Sunday, April 02, 2006

Will Body Shop still "love your body"?

I have been using Body Shop products since a few years ago. It all started with a bottle of lime flavoured Juice-IT shower gel. At HKD $88 / 250ml it was rather expensive, but I still bought and enjoyed it because of the lovely smell. Then came different shower gels, various creams and lotions for my face, hands and body, lip balm and shampoo. I have even bought hair styling products and two umbrellas from them. I am more loyal than many girls.

There used to be 2 reasons for my loyalty, other than their products' qualities. First, it is a british company. Second, they have 5 core values, 2 of which are printed in most of their products sold locally: they are against animal testing and support community trade. The local body shop branches even supported the Pink Revolution against breast cancer. I am aware that these may just be marketing plots, but, environmentally friendly or not, I still need to take showers, so I had to choose this "lesser of two evils".

body shop old logo body shop new logoThen on this April Fools' day something changed. I noticed that they have a new company logo.The old logo was something like a olive crown with 3 leaves on each side and small "THE BODY SHOP" text between the leaves. The new logo is dull and boring. The crown has been symbolized. The company name has a different font and becomes larger. Curious with such changes I went to their web site, and there I found this astonishing news that L'Oréal is buying the company for £652m (approx. HKD $8870m).

The customer statement assured us that "[t]he five values of The Body Shop will continue to be applied throughout the organisation", but will it really happen? Sharing its mother company's R&D, sooner or later those evil deeds will corrode the core values at the Body Shop.

Nestlé owns 26.4% of L’Oréal. We have to remember that Nestlé still has a double standard in GE food policies and is partly responsible for the plummeting coffee bean prices.

3 comments:

At 02 April, 2006 14:58 , admin said...

Actually the new logo is more classic and British than the old one -- its sans serif logotype reminds me of London tube / early modernity!

At 04 April, 2006 09:35 , kalends said...

你知道body shop的community trade是什麼嗎?查證一下吧。

At 04 April, 2006 16:47 , hokuto said...

maki: Could I also say traditional (neutral), and old (negative)?

kalends: Lesser of two evils... lesser of two evils... It is impossible to verify if they had an evil intention to rip off customers and small farmers together, or if they just did something the wrong way. They may recycle the empty bottles, or they may just throw them away. We never know.

Who is holier? The person who did something good while thinking about evil deeds, or the person who did good things badly?