Body Shop chairman sees green light for recovery after year of bid talk and shake-ups

Business Profile: Adrian Bellamy believes the Roddicks' empire can achieve a natural balance between creative vision and retail disciplines

Adrian Bellamy is prowling around the "mock shop" at Body Shop's London headquarters just behind London Bridge station. The shelves are stacked with new products such as Blueberry Body Butter, one of its latest launches. The walls are festooned with the environmentally friendly retailer's trademark slogans: "Against animal testing. Activate self esteem. Defend human rights. Protect our planet." The air is pungent with the wafting fragrance of papaya mixed with musk.

"We like to have this here so our people can try out new things and see how they look," Mr Bellamy explains. "Otherwise you can become remote from the business."

His accent is Zimbabwean, though he was born in Britain and has spent much of his recent working life in the United States.

Indeed, the 61-year-old Body Shop chairman is very much the international businessman. As well as his executive role at Body Shop he is on the boards of The Gap, Gucci, US wine maker Robert Mondavi and the kitchen supplies retailer Williams-Sonoma. Tomorrow he adds another role to his bulging portfolio when he becomes chairman of Reckitt Benckiser, the maker of household products such as Vanish and Mr Sheen.

Even his outside interests reflect his cosmopolitan tastes. He has homes in London's Belgravia and Carmel, south of San Franscisco, the latter with a dormitory to provide accommodation for his four children and five grandchildren. He collects Californian landscape paintings and English furniture from the Regency period. "My wife has said 'enough'. We just don't have room for any more."

The scope of his portfolio is even more remarkable given that he suffers from a degenerative disorder of the eyes which can make reading difficult. "The periphery is fine but the centre is fuzzy," he explains.

The core of his work is Body Shop, which he is trying to wrench back on course after a period of damaging drift. Body Shop might be one of Britain's best known high-street names but the past two years have seen it beset by takeover talk and boardroom shake-ups. One minute a Mexican group called Omnilife was going to mount a bid, then the founders, Anita and Gordon Roddick, were going to take it private.

Finally, all this background noise has faded. The Roddicks have stepped back to become non-executive directors, with Anita contracted to spend 80 days a year as a consultant. Mr Bellamy moved up to become chairman a year ago, after Body Shop had bought out his 51 per cent stake in its US business. Together with chief executive Peter Saunders, he has gradually started rebuilding a business that had lost its way.

"We had a year of crisis," Mr Bellamy admits. "Everybody was fighting with everyone else. Half the world was trying to buy us, or so the press was saying. The business lost its way because the ideas weren't coming to fruition. The voltage might have been 220 in terms of a concept but it was down to 10 by the time we got it done."

He gives an example. "With the Body Butters we've gone from three to twelve flavours. We had the creative people like Anita who could dream that up but this is a complex business with multi-language labelling for 50 countries and different sizes and weights. It's not rocket science but things were always late. Nobody thought of calling the factory and saying, 'You're going to be getting a big new order.' We had the art of management but not the science."

He says this is no criticism of the Roddicks, whose skills lie in vision and creation rather than number-crunching. "Companies are created by entrepreneurs, dreamers and thinkers. They don't let process get in the way. That was Anita's genius and I mean that. If you say to her, 'There are 67 processes to get this done,' she'd say, 'Do I really have to think about that?'"

Mr Bellamy says the Roddicks' revised role within the company they founded in 1976 is working well. "She has a series of meetings which she absolutely sticks to. The idea of these is creative input. I think she's more effective in the company today than at any time since I joined in 1997."

Little by little, Body Shop is starting to find its feet once more. Full-year figures last week showed a tiny increase in profits to £26.9m on modestly increased sales of £697m. New store openings have been put on hold as the company seeks to improve retail disciplines. Mr Bellamy appears relaxed in his dress-down outfit of open-necked shirt and brown boots. He also smiles a lot and shows confidence that things are on the up. "I'm excited about what we've done but we haven't thrown the baby out with the bath water," he says. "The Body Shop DNA is still there."

Once supply chain and distribution have been improved Mr Bellamy hopes to go on the front foot once more. He is going to target a broader age range of customers and attempt to increase the average transaction from its current £10 (it is $23 in the United States). Another improvement later this year will be a store refurbishment programme, which will be quite an undertaking across almost 2,000 stores in 50 countries.

"In the States we have a mock-up of a year-2004 store. It will have better lighting and glass shelves. And the green will get toned down. It's served its purpose."

Mr Bellamy was born in Derbyshire but his earliest memories as a child are of living in London's Dolphin Square, where he showed his entrepreneurial streak early on. "I had a tricycle and used to charge a penny a ride," he recalls.

The family moved to what was then called Rhodesia and it was in Southern Africa that Mr Bellamy started his career. He was chief executive of Edgars Stores group before moving to the US to run the DFS duty-free business prior to its acquisition by LVMH.

He becomes a little emotional when discussing the current state of Zimbabwe. "It was like a county of England in the sun," he says wistfully. "It was a hell of a place to grow up. I don't go back, sadly. I shed a tear every week for what's happened in that country. I feel guilty that I am not doing more."

He adds: "I think Africa should be blamed on us, and by that I mean the colonial British. We did a fantastic job building an economy and infrastructure but we didn't have an exit plan."

His international perspective gives him an interesting take on UK retailing. "The UK has some great companies in each category, such as Tesco in supermarkets, Next in fashion and Burberry at the luxury end. But I'm not impressed with store operations here. I think customer service is below average, to the extent that you get any at all."

As for his new role at Reckitt Benckiser, he denies that he should have waited until Body Shop's recovery was further advanced before taking on such a role. "My contract here is for 100 days a year, though I probably put in more than twice that. Reckitt is a non-executive role with one or two days a week."

If he can return Body Shop to anything like past glories it would provide a rose-tinted finish to a varied career.

ADRIAN BELLAMY: GLOBAL PLAYER

Title: Chief executive, Body Shop International

Age: 61

Education: Bachelor of commerce and MBA degree from the University of South Africa

Career history: Started with Edgars Stores in South Africa, becoming chief executive from 1977-83. Chairman of DFS (Duty-Free Stores) in the US in 1983-95. Joined Body Shop board in 1997 and set up a US joint venture with the company a year later. Chairman since February 2002

Interests: Family (married with four children). "Lousy" golf, collecting English furniture and Californian landscape paintings

Pay: £100,000 a year as Body Shop chairman, plus $1m-a-year consultancy agreement which runs out in August. Expected pay of around £140,000 as chairman of Reckitt Benckiser