BBC article on the Body Shop

[WomenShouldStillWinWomensSports]

This article looked promising as it said it was going to go into all the reasons the Body Shop failed but in reality it had zero thrust or substance beyond "your mum buys it". Which of course assumes that people "your mum"'s age aren't shoppers or members of the economy and only the teenage demographic is worth targeting (which is preposterous). So disappointed. What has happened to actual proper journalism and research these days? Where is all the critical thinking? Surely these people have never written essays at uni identifying the causes of something or doing a critical analysis of a complex issue? And where are the editors asking the hard questions of their journalists to make them better at their job?

It reads like the journalist asked a couple of her friends with good-sounding jobs why they thought it failed and they didn't really know but wanted the PR of being named on the BBC news website so said something anyway.

Five minutes of research outside their own bubble could have told the writer exactly why the Body Shop failed.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-68273425

By the time it's in the BBC, any company is fucked. All the talk of "rescue deals" is merely free advertising for the asset strippers who need to ensure the banks and investors get their "fair share" while the taxpayer picks up the (ever growing) tab.

But that's just life in the UK. Nothing to do with being GC or not.

Personally I think Body Shop became very outdated and didn’t move with the times. Its whole product range was stuck on the 80’s.

They were a trailblazing company on
their time but other newer forms came along and took the ethos forward into the 21st century.

Im in my 50’s and even I find them old fashioned and dated.

The sale to L’Oreal was a nail in the coffin for many as that went totally against their whole USP

Their spat with JKR and the holier-than-thou stuff probably didn't help, but personally I'd say most of the older women I know have either substantially cut down on how much they spend on make-up and beauty products, getting what they need at the supermarket/ Home Bargains; or would buy something more 'sophisticated' (expensive) than Body Shop. Mid-market retailers have been struggling between these two trends for years, and not just in the health & beauty sector.

Also, I don't think Mary Portas needs the exposure of this article, given she's had her own TV show and is probably one of the UK's better known businesswomen.

My mum buys Elizabeth Arden!

Body Shop bath pearls and Dewberry gift sets were a childhood staple.

Agree.
The Body Shop has been failing for a long time. It was a brand for young people, but we grew up and moved on. It was never a brand for middle age. It was for teens and young adults.

I doubt very much that the trans debate has anything to do with it, other than a peripheral attempt to stay relevant, without doing the research to find out what younger people want from a cosmetics brand.

They also lost their values when Anita Roddick sold to L'Oreal. Which was well before any of the trans stuff.

A bit of a side note, I looked up the journalist who wrote that, Dearbáil Jordan, and I suspect she may be a closet TERF (very limited info - someone saying she's a "Tory" on Twitter, and her Instagram has a "Karens With Attitutes" post, she also says she's a feminist which of course some TRAs claim to be).

I wonder if she wrote about the true reasons that the Body Shop "went wrong" but perhaps they were edited out by someone else?

I mean I wrote a very long list of reasons across more than one post and other posters have contributed even more reasons explaining it in much more depth but sure, take one reason and say that's what I'm saying as the only reason this happened because it was the first one that came to mind. 🤷‍♀️

Someone with more knowledge of psychology than me can tell me if this is the primacy effect, reductionism or both.

When your main customer base is saying something and you're in financial trouble, you should listen.

Eventually all these boycotts and people just plain avoiding the place for all these reasons add up. As the Telegraph article below has pointed out, it was a death of 1000 cuts. It's basic accounting that if you keep doing something that loses resources and don't do anything that gains resources you end up with a net loss.

But here are some sources for the long list of reasons I and others have said, for anyone who wants them (and as these sources show, you can add moving manufacturing to the human rights bastion of the Philippines, and racism in the international market, to the list of charges):
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-8410319/Angry-Twitter-users-threaten-BOYCOTT-Body-Shop.html (the number of upvotes in the comments show just how many people who read this one article felt strongly about this)
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/this-britain/body-shop-s-popularity-plunges-after-l-oreal-sale-6104058.html
https://www.womenarehuman.com/boycott-of-the-body-shop-over-jk-rowling-tweet/
<a class="break-all" href="https://web.archive.org/web/20240201000000/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/12/body-shop-administration-aurelius-takeover-anita-roddick" rel="nofollow" target="_blank">https://web.archive.org/web/20240201000000/www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/02/12/body-shop-administration-aurelius-takeover-anita-roddick/
https://eluxemagazine.com/culture/articles/5-brands-you-think-are-eco-but-really-arent/
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/southerncounties/5114976.stm
https://www.bbc.co.uk/worklife/article/20240202-has-b-corp-certification-turned-into-corporate-greenwashing
https://worldofbuzz.com/body-shop-malaysia-gets-backlash-netizens-racist-job-ad/
https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/ami_being_unreasonable/4128612-Bodyshop-at-home-using-the-pandemic-to-sell-Surely-this-is-wrong
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-8526647/Promise-luxury-lifestyle-turn-nightmare-mounting-debt-marriages-threat.html
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/mlm-company-how-to-check_l_5f6ccb8bc5b6e2c91262874a (I don't think I'm allowed to link directly to the Reddit Boycott Bodyshop MLM posts although there are many).
https://www.thesun.co.uk/money/25893504/the-body-shop-brink-closure-sales/
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-482012/Queen-Green-Roddicks-unfair-trade-started-copied-Body-Shop-formula.html
https://time.com/6269728/trans_representation_nike-budlight-backlash/
https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/rainbow-capitalism-pride-black-lives-matter-protest-social-injustice-a9590076.html
https://www.thepinknews.com/2021/07/01/pride-rainbow-capitalism/
(Those last three to support the point I was making that jumping on the rainbow bandwagon at that moment in time looked cynical and fake to the people they were trying to sell to and therefore harmed their business from those customers, too)

Ok you'll have to copy and paste the intarch link as it's refusing to paste as a clean plain text link and in the editor it's showing it as a clean link so I can't remove all that shite around it. I've even tried pasting it into notepad and putting it back in and that hasn't worked.

The point (the whole point) was that steady drops hollow the stone and the BBC article is so wishy washy as to have gone into NONE of that.

They also shafted all the home sellers by making them order at one price point and then putting offers in the shops undercutting them. Total cunt move on their own staff. They really hate women, is the only logical conclusion.

When I heard the news my immediate thought was that it was linked to a MN boycott! Lush must be getting nervous ...

I do genuinely feel very sorry for the staff losing jobs at a difficult time.

@WomenShouldStillWinWomensSports have you considered compiling your posts, which sound to me very well-informed, into an email to send to someone at the relevant bit of BBC? Offer your services as a fact checker/consultant or similar.

Well considering that Body Shop was sold to a private equity firm two months ago, and then goes into administration, I think someone should look at that deal.

It was a failing company, obviously bought to either asset strip or to clear the debts on the cheap.

Most people aren't interested and it's a minority of it's customers?
What do you base that on?

This article looked promising as it said it was going to go into all the reasons the Body Shop failed but in reality it had zero thrust or substance beyond "your mum buys it".

"Your mum buys it", and then your mum stopped buying it because of what they were tweeting about women and JKR in order to appeal to (misogynistic) men, who don't buy anything from The Body Shop.

If 'your mum' is not buying it anymore and neither is anyone else, then it's curtains.

Hope everyone who works there who was horrified by their social media output funds another job quickly.

Yes, they wish people's mums had bought it. If that were actually the case, they'd have been doing fine. Middle aged women have money and purchase a lot of stuff.

I think the jkr boycott won't have helped them, but it mostly just became irrelevant didn't it?

I used to buy stuff from there as a teenager. Then in my twenties, when I had money to spend on me, I went for more upmarket brands. Now in my forties, I'll either buy mega cheap from home bargains or similar for things like body butter, bath bomb etc one offs, or I'll buy Estee Lauder or Lancome for things that I use all the time and want to be good. Body shop is this weird in between - not cheap but also not really good & worth the spend. The new generations of teens didn't want to become the next body shop customers because they brand never updated itself, and their selling point of being cruelty free / against animal testing was eroded because that became the norm for most beauty products.

It's odd because a decent way to rehabilitate themselves might have been to present themselves as a heritage brand with all the classic fragrances and key skincare/makeup products. However, that would've meant actively marketing themselves to the audience that loved them as teenagers and clearly, they couldn't walk that back after having sneered at them the way they did.

I think they were fucked regardless by the time the JKR stuff happened, but had they not been that stupid it might at least have been an option. We'd be having the discussion in the definite rather than the hypothetical.

I associate with my teen years. You could afford the odd soap or pearls with pocket money. The hard sales tactics and lack of innovation didn't attract my adult self.
I don't associate them with luxury or premium brands. If im going to spend £16 on hand cream I will go for something like L'occitane.
They just weren't an appealing brand anymore

Well the BBC was slightly right in my case - my dds love various items in the Body Shop and have done so for years and I used to be the one who bought there for them for many years. Until their crap about JKR at which point the dds were told that 'their mum' wasn't willing to spend a penny in there even if their lip salve etc was their favourite in the world and/or they put it on their Christmas list blah blah blah. And they found it too expensive to buy from their own money - so the Body Shop lost all my purchasing power for 3DDs in one woke move.

I loathe shops where staff approach me so this put me off TBS.

But it fell off a cliff with the L'Oréal sale.

Then jkr.

Some of you lot should move over to Gransnet, christ. You're so focused on getting to throw in what you call 'woke politics' which is basically what people name anything they don't understand or don't like, and ignoring of basic ecomomic issues of past 20 years+ . I agree with you @NewYearResolutions quality and price in an ever-expanding market.

Nice bit of casual ageism there, @Lacacahuete

They discontinued everything that I would have bought as an old faithful. Grapefruit and Ice-Blue Shampoo, you are missed. Then the over the top sales stalking started and I don't buy from companies that use MLM sales techniques - so the brand was long-dead to me.

Shame because we all lived in there in our teen years - you could tell what year group base you were in in secondary by the smell of dewberry or white musk before we all graduated to the olfactory horror of Lynx Africa resprayed at about 20 second intervals.