Anita Roddick - Redefining Business

Anita With its strong environmental flare and popular demand of the products, Roddick had already opened a second shop before her husband’s return of being gone 10 months. Customers wanted to sell the products, and in 1984 the company went public and spread franchises all over England. Today The Body Shop has over 1,980 stores and more than 77 million customers in 50 different markets serving customers in over 25 different languages. Its success put Roddick's net worth at more than $200 million. In 2006, the company became an independently managed subsidiary of the L'Oréal Group

story of Body Shop: While her husband was away, Roddick gave birth to The Body Shop. 0ut of desperation, she created cosmetics out of every ingredient that she stored in her garage. She opened her first shop in Brighton, England, with only fifteen products and was able to finance the store using her hotel as collateral. Her products contained ingredients that women used in cleansing rituals that she had witnessed in her travels. She describes a woman’s body as a canvas to paint stories on.

Coco Chanel

Coco Chanel wasn't just ahead of her time. She was ahead of herself. If one looks at the work of contemporary fashion designers as different from one another as Tom Ford, Helmut Lang, Miuccia Prada, Jil Sander and Donatella Versace, one sees that many of their strategies echo what Chanel once did. The way, 75 years ago, she mixed up the vocabulary of male and female clothes and created fashion that offered the wearer a feeling of hidden luxury rather than ostentation are just two examples of how her taste and sense of style overlap with today's fashion

Sarah Breedlove McWilliams

Sarah Breedlove McWilliams Walker, better known as Madame CJ Walker or Madame Walker, together with Marjorie Joyner revolutionized the hair care and cosmetics industry for African American women early in the 20th century.

Early Years

Madame CJ Walker was born in 1867 in poverty-stricken rural Louisiana. The daughter of former slaves, she was orphaned at the age of seven. Walker and her older sister survived by working in the cotton fields of Delta and Vicksburg, Mississippi. She married at age fourteen and her only daughter was born in 1885. After her husband's death two years later, she traveled to St. Louis to join her four brothers who had established themselves as barbers. Working as a laundrywoman, she managed to save enough money to educate her daughter, and became involved in activities with the National Association of Colored Women.

Inspired by Need

During the 1890s, Sarah began to suffer from a scalp ailment that caused her to lose some of her hair. Embarrassed by her appearance, she experimented with a variety of home-made remedies and products made by another black woman entrepreneur, Annie Malone. In 1905, Sarah became a sales agent for Malone and moved to Denver, where she married Charles Joseph Walker.

Madam Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower

Changing her name to Madame CJ Walker, Sarah founded her own business and began selling her own product called Madam Walker's Wonderful Hair Grower, a scalp conditioning and healing formula. To promote her products, she embarked on an exhausting sales drive throughout the South and Southeast selling her products door to door, giving demonstrations, and working on sales and marketing strategies. In 1908, she opened a college in Pittsburgh to train her "hair culturists."

The Walker System

Eventually, her products formed the basis of a thriving national corporation employing at one point over 3,000 people. Her Walker System, which included a broad offering of cosmetics, licensed Walker Agents, and Walker Schools offered meaningful employment and personal growth to thousands of Black women. Madame Walker’s aggressive marketing strategy combined with relentless ambition led her to be labeled as the first known African-American woman to become a self-made millionaire.

Having amassed a fortune in fifteen years, this pioneering businesswoman died at the age of 52. Her prescription for success was perseverance, hard work, faith in herself and in God, "honest business dealings" and of course, quality products. "There is no royal flower-strewn path to success," she once observed. "And if there is, I have not found it - for if I have accomplished anything in life it is because I have been willing to work hard."

Improved Permanent Wave Machine

An employee of Madame CJ Walker’s empire, Marjorie Joyner invented an improved permanent wave machine. This device patented in 1928, curled or "permed" women’s hair for a relatively lengthy period of time. The wave machine was popular among women white and black allowing for longer-lasting wavy hair styles. Joyner went on to become a prominent figure in Madame CJ Walker’s industry, though she never profited directly from her invention, the assigned intellectual property of the Walker Company.

Oprah

n a recent poll, we asked readers, "Which entrepreneur do you admire most?" The winner, hands down, was Oprah Winfrey, with nearly double the votes of Bill Gates and four times Richard Branson. In a career filled with firsts and superlatives, Oprah has managed to amass a sizable fortune, become one of the most powerful people in the entertainment industry, and yet maintain a sense of humility and compassion we all should strive to achieve.

Broadcasting Pioneer: Born in a small town in Mississippi in 1954 and raised in Nashville, Tennessee, Oprah began her career in broadcasting at age 17 at radio station WVOL. By 19, she was anchoring the news at WTFV-TV, both the the first African-American woman and the youngest person ever to do so. In 1976 she moved to Baltimore, where she co-anchored WJZ-TV's Six O'Clock News. She soon made the switch to doing talk shows, hosting the local People Are Talking.

The Oprah Winfrey Show: In 1984, Oprah relocated to Chicago to host AM Chicago. Within just one month, it had surpassed Donahue as the #1 local talk show, and within a year it was renamed The Oprah Winfrey Show. A year later, it entered national syndication and became the highest-rated talk show in TV history. It has remained the number one talk show for 18 seasons, has won dozens of Emmys, and is seen by an estimated 30 million viewers a week in the United States and is broadcast internationally in 111 countries.

Entertainment Entrepreneur: Not content to work for somoeone else, in 1988, Oprah founded her own production facility, Harpo Studios (in case you hadn't noticed, that's "Oprah" spelled backwards, not a Marx Brothers reference). Since then, it has grown into Harpo, Inc., which employs around 250 full-time people in television and film production, magazine publishing, and online media. She is also co-founder of Oxygen Media, which operates the Oxygen Network, a cable network for women reaching more than 54 million viewers.

Jenna Jameson's

I was taking a look at the Forbes Celebrity 100, a list of the 100 wealthiest people in sports and entertainment, and their story about Jenna Jameson caught my eye. In case you don't know her name (or at least won't admit to it), Jameson is the world's most famous pornstar. While she has done only about 50 movies (not really very many by porn industry standards), she has managed to successfully cross over from her hardcore background into mainstream media. She has appeared over 30 times on Howard Stern's radio and TV show, has made numerous guest appearances on a variety of E! TV shows, has just completed a pilot for a new reality series, and her autobiographical How to Make Love Like a Porn Star spent six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Jameson's holding company, ClubJenna, expects revenues of $30 million this year, at nearly 50% profitability! They plan to expand into Jenna-branded strip clubs, cosmetics, and an apparel line, as well as some racier products you might expect. You can even download a "moan tone" for your mobile phone. 40% of the company's revenue comes from web site membership fees and site management fees for other porn stars' Web sites, which they run for 16 other actors, including Tera Patrick and Briana Banks.

Now here's the punch line...