At the news The Body Shop will be closing its doors for good in New Zealand, Kelly Bertrand pays a nostalgic tribute
It was the best of times. It’s 2001 and Christmas money is burning a hole in my pocket, Boxing Day sales are raging through the local mall and I had one mission, and one mission only – buy the thing I’d been lusting over for months. I’d cut pictures of it out of magazines and carefully plastered them on my walls, along with the transparent blow-up furniture and lava lamp I wanted from HBK and the flared jeans with the cute little diamantes from Urban Angel that my mother (quite rightly) refused to pay $95 for.
Today was the day I finally bought The Body Shop body butter.
Lauded by celebrities and magazines, The Body Shop’s thick, heavily fruit scented body butter was the stuff of dreams and my God, how great would if be if I could go back to this moment in time where my only true dilemma was whether or not to get mango or strawberry.
Life was good. Life made sense.
And today, there’s a part of me that feels an innate sadness for that excited 11-year-old at the news that The Body Shop is now, officially, no more, with all stores in NZ now closed.
What happened?!
THE BODY SHOP THEN
Before Lush, before Mecca, us Gen X and Millennial gals had The Body Shop – the smell a siren call in any mall, the products lauded by trendy celebs and the brand that made us, regular girls and women, feel like we were making a difference in the planet’s quest to be less shit.
Remember the scent as you walked in the door? It was exciting, intoxicating, fun. And then you could test out all of the products – the soaps! The gels! The body butters! The body sprays! I remember Mum wrinkling her nose as I walked in the door one day and asking me what the hell I’d been doing because I think I sprayed literally every perfume they had onto my skin because hey, I was a *super grown up* 13-year-old. I was given a set of the animal soaps (oh my god remember the animal soaps) one year for my birthday and I was on a high for weeks (of course refusing to ever use the soaps).
The day I got a *real* body spray (strawberry) instead of my usual Impulse was a huge step in my womanhood journey (for me anyway).
Everything was packaged in a riot of colour to appeal to the younger generation, but what the packaging actually said hit the sweet spot of the conscious young women who wanted her beauty products to do more, be more.
Founded by Dame Anita Roddick in 1976, The Body Shop was absolutely first out the gate when it came to conscious consumerism. They were against animal testing, they used vitamins and plants in their products, they stood for something. It was an irresistible mix of marketing and mission and The Body Shop quickly rose to cult status in the 1990’s, with their signature Dewberry and White Musk scents taking centre stage, as well as the aforementioned body butters and gift sets that mothers, grandmothers and teachers everywhere would come to recognise with annual familiarity. Put simply, they made caring cool.
I would spend hours poring over the carefully wrapped gift sets, mentally picking out which one I would like if I had enough money, ignoring the fact I had no idea what most of the products actually did. I was a kid in a candy store – well, a kid in a Body Shop – and it quickly became my happy place.
WHAT HAPPENED?
But as much as my nostalgia and memories of TBS warm me, the harsh reality is this – I haven’t bought a Body Shop product in years. I’ve been gifted a few for work, and their advent calendars for Christmas were cool, but otherwise, the brand faded in my consumer conscious faster than my love for Atomic Kitten.
The world cottoned on that having a mission and a purpose for a brand is a fabulous way to market yourself, and other big-name cosmetic companies began drawing inspiration from The Body Shop’s model. Simply, everyone else innovated – and The Body Shop rested on its laurels. No longer was ethical marketing and branding a golden ticket to success.
The brand attracted outrage in 2006 when founder Anita sold to the L’Oreal group, a move many of The Body Shop’s core fans dubbed a “sellout” due to the differing nature of ethical priorities, and since has struggled to reclaim its position as the hero of the cosmetics world. Slowly, TBS slipped into irrelevance, never playing on its nostalgia credibility or re-angling products to a younger audience.
Now, as it faces huge difficulties overseas, today it announced all 16 stores in New Zealand will close after being placed into voluntary administration in January, with the loss of 70 jobs.
It’s a sad demise to a once iconic brand. Here’s to you, The Body Shop – thanks for the sweet, sticky, sensational memories.
