Bodyshop loses customer support, lol

[EightMonthsScared]

Thought I'd post this for people (like me) who emailed their CEO a couple to years ago about how they were alienating their core demographic, us.

Remember how we were dismissed. Oh well.

https://www.ft.com/content/02e5b3dc-62f3-44cb-b55c-8a99cf1b90a

The article doesn't actually (sadly) reference the menstruators argument but I think it's got a lot to do with it. I feel like that was a Ratner moment for the company.

I've got DS and future* DiL (20s) staying with me at the moment and neither of them have any Body Shop products. I'll have to ask them why.

(DS will immediately know it's a 'terf quest' but he's a terf too so he'll be interested.)

*god willing with a fair wind

I shopped there a lot many years ago. I used to love the fact that you could take empty bottles to be refilled.

i wrote to them too post-menstrugate and told them I’d been shopping there since the late 80s (admittedly much less often recently) and they’d never get another penny out of me.

there is so much choice and variety in the market across absolutely everything they offer,
yet they chose to make their USP misogyny.

I boycotted after their JKR hate and so did several of my friends. They're firmly on the nope list.

Bloody hell! You can get a kilo of Shea butter online for under a tenner! (Also really cheap if you have Caribbean hair shops near by like we do).

Well, making better quality/more ethical/lower-priced products would cost money. Whereas misogyny is free!*

*unless you count the drop in sales to women

I haven't crossed the threshold since the JKR incident. DD was spending a fortune in there of my money and that stopped. The one on our high street is always empty and that'll be because of the cost and Lush probably appeal to their old customer base more.

So the whole Body Shop empire is now only valued at £207m?

I wonder if there has also been a reliance on renting retail space for its shops, and the company didn't build up property assets when the going was good. When rents shot up, it just put prices up and insulted the customer demographic that actually has some money.

Way to go, Body Shop.

Boycotted after JKR.
I do wonder why the whole original look and feel and product range was binned? Was it too expensive to mass produce?
I can remember not just the eco credentials but the international aspect too.
I honestly think if they returned a lot of the original inventory and ramped up refilling opportunities, there'd be enough nostalgic older women and a new teen audience to make a comeback.

Mum's terfy shampoo and shower gel because it's free.

Excellent!

That new demographic chase after the latest shiny viral thing they see on TikTok. There is no brand loyalty.

Shouldnt have sold out adult human females, guys!

Us middle aged females with money to spend and a nostalgic fondness for the Bodyshop could’ve kept you going. Shame.

Heard from many other retailers: your current customers will be dead soon (thirty forty years but 'soon' in the world of crass youth), you have to ditch them to be chasing the up and comings, with a belief that you attract the up and comings by loudly spitting on your loyal current customers.

It's not working in reality is it? Like many things about these politics.

Yep, this is when I walked away too. The Body Shop can fuck off with their disrespect to women, they aren’t the only company to sell shea butter.

The Body Shop need women far more than women need The Body Shop, so maybe let us define ourselves?

Too expensive for what they are.

If I want expensive I’ll buy Aesop or Ren.

And the stupid marketing campaigns are alienating. Don’t shop in Lush now for the same reason.

My Gran started buying Lancome products when she was 16, and was a loyal customer until she died at 97.

If The Body Shop think it’s ok to alienate women over the age of 25, they’re pretty bad at maths.

The responses to this thread is fucking brilliant.

I'm so pleased that we stuck to our guns and didn't forget.

Yep, as a skint student I bought all my cosmetics there, even if it meant living off toast till the end of the month.

Started to go off them when a local lass, who I would class as a vulnerable adult was hooked in to their MLM with entirely predictable consequences. I havent spent a penny there since JKR. And nor will I.

if you are listening BS. I don’t support misogyny and I don’t buy from any business that pushes MLMs.

you want my trade. Buy out your MLM victims at a fair price. Apologise to JKR (and donate to Lumos/Berias place).

And then bring back the stuff we all went mad for in the nineties.

That's a bloody good point. Older women are using products and brands like Lancome and Olay all their lives, into their 80s and 90s, spending good money on them.

M&S have done it as well. It was bad enough when they tried to dress us all like building society managers, but then it went mental with the whole lingerie-fetish-market EDI crap and now you need to take your own luminol equipment with you just to try on a bra and knicker set.

What two tier system was that, I missed it.

You used to be able to go in there with your next to fuck all pay from working a till at the supermarket for ten hours a week and spend pennies on a selection of bath oil beads or a tiny bottle of something else that smelled lovely, then come back the week after half term and splash out on a £2.90 stick of cocoa butter or look forward to buying the £4.99 baskets for your best mate (and getting almost identical ones back) for Christmas. And once you'd got past the stage of the smallest size of everything, you'd go up a size in your favourite products whilst still buying small bottles of more and more things because it wasn't a huge financial risk.

It was accessible. They welcomed the kids with their handfuls of coins, let them potter around smelling things, gazing wistfully at the huge baskets at the back of the stores.

OK, there was a hefty dose of appropriation and white saviour whiff about the place, but it was at least recognising that women existed and worked thousands of miles from the offices and schools of the Home Counties, rather than the media depiction of them all holding starving babies when standing at the back of a truck, waiting passively for white guys to chuck bags of rice at them following a gig and patronising lyrics.

it hitched itself to stupid causes that its core customer base didn't care about. It conflated "I care about ethical cosmetics production and will pay a price for it" with "I care about every random "cause" going and want overpriced cosmetics to pretend to care about it too.”

Not dissimilar to Lush. I used to spend a fortune in there until they started backing hunt sabs (whatever your opinion on hunting, sabs are the TRAs of the countryside - quite happy to scream obscenities at children in the name of their righteousness) and bashing the police. Haven’t crossed the threshold for over 10 years.

I absolutely loved the Body Shop too, as a child it seemed like a magical shop to visit. Being given gifts from there was a real treat. As a teenager I spent my pocket money there on Fuzzy Peach, strawberry soaps and tangerine showergel with cool, bright labels and ethics that no one else seemed to think about. Now - as a 40-something with money to spend - I wouldn’t even think of going into the Body Shop. Big business/private equity owned, skewed ethics (the JKR incident), nothing-special products and unreasonable prices. Nah.

It was decades ago so I might be misremembering, you paid around £10(?) to become a member and you'd get a pound or so off normal prices. So, if you were a loyal customer and went in regularly you'd save money overall. I just used to get their vitamin e moisturiser, which had a lovely scent, and a body scrub. So, I made my, as it turned out, final purchase and never went back.

Do they still do bath pearls? I loved them when I was about 12, same for the animal soaps, then got into their scents and lotions as I went through my teens. Their planet-friendly outlook definitely shaped my politics. I won't be getting anything from there for my teenage nieces given the whole JKR fiasco.

Go woke, go broke.

What's hilarious is they did the dirty on JKR in the full belief that they were more powerful than her as a brand because they thought they were this major multinational Goliath crushing David the TERF. They got her cancelled. But her products (well-written page-turners) are so fucking good it was impossible to cancel her really, and they're the ones now in financial jeopardy, not her.

And she handled it in such a dignified, composed way.

Total poetic justice.

If I were her, I'd have been fucking petty and bought them up so they'd have to answer to her. But I'm a bit of a bitch like that sometimes. 🤣