Jon Entine - The Body Shop Controversy

The Body Shop Controversy

Entine's first print piece, the September 1994 investigative article, "Shattered Image: Is The Body Shop Too Good to Be True?," in Business Ethics magazine, created an international brouhaha and led to hundreds of stories in the international media, including articles in The New York Times and a report on ABC World News Tonight. The flurry of news stories led to a temporary 50% drop in the market value of the stock of The Body Shop, a British-based international cosmetics company, which until that point had been considered a model "socially responsible" company.

Entine reported that Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop, in 1976, had stolen the name, store design, marketing concept and most product line ideas from a different cosmetic chain with the same name, The Body Shop, founded in 1970 in San Francisco by two California women, and subsequently fabricated her story of traveling around the world discovering exotic beauty ingredients. (In 1989, Roddick purchased the U.S. and Israeli rights to The Body Shop name from the original Body Shop founders, and the San Francisco based chain of five stores renamed itself Body Time). He reported that Roddick's "natural" products contained extensive amounts of artificial colorings, scents and preservatives. Despite Roddick's claims and unverified reports in popular articles and even some university case studies that Roddick and The Body Shop "gave most of its profits to charity," as Roddick had proclaimed, documents from Britain's Charity Commission showed that the company gave nothing to charity over its first 11 years and was penurious in its philanthropy thereafter, despite Roddick's claims. The Body Shop also faced millions of dollars in claims by disenchanted franchisees, who believed they had been enticed to buy franchises by misrepresenting its potential revenue.

About The Body Shop Story from Encyclopedia of Leadership, Volume 4

Article in the Berkeley Daily about Body Time (The original Body Shop)

How The Body Shop tried to stop this information from getting mainstream: The article in Business Ethics (now defunct), which was cited with a National Press Club Award for Consumer Journalism in 1994, is widely used in university business ethics classes and is generally credited with prompting companies claiming to be socially responsible to match their claims with operational practices and to increase transparency.

"Shattered Image" had originally been scheduled to be published as a 10,000 word feature in Vanity Fair earlier in 1994 but was dropped after legal threats by The Body Shop, which threatened to litigate under British libel law, which requires proof of innocence by defendants rather than proof of guilt by the prosecution. The original article was eventually published in 2004 by The Nation Books in Killed: Great Journalism Too Hot to Print, edited by David Wallis. Business Ethics, which had featured Roddick on its cover just the year before, printed a much shorter version of the exposé commissioned for Vanity Fair. "Shattered Image" and subsequent writings by Entine on the emerging "socially responsible" business movement challenged the belief that companies that promote themselves as socially conscious necessarily operate with a higher degree of ethics or social responsibility than conventional companies. Entine's writing focused on what he called "reality rather than rhetoric" of ethical business. He is often credited for coining the term "green washing", which refers to the deceptive marketing exploits of self-professed "green" companies.