My colleague Daniel Finkelstein once went into a Body Shop to buy a hippo-shaped sponge from Guatemala. I have no idea why. After paying, he asked the shop assistant for a plastic bag. With a terrible misreading of her customer she asked him smugly: “Do you really need it?”

“Do I really need a hippo-shaped sponge from Guatemala?” he replied.

The exchange pinpoints what The Body Shop was about: warm heart, with a slightly annoying moralising tone. Return your mango shampoo bottle for refilling and we really could change the world.

And the amazing thing about The Body Shop, and its founder, Anita Roddick, who died this week, was that it – almost – could. What began as suspect hippy idealism is now mainstream consumerism, at least in theory. Now even the big supermarkets ask, if not in so many words, but by not immediately offering them: do you really need that plastic bag? Every other soap product flaunts its natural credentials. Packaging apologises (occasionally) for not being recyclable. Shampoo manufacturers promise that their products are not tested on animals.

Admittedly it took a hell of a long time for the Roddick philosophy to catch on; we are hardly perfect environmentalists now, and too many of us still buy ridiculously cheap clothes mass-produced in sweatshops. But at the very least, if we stop to think about it, we know we shouldn’t. And Roddick started all that. It was she who stood up in the 1980s, in the midst of Thatcherism, and shouted at us that we ought to care about the social and environmental impact of our careless consumerism.

Ethical consumerism is now big business in itself, from organics to baby bonds, politics to smoothies. From Ben & Jerry to Tesco, they boast about having small and cooperative suppliers. The House of Commons sells Fairtrade coffee. The Conservatives plead for corporate social responsibility, while ministers calculate the environmental cost of a runner bean flown from Kenya against a tomato grown in Britain in a heated greenhouse.

Would all this have happened without Roddick? Possibly. But she saw it before anybody else did, and made ethical consumerism mass-market and a badge of honour admittedly for mostly the middle classes: we have money therefore we have power, and with power comes responsibility. Today we say she did it “at just the right time”, as The Times obituary puts it. But nobody else did it; she made it the right time.

Roddick opened her first Body Shop in Brighton in 1976, with a £4,000 bank loan negotiated by her husband before he set off to spend two years riding a horse from Buenos Aires to New York, leaving her with two young children and no money. The products were to be natural, sold in reusable containers, with handwritten labels. Nothing would be tested on animals. “We recycled everything,” she later said, “not because we were environmentally friendly but because we didn’t have enough bottles.” Such was its success that she quickly had to borrow £3,000 from a friend to open a second shop. He got a payout of £137 million when she sold the business 30 years later. It had become for a while the second most trusted brand in the UK, and Anita Roddick was a household name.

She was something else too: the most high-profile businesswoman the City had seen, fêted and derided in equal measure. I grew up hearing that she was something a little dodgy, and seeing that she was something amazing. Friends who did holiday jobs in The Body Shop laughed that they were dragged along to protest marches in their lunch hour – they knew not what they were protesting for – but it was impossible not to be in awe of this wild-haired woman who believed so hard in her hippy ideals that she had turned them into a multimillion-pound business.

There was something more accessible about Roddick than about the very few other female role models in the 1980s – Margaret Thatcher, Madonna, perhaps Germaine Greer. They would never have stooped to talk about moisturiser, or corn scrub.

And that was Roddick’s great genius. She wasn’t really talking about moisturiser either. She was using moisturiser to talk about human rights, and animal testing, and the environment. Moisturiser wasn’t just a cream, it was politics – from the World Trade Organisation to the Nigerian Ogoni people – and it was big business. She may never have spoken a truer word than when she claimed that The Body Shop was “a series of brilliant acccidents”. I’m not sure that The Body Shop was even really about shopping.

When she floated in 1984, the City sneered but it bought her shares, even as she lectured them on the need for moral corporate leadership. Men derided her; women cheered her on. She seemed to take on the stifling male hierarchy and win.

And then, suddenly, she appeared to sell out to it. Purists choked on their organic muesli when she sold her 18 per cent stake in The Body Shop to L’Oréal for £130 million last year. (She threw the money into charity.) Roddick believed that Body Shop ideals would permeate L’Oréal, not the other way around. I doubt it. I don’t think the revolution went that far. The Body Shop is now just a shop, its customers buying products, not politics. I popped into a branch yesterday to hear one shop assistant telling another who Anita Roddick had been. She was vaguely interested.

Gordon Brown hailed her yesterday as “one of the country’s true pioneers”. He said she “inspired millions to the cause by bringing sustainable products to a mass market”. She never had backing from a mainstream political party to turn a radical idea into a revolution; no government has ever had the courage to seize the green agenda and force it into consumers’ shopping baskets. Anita Roddick did it on her own. So we did, you see, need a hippo-shaped sponge from Guatemala after all. Much to our surprise.

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