Roddick: I blame the consultants

BODY Shop founder Anita Roddick blames the group's woes on management consultants. She said they gave her the wrong advice on how to steer it out of trouble when sales began to slide. They urged the firm to copy what other retailers were doing rather than reinvent itself.

'I should have stopped that,' Roddick told the Retail Week conference in London. 'I should have told them that if that was the way the market was going, we should give serious thought to going in the opposite direction.'

The shares, up 1p to 92p, have halved in five years. Roddick, who stepped down from co-chairman to part-time director last month, said she learned a great deal in 26 years at the helm. 'I learned not to employ management consultants - or certainly not the ones we employed,' she said, declining to reveal names. She added: 'I should not have hurried to the stock market. Being a public company constrains you from being as experimental as you need to be. Or as ethical.'