Wealth & Money Quote by Anita Roddick

Roddick isn’t reminiscing about Quakers because she’s sentimental about bonnets and meeting houses. She’s using them as a moral yardstick, a deliberately plain example that makes modern corporate self-mythology look evasive. Quaker merchants became shorthand in British business history for a counterintuitive idea: that restraint, transparency, and decent labor practices weren’t soft virtues, they were competitive advantages. By invoking them, she’s arguing that “ethics” doesn’t need a PR department. It needs a payroll.

The line “still looking” carries the sting. It implies she’s searched through boardrooms and glossy CSR reports and mostly found substitutes: branding that borrows the language of conscience without paying its costs. Her ellipses do work here, too, creating a pause that feels like disbelief - as if the obvious model for humane capitalism is right there in the historical record, yet absent from the present tense.

Context matters: as founder of The Body Shop, Roddick built a retail empire by selling products alongside a worldview - against animal testing, for fairer sourcing, for activism as part of commerce. She knew the power and danger of moral marketing because she helped invent its modern form. So this isn’t an outsider scolding capitalism; it’s an insider warning that the “business creed” has been swapped for something thinner: shareholder-first logic, extractive supply chains, and performative virtue.

The subtext is a challenge to today’s leaders: stop asking consumers to “trust the brand” and start rebuilding the conditions that make trust rational.