Anita Roddick

Anita Perilli was born in Littlehampton on the Sussex coast to Italian immigrant parents who ran a café. She trained as a teacher, travelled widely and worked for the United Nations in Geneva before settling down with Gordon Roddick, running a small hotel and restaurant.

In 1976, with Gordon away on a two-year horseback trek across the Americas and two young daughters to feed, she borrowed £4,000 from a bank and opened a shop in Brighton selling 15 simple skincare products in five sizes. The green paint was chosen to hide damp patches on the walls. Customers were asked to bring bottles back for refilling, not because it was good for the planet but because she could not afford enough bottles. The two funeral directors next door objected to a business called "The Body Shop".

The formula worked. A second shop opened within months, then franchises across Britain and abroad. By the time the company floated on the London stock market in 1984 it had over 100 shops, and the share price rose so fast that the City nicknamed it "the shares that defy gravity".

What set her apart was using the shops as campaign posters. Windows carried messages about whaling, animal testing, rainforest destruction and political prisoners, and staff were paid to volunteer for community projects. She was, at various times, criticised for being naive, hypocritical, or simply inconvenient to the industry. She was made a Dame in 2003, and in 2006 the company was sold to L'Oréal for £652 million, a decision she defended as a way to change the buyer from the inside. She died of a brain haemorrhage in 2007 at 64, having announced that she would leave her fortune to charity.