A tribute to Dame Anita Roddick

I've known Anita for 10 years. She was a truly remarkable person, and other than my family and girlfriend the single biggest influence on my life. Anita had an enormous passion for life, which she lived with boundless energy. She was very, very funny and had a habit of being able to look at life and business from a different angle to the rest of us.

I first met Anita in 1997 when I joined The Body Shop to help market the 'values' of the Company. She believed passionately in business being a force for good. For her it was profits AND principles not profits OR principles and the companies financial goals and social and environmental goals were one and the same to her.

Anita will be remembered as an entrepreneur, an innovator and an activist (the latter would have meant the most to her). Over twenty years ago The Body Shop enabled you to refill or recycle your bottles in store (something that none of the supermarkets do now). Whilst the world was focussed on aid Anita believed in trade as a way to help people out of poverty. She invented and tirelessly promoted her community trade programme, which involved ingredients being sourced from communities in need under fair trade conditions. Decades later we are finally seeing mainstream businesses stocking fair trade goods. Many of Anita's community trade relationships have lasted 20 years. Some would have been far easier to give up on, but Anita was never one for that.

Anita fought hard for her beliefs, and also for very many people and causes. She started with animal rights and a 10 year campaign to stop the animal testing of cosmetics. However it seemed to me that her greatest passion became human rights and women's issues. The murder of Ogoni activist Ken Sawo Wiwa by the Nigerian junta came as a great blow to her, and she fought side by side with the Ogoni people in their campaign against Shell's social and environmental record on their land.

The idea that businesses should campaign was simple to Anita - if you believed in something you fought for it - however many business leaders then, and now, struggle to grasp this. Anita always said that you shouldn't leave you values at the door when you come to work.

She once said to me that the greatest skill of an entrepreneur was to convince other people to follow your ideas. In this Anita was a great success. The Body Shop family was made up of franchisees who bought into (and in many cases developed further) Anita's vision around the world. Franchisee meetings were notoriously opinionated affairs, but in the end Anita's charm and vision held them all together.

Looking back now its hard to remember just how radical (one of Anita's favourite words) her views on business were at the time (and indeed some still are now). She was a visionary, and every person who met her was infected with her personality, beliefs and sheer enthusiasm. She deserves to be remembered as somebody who truly transformed the way in which business sees itself.

I remember Anita also as an exceptionally warm and supportive friend. When I told her I was leaving The Body Shop to set up my own company her first question was 'how can I help?'. Anita and Gordon invested in responsibletravel.com but really she gave me far more than just the cash - it was her vision and spirit that we've been following these past 6 years at responsibletravel.com and will continue to follow.

I last saw Anita about six weeks ago when she invited my girlfriend Heidi and I, together with three other like-minded couples, over to her house for the weekend. Anita cooked and served the tea, and as always was making mischief and the centre of every conversation. When I asked her about any travelling that she might be doing she explained that she was meeting L'Oreal, whom she sold The Body Shop to, to persuade them to use more community trade ingredients in their products - something that due to their scale would have transformed the lives of many communities. Anita remained an activist and L'Oreal bought into that and her ideas - a trojan horse is how she described herself.

When my father died suddenly while I was working at The Body Shop Anita wrote me a card which I still have. She described how life was like an onion, layer upon layer of memories, impressions and new ideas left with the people who we've met and talked to. I'd like to think of Anita as a friend, an inspiration and the biggest onion in the world. She leaves an enormous hole and will be missed greatly by many, many people across the world.