I recently saw a short article about the late Anita Roddick (Dame) about starting a business.
Ms. Roddick is known for having started the Body Shop.
That just doesn't happen to be true. I know the history since I was a consultant to the original Body Shop which was a member of the San Francisco Briarpatch.
The real founders of the Body Shop where Peggy Short and Jane Saunders. They were hippies who had opened a shop in Berkeley and a second shop in San Francisco on Union Street. At the time they were doing what several other people I knew were doing. Which was commissioning cosmetics from a Berkeley chemical lab. Peggy and Jane just did an extraordinary job of selecting the smells and doing the graphics.
Anita Roddick took every detail of Peggy and Jane's stores. Cosmetics, design and the name.
More than a decade later when Roddick wanted to move her version of the stores into the San Francisco Bay Area she had to negotiate with Peggy and Jane. The Bay Area women were happy to take the money offered to them and change the name of their store to Body Time.
Most of what Anita Roddick said about activism and her charitable giving and the purity of her products were not true. That should not be a surprise.