‘Anita Roddick gave me the best education in sustainable design’
18th March 2025
Author EditorPosted on Categories Business
By Chloe Bullock, Founder of Materialise Interiors.
When I was six-years-old, a mile away from us, entrepreneur and activist Anita Roddick was busy setting up the first The Body Shop in the middle of Brighton’s Kensington Gardens. It was 1976.
My family were early adopters of this shop and its unusual natural products. Her creations were decanted into different sized refillable containers – sometimes even medical urine sample bottles – complete with hand-written labels that blurred over time in the bathroom. We loved her home-made products using unusual and unexpected ingredients. The shop looked and smelled exciting – like nowhere else I’d seen, with fence panel walls, dried flowers and rolls of stickers by the till which I would covet.
Little did I know this shop and its innovative owner was going to impact my life so much – as well as changing the skin & hair care industry and its practices so radically across the world!
“If you think you’re too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito in the room.” A quote from the Dalai Lama, often re-quoted by Anita Roddick.
I literally grew up with Anita’s values and campaigns as she used the window area to draw attention to global issues around people, planet and animals – from Greenpeace to Amnesty International to banning animal testing.
When I returned home to Brighton after I’d graduated in design, it was the early nineties recession and I was really struggling to find work. In desperation I wrote a letter to Anita, whose company had boomed and had been floated on the stock exchange. Her international headquarters, complete with a pagoda-shaped office building and factory, was just along the coast in Littlehampton. Amazingly, this handwritten letter led to work experience and then 10 years as a retail designer for the company.
This involved travelling the world and even living in Melbourne. Working within those teams turned out to be the best education in sustainable design and responsible business that I could have received. The experience has completely shaped my work since.
This November I will have been running my interior design company, Materialise Interiors, for two decades. I’ve been so fortunate to work for hundreds of clients on their businesses and homes across Sussex, in London and even in Oslo.
Everything I learned during my time at The Body Shop has carried through into my company – both how I operate as a business and how I design for my clients. My business became a certified B Corp two years ago and, last year, the Royal Institute of British Architects published my book ‘Sustainable Interior Design’.
Over this time running my own business, I’ve seen that my seemingly glamorous industry has become part of the marketing machine of consumption. Along the way, the industry has become disconnected from nature, only seeing it as resources and not seeing the negative impact that the materials and processes we use have on wildlife – our life-supporting biodiversity. It’s polluting our air, land and water….and that pollution then finds its way into our bodies. We are disconnected from craft – our supply chains can exploit people, and even children. Animals are seen as resources for the industry and are used to test the toxic chemicals used by the industry on. So sadly not so glamorous after all.
The good news is – it doesn’t have to be this way and it’s completely possible to work in a conscious way whilst delivering beautiful interiors for clients. So, this International Women’s Day, I wanted to celebrate some of the inspiring women in my book who are breaking the way of doing things.They are rethinking interior design – shifting to a version that lives in harmony with our precious mother nature and does not compromise the needs of future generations in the process.
Read Chloe’s book Sustainable Interior Design, by RIBA Books.
Chloe offers interior design services for business and homes – as well as helping fellow designers and architects on their own sustainability journey.