Tuning in…
Tuning in…
Castaway
1 appearance
Businesswoman and founder of The Body Shop, rose from unknown housewife to heading over 300 stores selling herbal oils and natural creams.
On the island
Eight records
Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5: Aria (Cantilena)
Salli Terri and Laurindo Almeida
Music speaks very personally to you and as long as I'm suffering I want music to accompany me with that.
I love it because I can remember us all hugging the jukebox or going down to Butland's or when the fairgrounds arrived in and hugging the dogem cars because all the good looking guys were always looking after the dogem cars. It's just good memories and I would dance to it because I love dancing.
I've chosen this because it sums up the only time of my life when I used to pause and had something special happen to, which in fact was meeting Gordon. And I think this record more than anything was right for that time.
If I CouldFavourite
My fourth record is a pause now because it's really come up to date in my love for this type of music.
It's such a great memory for me in my wonderful garden. And it was a hot summer about three years ago. And I played this and the kids were with their friends and everybody, independent of each other, just started dancing. I love it.
It sums up to me, you know, the search that I'm constantly looking for. And I was in Turkey trying to find out why all our sponges, which we buy from southern Turkey, was diseased. And I was on this fishing boat and just waiting for the first crop of sponges to come up. And I was sitting there waiting, and I was listening to this record.
I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For
I think this is a very personal record because it seems at this very time in my life to sum up a lot of what I'm going through or feeling.
This is a joy. This is a gem. I think one of the best Western white blue singer I've ever come across, Mary Coughlan, an Irish lass.
In conversation
Presenter asks
1:03You are one of the richest business people in Britain today, but you really can't bear that tag, can you?
I tell you why I can't bear it. It's because it's so irrelevant. The only positive aspect of wealth is that you never have to worry about paying the bills. But if you don't have a life which encourages leisure, you haven't been trained for a leisure time or leisure activities, it actually means very little. And certainly in my own work, nothing has motivated me less than money.
Presenter asks
1:42You've also been called a product of Thatcher's Britain... but you don't much care for that tag either. Why is that?
It's nothing to do with government or it's nothing to do with an attitude. There's a hell of a lot of lip service paid to entrepreneurship in this country and to initiative. But really, when it comes down to it, the bottom line, I would know of nobody with little collateral that can set up a business in this country to get real greenfields money.
Presenter asks
13:50At what point did you conceive of the idea of homemade lotions and potions?
When Gordon said he wanted to take a couple of years off and travel from Buenos Aires to New York by horse... I had to do something that was controllable. So a 9 to 5 shop was so easy, so I thought. And I knew nothing about what I wanted to put in the shop other than what I'd seen when I'd been traveling... and saw how they washed their bodies and hair and lived the way they did. And so I used as a building block for the ingredients the plant that I'd seen.
The keepsakes
The book
Pat Conroy
Now, you have to read this in hardback because the weight of it weighs your, you need that physical weight because it's physically heavy on the soul as well. And it starts, the first sentence is, my wound is my geography.
The luxury
a comfortable bed with plump pillows and white cotton sheets
I've plumped for the most wonderful, comfortable bed with plump pillows and white cotton sheets.
Presenter asks
14:45How did you go about setting [the Body Shop] up?
I went about it totally wrong by getting, not wearing as I'm wearing now, jeans and I think I had a Bob Dylan t-shirt and going to the bank and asking for 4,000 and babies on the back and in the pram and no, no, no, you can't have it... I dragged Gordon along the next time and we got the money. We had the plastic sheet, we had the profit and loss sheets, which is an absolute sham, but we got the money.
Presenter asks
18:22You have more than 300 shops across the world, but you only directly employ about 500 people. How does that work?
Because we franchise. Now, that happened because we had no money. Every successful aspect of the body shop started because we had no money, and self-financing was the way we went... people were coming to me and saying... why didn't you open up one in Bath or Bristol? Well, fine, you do it yourself. I haven't got the money to do it, basically. And we didn't know it was called franchising.
Presenter asks
25:11To those women at home who think they've got a brilliant idea, but they don't really believe they can pull it off... what do you say?
There is obviously an element of timing, not luck, timing. I think if you've got the support of your family, as I had, this extended family unit, and of your husband, which I had and still have, 90% of your problems have gone... The difference between, I think, somebody being crazy and an entrepreneur is very little. I mean, the only difference is that I can convince people of the vision or the idea that I've got. And I think if anybody at home's got the idea, the idea becomes obsessive. And you run after the idea. So you have to really be a weenie bit crazy.
“Loss will be the theme of my life, so I mean, and the only memory, so I will, I will hate it.”
“I'm absolutely not interested in the West perception of beauty or the industry, the beauty industry at all. What fascinates me to the quick is the sort of an anthropological. I'm totally curious about what people do, how they act, what they think.”
“I have such disrespect for a lot of the standard ways of conducting business, the roles of business people play.”