Wealth & Money Quote by Anita Roddick

The line lands like a confession from inside the machine: IPO money didn’t just change The Body Shop’s balance sheet, it rewired the moral scoreboard. Roddick frames “going public” as a minute-by-minute conversion experience, a sharp before-and-after that makes the shift feel instant and irreversible. One day legitimacy is counted in people hired; the next it’s counted in market cap. That contrast isn’t nostalgic sentimentality. It’s an accusation about what capitalism chooses to see.

Her phrasing is bluntly transactional: “how our wealth was created” acknowledges the stock market’s power without romanticizing it. The subtext is that the mechanism that enabled scale also smuggled in a new set of demands - quarterly expectations, analyst narratives, shareholder primacy - that don’t merely compete with social goals but actively displace them. “No longer” does heavy lifting: employment becomes a quaint metric, a civic-minded relic, once the company’s story is priced.

Context matters: Roddick built her brand on ethics, activism, and a public-facing critique of corporate orthodoxy. By the late 1980s and 1990s, “social enterprise” was still fighting for oxygen in a culture increasingly mesmerized by financialization. Her point isn’t that profit is corrupting by nature; it’s that public markets reward a particular kind of virtue - growth, valuation, optics - and punish the slower, messier work of building institutions that employ, train, and stabilize communities.

It works because it’s not a manifesto. It’s a lament with receipts: a founder describing how the yardstick changed, and how quickly the room agreed to pretend it hadn’t.