By Anthony Reuben Business reporter, BBC News

Dame Anita was famous for her original approach to products

Shopping on Britain's High Streets is a very different experience now than it was when Dame Anita Roddick opened her first branch of the Body Shop near Brighton in 1976.

It was not just that she used ingredients that had either been found on her travels or had not been widely used in British cosmetics since World War II.

The very idea of a commercially run business being set up to benefit anyone other than shareholders was a new one.

"What she wanted to do was tear up the old rule book that really what you did was you just made a product, you gave a service, and the only people who benefited were the investors," said John Bird who created the Big Issue.

Her business was to be just as much about communicating ideas and supporting political and ethical campaigns as racking up sales.

In 2004, Dame Anita wrote on the Body Shop's website: "28 years on The Body Shop is a multi-local business with over 1,980 stores serving over 77 million customers in 50 different markets in 25 different languages and across 12 time zones. And I haven't a clue how we got here!"

Championing causes

She went on to amass a huge personal fortune from the growth and eventual sale of the chain.

Her lasting legacy will really be ... how she transformed attitudes in the business community John Sauven, Greenpeace PM leads Dame Anita tributes Obituary: Body Shop founder Anita Roddick remembered

However she got to that point, it was for her championing of ethical business causes and her unconventional management style, which put her at odds with many in the business world, that she will be best remembered.

"The things that are now mainstream with the big corporates about the environment and human rights, Anita was doing those things in the 70s," said Lynne Franks, the entrepreneur behind Sustainable Enterprise and Economic Dynamics. "She was the first - she was the pioneer."

"And not just in this country. In the States she was one of the first businesses - alongside great friends of hers like Ben and Jerry ice cream - who were saying 'we can actually have a business that makes a difference in society'," she added.

Dame Anita saw the shops and the company as a way of achieving her goal of social and environmental change.

In store she launched campaigns and mobilised customers on a number of issues including rejecting animal testing on cosmetics, calling for an end to child labour and exploitation in the Third World, supporting Fair Trade, Greenpeace, and human rights

"Her lasting legacy will really be not just as a human rights activist and environmental activist but really how she transformed attitudes in the business community," said John Sauven, executive director of Greenpeace.

'Vigilante consumers'

"She was so ahead of her time when it came to issues of how business could be done in different ways, not just profit motivated but taking into account environmental issues," he added.

She characterised customers as: "Vigilante consumers. People who are bored to tears with retailing and all its pretence.

The Body Shop is credited with changing the retail landscape

"They are very aware and very powerful," she said.

She was relentless in her drive to make consumers realise their power in their pockets, and make financial decisions - in the form of boycotts - in order to shun firms which produced products in the developing world using sweatshop conditions.

She was sceptical of many of the corporate social responsibility programmes (CSR) run by huge business conglomerates.

She said that the CSR movement was refusing to take a deep, hard, look at the problems it was supposed to be addressing.

"If it gets in the way of profit, businesses are not going to do anything about it," she once declared.

Multinational moves

Given those views, it was surprising to some that The Body Shop was sold to cosmetics giant L'Oreal in 2006 for �652m.

"I heard her speak about selling to L'Oreal and she was very hurt by the way that the media reacted."

Body Shop's sale to industry giant L'Oreal shocked some observers

But Lynne Franks said the sale was entirely in line with Dame Anita's values.

"She said 'L'Oreal are the biggest manufacturers of cosmetics in the world. If they can make a difference with the way that they manufacture, with the way they retail and I can help them with that then we can actually make changes in the world,'."

Body Shop is not the only ethical business that has been snapped up by a multinational.

Unilever owns Ben and Jerry's ice cream and Cadbury Schweppes owns Green & Black's chocolate.