engineering team leader

customer consultant

store manager

assistant store manager

assistant manager

The Body Shop

Typical day?
9-5
Open store, review sales from previous eve.
Sell to customers, coach and train staff on PK every shift.
Set goals and targets for self, staff and store.
Manage team.  
Motivate and challenge the team.
Books, Schedules, Inventory control.
Communicate with owner.

What Did I learn?
Management, Leadership, Public Relations skills.  People skills.  
How to run both a small and large team.  Recruiting, refining sales skills, how to be an effective coach and trainer.  
How to be a mentor.
Balancing relationship with staff and being an effective Leader.
Inventory control, merchandizing skills, organizational skills.
How to create and promote goals and targets and coached on how to achieve them.
Budgets

Management?
Here would have been Owner as I was Management.  My relationship with the owner was excellent.  He was a very good and supportive player.  Very involved in his stores and my teams.  Flexible and excellent to work for.

Co-workers?
I had wonderful teams of very dedicated staff.  They loved their jobs and their co-workers and even worked on their days off just to be around each other.  We ran a very successful store together.  I had a fantastic Assistant Manager who ran the show when I went between stores, and who later Managed the shops when I took time off for other ventures.
Members of my Team who went on to their own careers came back to me during holidays and other busy times through out my years at The Body Shop.

Hardest Part of the job?
Watching Corporate come in and take away what the founder worked so hard to build.

The most enjoyable part of the job?
The team and the regular customers.
Selling and the friendly competition the team had to be the best.

A typical day at work includes: getting updated on the sales going on for the day, products we may have gotten in or ran out of. We are also told our goals for sales, ATV and number of memberships to sell. We then go about greeting and helping customers with their wants and needs. This sometimes means looking up ingredient lists for people with allergies, calling other stores to see if they have a product, asking about the customers skin types to figure out the best product for them. It could also mean helping someone find a gift, which can be complicated or easy depending on how much they know about the person. Very rarely have I had to resort to a simple gift card rather than finding a suitable gift that people of all ages and likes would enjoy. I have learned about various ingredients that a only found in products found at the Body Shop that help support community fair trade or that are healthier than regular products you could find at other stores. The management is great, but sometimes hard to learn info from and I have had to look up information on the company website. The hardest part of the job is that there are not many hours to be had. the most enjoyable part is being at work! My co-workers are great and have a great knowledge base of the products themselves so we often help each other out. Another part I love about this job is that it is not just about sales as many retail jobs seem to be. I spend a lot of my time actually getting to know all about the customer and we become more friends than the usual customer-sales associate relationship that leaves you feeling like a machine rather than a person.

This is the most rewarding job I've ever had.  I didn't think I'd ever return to retail, but I don't consider this to be the same old retail job.  This is The Body Shop, and with it comes with a culture of support, connections, and selling solutions over products.

Head office is easily approachable, and strive to keep even customer consultants on a first name basis.  District Sales Managers are supportive and accessible.  The recent sale to Natura shows a real shift back to the basics of The Body Shop, including community involvement and activism.  This brand has real values, and it's a joy and a privilege to know that I'm a part of supporting community trade, human rights, the planet, and ending animal testing.

Benefits are great.  FT employees are offered amazing health coverage and benefits.  There is a generous fitness reimbursement, tuition assistance, and access to 24/7 counselling.  All employees have access to a discount website, an amazing rate at a popular fitness chain, as well as sales incentives!

If you're hunting for a retail job where you can stock shelves, run a register, and work with little product knowledge, then this isn't the company for you.  The Body Shop provides thorough training on products and procedures and encourages its employees to become trusted experts with top notch customer service skills.  There are, of course, dollar sales and category targets to be achieved, but I've never felt pressured or undervalued in achieving these.  I never, ever want to leave!

What is the best part of working at the company?
Small teams often means you get to working alone. The products are decent. Easy rewards program for customers that can give deals. Uniform is not strict with relaxed expectations. 

What is the most stressful part about working at the company?
Redundant check ins on self preformance and store targets, sales targets were unrealistic and a constant pressure to do better with minimal reward. The pay is minimal and the responsibility high. Unbalanced work to life ratio often times, and little to no training with a massive work expectation and so much product to know. Online lessons manager reviews and company self performance assessments felt Un motivating and over rated.

What is the work environment and culture like at the company?
Within imediate teams the stores seemed easy. Teams are small. A few staff per store although
The district had politics and management stacks together and everyone of them over worked underpaid. It is not the vision the company is built upon, all these liberating ethics that dont seem to apply within the actual work culture and daily environment to support staff in tangible ways. This was always left on managements shoulders. The promotions were also confusing to customers and complicated to explain. Always too much explanation required.

I was really excited to work for The Body Shop since I love the products and what they stand for as a company. I learned how to be really present with people, both colleagues and customers, and how crucial active listening and collaboration are to achieving goals. It was a culture really based on curiosity, and sharing knowledge to build each other up. It changed the way I approach leadership for the better. All that came crashing down in 2024 with the closure of 1/3 Canadian stores. It was really jarring, especially after we were told for a few months that the acquisition by another parent company wouldn’t affect our jobs. I couldn’t help but be resentful of the mismanagement from the top down that put the company in such financial trouble that they had to resort to these measures, and the fact that we were expected to deal with this news by staying to liquidate our stores for another 2 weeks, with a Black Friday level of urgency as deal hungry crowds descended upon us. It really seemed like they were desperate to extract every last drop of labour they could from us, and trying to keep up morale while we were watching the environment we loved crumble into chaos felt like a joke. Overall, I look at my experience at The Body Shop fondly other than those two terrible weeks, and wish for success and stability for all the amazing people working in the remaining stores.

Great products, great company values (environmental protection, animal rights, human rights, etc), but exceptionally poor at valuing their own employees.

Even when I succeeded, hitting and exceeding my store's budget, instead of being congratulated I was asked, "why didn't you do better?"

Was given store layout plans for other stores that didn't fit the shape or size of my store at all and when we inevitably failed at not being another store, I was criticized for that. Somehow I was expected to be a wizard with magical powers over space and time and had my job threatened repeatedly for not being a wizard.

Was promoted into management and offered far less than what the previous individual in that position had been offered when they first started. Was not allowed to hire new staff during the Christmas season. Was not allowed to terminate staff who were actively disrupting the shop, damaging product, and harassing customers.

Was literally told by the Vice President of Marketing herself that we are NOT to view customers as customers. They are "walking wallets" and our job is to squeeze them of every last dime they have, no matter what. Anything less than that, and we'd be out.

To be honest, the typical day at work was a walk in the park, and however exciting the environment was, the job itself was unstimulating because my social skills already surpass that of a sales associate for beauty products- but a job's a job, am I right?
My favorite part had to be taking in the shipments and stocking, because I am the type of person who ADORES stretching their memory and I loved having to know what product was where and how much at all times, and doing all the calculations in my head all the while, boy did I enjoy that! The co-workers and management there were to die for in their levels of kindness and compassion and I could not have asked for a better work team. Unfortunately the only information I learned there was a few new bits on teatree oil and vitamin E products, etc. All in all, the Body shop was a dream job and I was glad to work there for the short time that I did, because there was no hard tasks whatsoever.

I loved working there. I loved the products, I loved the stories of the products, I loved what the job entailed, and talking to the customers there. Typical day is on your feet, approaching customers, and explaining products. You have to have a basic knowledge of skincare and basic skin conditions and chemicals in products. You have to know the benefits of different ingredients (ex. hemp vs. vitamin E for dry, red skin) and how to market it to the customer. Customers were always friendly. Management can be really good or really bad. I've worked in one store and had to go to another store for a couple nights because they were short staffed. One of managers was very overwhelming and demanding, the other was very kind and fun and free-spirited. It's all about who you get as a manager. Co-workers are alright. You either have your friends or you have your competition. Hardest part is selling the membership card, most enjoyable part is the customers and the products. Getting ready for work is fun too - I've never had a job that asked me to get make up on and be as pretty as I can be.

If you have a well working team, everything is fine but management is always the problem. The people pretend to care about your mental health and well being but genuinely do not care at all. The company is far more forgiving for mistakes than they need to be which leads to being who are causing problems to continue employment despite multiple write ups. Store managers are typically terrible but the District  Managers are the worst of them with neglect and constantly putting too many things on your plate and just expecting you to be able to complete everything at a moments notice. They ask untrained employees to open and close the store without paying them more and frequently have many staff and managers working 6 to 12 days in a row with little care as long as you're meeting the recommended shift coverages.

I love everything the company stands for and is, bcorp, going all vegan, being an activist brand etc. But most all leaders are not reflective of the body shops views. There is no work life balance even though they preach the importance of that. They pride themselves in being a different retailer than the rest, but no major difference in worklife balance, benefits, scheduling, wage or general employee wellbeing than any other retailer out there. They have very high expectations of staff and only care about the KPIs and money. No matter how well you do or if your store is a top performer in many areas you are still told you are not good enough. Expect to be pushed to your limits and told that work should be your top priority in your life with little empathy. It's a great place for young people to get there first job. But there seems to be some pushback around hiring young people for roles even though it's what the company is try to attract as a customer and employee.

Top Job Titles	Average salary
Engineering team leader 32 salaries reported	$18.23 per hour
Customer consultant 22 salaries reported	$17.78 per hour
Store manager 17 salaries reported	$47,205 per year
Assistant store manager 13 salaries reported	$43,035 per year
Assistant manager 3 salaries reported	$54,292 per year

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