The Body Shop Approach to Sustainability Reporting

The Body Shop is re-committing to a programme of sustainability reporting that will help us communicate directly with our stakeholders and address issues of particular interest to them in the context of our business, our industry, the environment and the global community in which we operate. Recent years have seen challenging times for The Body Shop. In response to under-performance, we have needed to make significant changes to our business. Such changes have hampered our ability to publish consistent and meaningful reports on our social and environmental performance. We have however continued to focus on ensuring that our values inform the way we do business, maintaining standards around our social and environmental performance, and continuing a dialogue with our key stakeholders to manage expectations and engage them in the evolving business aims and approach. We believe the future lies in more personal and targeted communications that respond to the current interests and information needs of our stakeholders. Based on feedback from our previous Values Reports, our reporting approach is evolving from being information-driven to performance-led. By this, we mean that we are moving away from a 'broad-brush' approach providing detailed information across an array of issues. Instead, we want to present an account of the key impacts, risks and issues that are of relevance and priority to our business, our sector and our stakeholders today. We are publishing individual stakeholder accounts relating to our six key stakeholder groups: Customers, Employees, Shareholders, Franchisees, Suppliers and the Environment. We have selected these groups because they each have a continuous relationship with the business. The individual stakeholder accounts have been designed to help our stakeholders understand our business strategy and management approach within the context of their own relationship to the Company. They also seek to present a holistic picture of the business by observing the Company's approach to specific issues from a range of stakeholder perspectives. The accounts therefore offer a choice of lenses with which to view and understand our business - from individual stakeholder perspectives and from the perspective of a particular issue. Our individual stakeholder accounts are published via our website and are subject to annual updates to ensure that our stakeholders are able to access the most up-to-date information on our Company. We believe that disclosure is an important tool in helping our stakeholders to feel engaged in our business aims and approach. As importantly, we regard the discipline of preparing accounts and reviewing our performance in an objective way as a crucial management tool for developing our own understanding of our current approach. It will help us to achieve alignment and consistency across our global business, and assess improvements that can realistically be committed to within the confines of our commercial business.