The Body Shop, the now Natura-owned British cosmetics retailer, is in many ways a product of the city in which it was founded – Brighton, on the south coast of England. Environmentally-conscious, vocal about what it believes and wildly successful, the company went from strength to strength in the years after its founding in the 1970s, to a stock market listing in the 1980s, acquisition by French cosmetics titan L’Oréal in the 2000s, before passing to the Brazilian group Natura in 2017. Two years later it was formally certified as a B-Corp.
Yet the company has not sailed through untroubled...