After coming through a period of financial struggles and shifting ownership, The Body Shop Canada is looking to turn the page with a revitalization strategy that leans on its values-driven roots and new store concepts.

In February 2024, the U.K.-based beauty and skincare company went into administration in Britain after being purchased by private-equity firm Aurelius Investment.

The Body Shop Canada’s footprint of 110 locations was reduced by 33 in December of the same year ahead of its purchase by Serruya Private Equity, a Markham-Ont.-based company which has investments in St. Louis Bar and Grill, Second Cup and Swensen’s.

Now 100% Canadian owned, The Body Shop Canada has announced plans to begin reshaping its presence in the country, with new flagship stores planned for urban centres backed by an omnichannel approach led by Micheal Roden, who joined the company as a consultant in February before being named president over the summer.

Two new locations opened in January at Sherway Gardens and Lime Ridge Mall in Ontario. A flagship store at Vancouver’s Pacific Centre is set to open in November 2025.

Led by Roden, The Body Shop is looking rebuild relevance through an approach including new store designs, skin consultations, interactive product discovery zones and community-driven spaces.

The former executive at Suzy Shier, Thrifty’s, Bluenotes and Lucky Brand, brings experience in market-specific strategy and omnichannel growth, with a focus on integrating customer experience across physical and digital platforms.

Roden says The Body Shop will be looking to attract new audiences while maintaining the values-driven, ethical-sourcing approach that long-time customers have come to rely on since the company opened in Canada in 1980, four years after it was founded in Brighton, England.

You mentioned in last month’s relaunch announcement that being 100% Canadian owned allows The Body Shop Canada ‘to move with greater agility.’ Do you plan to lean into the ownership change in brand storytelling and messaging?

Yes, most definitely. Currently, all of our product does come still from the U.K. It’s produced out of the U.K. But this gives us the opportunity, now, to really speak to the Canadian consumer from a digital and in-store perspective, where in the past, all of that came from the U.K. So sometimes, in the communication from the U.K., it didn’t align with the Canadian consumer. So definitely, we’re going to be looking at making some of [the communication] with a similar twist of what the brand is representing in the U.K., but really, looking at it from a consumer point of view across Canada … How we market the company is totally in our hands now. We have a choice of taking the marketing that we get from the U.K., or we have the opportunity to stay within the brand guidelines while making it more tweaked to our Canadian customer.

The new store designs put emphasis on consultations, interactive discovery and community-driven spaces. How are you planning to reframe the locations as more than just retail outlets?

Body Shop has traditionally stayed very true to certain colours of green and different elements, but we’ve received a new colour palette from the U.K., so we’re going to make the stores look more airy and more exciting and more engaging. One of the things we’re going to do is, you can sign up for a skin consultation, so we invite the customer to the store, we put them on a list, then give them samples of the products that they used during the skin consultation. It’s a way of getting our brand out there in a different way. Community events have always been part of The Body Shop’s values, and we will now start to gear in on events from a Vancouver point of view, from a Toronto point of view or from a Newfoundland point of view. We’re going to go back to some of the heritage parts of the business and try to bring in a younger customer without alienating our global heritage customer. I think that’s a great opportunity to showcase when we get to opening the Vancouver store, which will be in early November.

How are you approaching the challenge of re-establishing relevance with Canadian consumers in today’s crowded beauty and skincare market?

I think relevance comes with a clarity of purpose, right? The Body Shop has stood very strong from an ethical background against testing on animals. Those are the parts that are really the true heritage of the company that we want to continue to live by. And we do. It’s definitely in our values. I think we have an opportunity to put a new twist on the storytelling, and one of our main goals is, how do we attract that younger crowd? How are we going to connect with them? There are a lot of new skincare products that are going to be launching in Body Shop in 2026 and I think we have a great opportunity to highlight those through social media, through different channels in our business.

We have an opportunity with our PR agency [Rose PR], with our marketing strategists, to kind of put together the framework of how the new story is going to be told. We’re not quite there yet. I mean, we’re still fairly new. We’re going into our sixth or seventh month under the new ownership. We’ve definitely moved a lot of mountains here. And obviously the first was to stabilize the business, get online back up and running and we’re actually now starting to branch out into third-party retail, so it is part of the agenda.

You’ve worked extensively in brand revitalization. What lessons are you drawing on as you chart this new chapter for The Body Shop in Canada?

The vision of The Body Shop is not about chasing trends. We have the opportunity now to really curate our assortment based on the Canadian consumer, where in the past, we got everything from the U.K. and it wasn’t necessarily so focused on the consumer. And also, we have to know what the customer is asking. You know, if we’re selling more skincare, we’re going to have a bigger section of skincare. If we’re selling more bath and body, we’re going to focus on bath and body. So we have an opportunity to really expand or retract in our stores. To keep them more relevant is really the key. So sometimes we’re going to follow the guidance that will come from the U.K. Sometimes we’ll buy into it. Sometimes we may not think it’s necessary for the consumer.

What challenges have you been dealing with as The Body Shop moves to fully Canadian owned?

The first challenge was, obviously, getting inventory back in place after the administration. So that was really a big challenge. I would say the second was the loss of customer. You know, we lost our database with the purchase. It remained in the U.K. So we’ve been really building on our customer data. We’ve been connecting with our customer. The first few months we didn’t have footfall where we wanted it to be. Over the last 60 days, we’ve actually seen footfall increase and this week alone [Aug. 24 to 30], we are seeing a 7% increase in customer traffic into the stores. So a lot of the things that we’ve been working on, whether it’s promoting the new Spa of the World product, having a new marketing director, having a new director in e-commerce, we’ve been really coming up with fresh ideas and fresh approaches. But definitely customer and product were the biggest challenges.

What what will success look like for The Body Shop Canada in the next three to five years?

Well, definitely, our goal is to grow market share. I mean, one of the initiatives that we are working on, and we have been working on, is we want to be able to get our product across multiple channels. We do have 52 Shoppers Drug Mart stores currently that carry The Body Shop curated assortment for them. Our goal is to grow that business significantly over the next two to five years. We have a big opportunity there. We’re also in a position where, shortly, we’ll be launching on Amazon. So we’ll be on bodyshop.ca, we’ll be on amazon.ca. So really, I think the opportunity is to continue to grow brick and mortar to a certain level. We may not ever get back to the level of brick and mortar stores that we had originally, but we feel that the business can be diverse. We can be in different channels, making it more accessible for our customer.

– Some responses have been edited and abbreviated.