Dame Anita Roddick, at the peak of The Body Shop’s powers, employed a team of scientists and formulators to work purely on discovering exciting new ingredients in the Amazon rainforest.

Dame Anita Roddick - visionary, entrepreneur, retail revolutionary - was a woman I greatly admired. Some 20 years ago now, at the peak of The Body Shop’s powers, she employed a team of scientists and formulators to work purely on discovering exciting new ingredients in the Amazon rainforest.

In the first 10 years of this century the WWF reported that more than 1,200 new species of plants and animals were discovered, most of which came from the rainforests of Brazil.

Today, everyone is talking about how the “miracle material” graphene will transform our lives and our businesses. In between, and closer to home for us retailers, we’ve had the technological revolution of the internet. Drawn on a graph, the impact of these changes would look like big steps. But if you were to map our collective reaction to these changes as businesses, the line would be shallow, slower and frankly a little flaccid. Except perhaps for the likes of Apple, Amazon and Asos.

So while the revolution is something that others start and happens around us, we all too often settle for evolution and run our businesses based largely on how we’ve always done it.

But that changed for us somewhat when we undertook a project that you can see on Channel 4 via catch-up, a programme called Sex Toy Stories.

Rather than develop a modified version of a previously successful product design and try it out on our panel of experienced testers, we challenged ourselves to work with a new group of women from a variety of walks of life, including one who had never had an orgasm - and some medical professionals too - to create a brand new range of products from the bottom up.

It was a real eye-opener. It’s only when you start with a blank sheet of paper or seek the outliers among your potential customers - those metaphorically in the depths of the retail rainforest - that the step changes in your business happen.

You can see parallels in one of the UK’s most successful brands: Britain’s Got Talent. Its premise is to seek out new entertainers, especially if they’re something different. If the show followed a traditional path, we would never have enjoyed the extraordinary combination of a 14-year-old comedian with cerebral palsy and a troupe of Hungarian shadow dancers finishing as runner-up and winner.

We wouldn’t have created such an innovative new range of products if we hadn’t consulted such a diverse group of women or ripped apart our usual product development process.

If there aren’t lessons here for all of us in retail there are certainly questions to be asked. For example, if you work in travel retail, how would you plot the user journey or describe the experience of travelling overseas on holiday to someone who has never had a passport? Or perhaps most importantly, how would you design a store for someone who’s only ever shopped online?