The Body Shop has unveiled a new store concept on London’s Oxford Street that taps into the retailer’s mission-led heritage with a keen focus on sustainability.

A slogan is emblazoned on the window of The Body Shop’s refurbished Oxford Street store: ‘Speaking Out Since ’76’. It’s the year that the ethical beauty retailer’s founder, Anita Roddick, opened the first Body Shop in Brighton and made a name for the business with her unapologetic stance on animal rights and environmental issues.

Although The Body Shop has kept the issues on which Roddick founded The Body Shop intact – in particular her insistence on never testing on animals – in reality, the retailer’s voice has been less of a shout than a whisper in recent years.

This was particularly the case during its tenure under global cosmetics giant L’Oréal, which owned The Body Shop from 2006 until 2017.

However, under new owner Natura, the retailer is raring to reawaken its activist heritage, and its refurbished Oxford Street store is a bold statement of intent.

Critical change

All fixtures in the retailer’s 1,100 sq ft new-look store have been “upcycled, recycled or reclaimed”, according to UK boss Linda Campbell – from the zinc cladding outside the store previously used as roofing, to storage boxes that were once used in a car-manufacturing plant, right down to the till, which was reclaimed from landfill in Wales.

The retailer has also installed a refill station for shower gels – the first that has appeared in one of The Body Shop’s branches for more than 20 years. Shoppers can buy shower gel in an aluminium bottle for £6, and refills using that bottle will cost £4, as opposed to £5 if buying a shower gel in a plastic bottle.

“If there is one element of the store that we have aspiration to roll out everywhere, it would definitely be the refill station,” says Campbell, adding that features such as these are not just nice-to-haves for businesses like The Body Shop, but critical to their survival.

“Young people are so much more informed now – if you are not seen as a business that will take a stand and do something about issues they care about, your customers won’t come back.

“Now more than ever we want to have The Body Shop voice back out there”

Linda Campbell, The Body Shop

“Now more than ever we want to have The Body Shop voice back out there, raising issues that our customers care about and our staff care about.”

To this end, The Body Shop has introduced an Activist Corner in its new-look store where shoppers can take selfies making sustainability pledges, and write down issues that they want The Body Shop to tackle. This will be monitored by the branch’s store manager and shared internally.

The retailer will also take donations for Bloody Good Period in this area of the store, having partnered with the period-poverty charity following a suggestion from one of the store managers.

The Body Shop’s in-store range is centred around its hero products and ingredients, such as tea tree oil, hemp, charcoal and shea butter, with a hunk of the latter having been transported from Ghana by rail and boat, and planted on an island in the middle of the store for shoppers to try.

Campbell explains that the shea butter was transported in this way rather than by air freight to keep the carbon footprint down.

The range chosen for the store follows a review of The Body Shop’s SKU count last year, which resulted in the number of products it stocked reducing by 20%.

Future rollout

Campbell says that The Body Shop will roll out the new store concept in eight major cities across its different territories next year, and will start introducing refill stations at its 242-strong UK and Northern Ireland store estate next autumn.

In the meantime, Campbell is confident that The Body Shop reigniting its activist roots has resonated with shoppers.

“Our UK store sales are up 4% in like-for-like terms, as a result of our staff training and through the service offered in our stores – all regions are in positive like-for-like growth,” she says.

“We are feeling positive about ourselves, so while it is great to have a new shop fit, we are performing really well even outside of central London.”