Anita Roddick

Opened a single shop in Brighton selling refillable lotions, and ran it for 30 years as an activism vehicle disguised as a retail chain.

Rooke and Torbert's 2005 article cites Roddick by name as an Alchemist. She opened The Body Shop in March 1976 with a £4,000 loan, mixing her own products in a back room and selling them in refillable bottles — partly because she couldn't afford packaging, partly because she'd lived in fishing villages where waste was a sin. Over 30 years she turned a single store into 2,000+ in 50 countries — and used the supply chain itself as activism: fair-trade sourcing (decades before the term was standard), public campaigns against animal testing (the EU ban came later), Amnesty International partnerships, defending the Ogoni against Shell in Nigeria. The shop was the medium. The campaigns were the work. Asked late in her life what she'd learned: "If you think you're too small to have an impact, try going to bed with a mosquito."