. Alternatively, you can contact Jon and ask for a copy via his website where Jon Entine has kept an archive of the Body Shop and everything after the article was published. It makes for some interesting reading:
Particularly interesting read is this article: https://jonentine.com/a-social-and-environmental-audit-of-the-body-shop-anita-roddick-and-the-question-of-character/
More lies…
Animal Cruelty and The Body Shop:
From the start of the company The Body Shop has always stood for ethical, green, eco friendly and above all Animal Cruelty Free! However, when the Roddicks sold the Body Shop to L’Oreal in 2006 for over $500 million… the Body Shop lost their Cruelty Free status!
They only got it back in 2018 when Natura&Co finally made efforts to get their ducks in a row.
So if you bought anything from the Body Shop between 2006 and 2018 thinking they were cruelty free, then you were scammed, because they weren’t. There even was a ban on the Body Shop for 11 years by Naturewatch.
But how much does that mean when you know the company lost this status before and Natura&Co didn’t have Cruelty Free status when they took over the Body Shop either.
Their Cruelty Free status is now under investigation again, since Natura&Co bought Avon and Avon isn’t cruelty free…
If after reading all this you still think that the Body Shop is ok and that they aren’t so bad, I don’t know what else to say… In my personal opinion I would call for a world wide ban on The Body Shop for all those reasons mentioned and all Natura&Co brands for the fact that they’re a massive MLM conglomerate…
