A Body Shop store in London. Photograph: Ben Stanstall/AFP
The Body Shop, with its distinctive green façade, started as a small shop in one of those small lanes in Brighton that thronged with shoppers on a Saturday afternoon.
Dame Anita Roddick and her husband started their enterprise in 1976, apparently to help support their two daughters.
The Body Shop not only became a pioneer of ethical consumption - it promotes natural products and opposes animal testing - but also provided a platform for Dame Anita's various causes, from the Ogoni people in Nigeria to the make poverty history campaign. Not many commercial companies carry a link to the declaration of human rights on their websites.
Wearing its sleeve on its heart, as it were, the company became one of the UK's most well-liked companies; in 1999 the Body Shop brand was voted the second most-trusted brand in the UK by the Consumers Association.
In agreeing to a £652.3m offer from L'oréal, Dame Anita said: "For both Gordon and I, this is without doubt the best 30th anniversary gift The Body Shop could have received."
Dame Anita and her husband will make £130m from the sale of their venture, a deserved reward for the hard graft of the past three decades, with their ups and downs.
The Body Shop went through a particularly tough time when it stumbled in the tough US market, as so many UK companies have done. More recently, the company has had to withstand the challenge from the omnivorous supermarkets.
Still, the two companies are very different. L'Oréal, with its Because I'm Worth It slogan, is, in many ways, the antithesis of The Body Shop, which shuns the glamourous image of the French giant.
When Dame Anita says L'Oré displays "visionary leadership in wanting to be an authentic advocate and supporter of our values", a degree of scepticism may be in order.
Some of The Body Shop's true believers might desert the company now that it has become part of a giant multinational. But the trend is for multinationals to buy niche players such as Body Shops to reach new customers. McDonalds buys Pret a Manger, Cadbury Schweppes takes over the Green & Black's organic chocolate business and Unilever gobbles up Ben & Jerry's ice cream company.
The trick for the mother ship companies is to allow their takeover targets to exercise enough autonomy to retain their identity. L'Oréal says it respects The Body Shop's identity and values. Body Shop employees and loyalists will be watching like hawks to see if L'Oréal puts those sentiments into practice.
