The Body Shop has faced lots of change in the last three years, shuttering hundreds of stores and changing ownership several times. The UK company was acquired out of administration in September 2024 by a consortium led by British cosmetics tycoon Mike Jatania, under UK private equity firm Auréa Group. The Body Shop had sunk into administration in February 2024, just three months after German private equity firm Aurelius acquired the business from Brazilian beauty group Natura & Co.
Now, just over 1.5 years on from Auréa’s takeover and in its 50th anniversary year, The Body Shop is working to reset. Later this year, the company will unveil its new sustainability strategy, outlining key actions it wants to take to stay sustainable in the coming decades.
’Focused’ sustainability goals
“The business has undergone many changes but one thing has remained consistent: sustainability,” said Breanna Lujan, head of sustainability and community fair trade at The Body Shop. “Sustainability has been woven into the DNA of The Body Shop since day one,” Lujan told attendees during a talk at in-cosmetics Global in Paris, last month.
The sustainability strategy, she said, will “refresh and fine-tune” sustainable business actions to address today’s “most pressing issues”, including climate change and plastic pollution, whilst staying true to the company’s 50-year legacy of being a force for good, for both people and planet.
Speaking to Premium Beauty News, Lujan said: “We have been taking a really hard look on where we’ve been as a company and where we want to go. 2026 is the year we’ve put things down on paper in a really strategic, focused way.” The roadmap will outline goals for the next decade; the “nearish-term milestones”, she said, but also detail longer-term goals right through to 2050.
Lujan told attendees The Body Shop’s new sustainability strategy centres around three pillars: people and communities; nature and biodiversity; and climate and circularity. The company will remain committed to vegan formulas, for example, and continue to defend nature through ecodesign, as well as transform packaging, formulas and transport to hit net zero emissions in line with the United Nations’ Paris Agreement. Any many of these actions, she said, will be achieved under The Body Shop’s Community Fair Trade programme, initially launched in 1987.
Partnership power
Today, she said the Community Fair Trade programme works with around 15 entrepreneurial organisations worldwide to tackle a range of environmental challenges whilst improving incomes, livelihoods and local community welfare.
In Ghana, Africa, for example, it partners with the Tungeiya Women’s Association, working with around 650 female shea butter suppliers to providing these women, families and communities long-term and consistent business, she said. In Italy, the programme works with farmer cooperative Nuova Cilento to source all of The Body Shop’s olive oil, valorising organic and regenerative farming in the region. And in India and the Philippines, the programme works with B-Corp certified environmental organisation Plastics for Change to source fair trade recycled plastics, helping break the poverty cycle and accelerate the development of recycling infrastructure, she said.
Asked if The Body Shop also has plans to partner with existing global initiatives, taking efforts beyond its own programmes, Lujan said the retailer is “definitely open” to figuring out what partnerships, consortiums and networks it could be a part of.
“You can only build momentum as a collective, so it’s really about thinking through what strategic partnerships would make sense and when. Right now, we’re building our sustainability roadmap, so once we get clear about what we want to do, then it will make sense to work out who is working on that,” she said. “That’s not to say we’re not having those conversations now,” she added.
Beyond this, Lujan said The Body Shop is also planning to bring back some past initiatives that were discontinued, including its refill programme.
