The archive · Marketing & Growth · Product decision · 2023–2024
The Body Shop prints Braille store signage so blind shoppers can find categories alone
On its 18th anniversary, The Body Shop made its Mumbai store navigable by touch — Braille call-outs from a disabled activist on its youth council.
The Body Shop India
What it had to solve
For its 18 years in India, the beauty retailer wanted a genuinely inclusive retail experience — not a one-off gesture — and it had a Youth Collective Council of young voices advising top management.
How it works
The Body Shop India had no trouble selling to people who can see. The store experience itself was the barrier: a blind shopper could not tell the face-care bay from the body-care bay without asking, which quietly excluded a large share of customers from the brand's 'ethical beauty' promise. When the company turned 18 in India, it used the milestone to fix exactly that.
The fix came from inside the brand's own structure. The Youth Collective Council — a body created in August 2023 to inject young voices into business strategy — included disability-rights activist Virali Modi. Her suggestion: put Braille category call-outs throughout the store. The Pilot landed at the Activist Workshop store in Mumbai's Palladium Mall in June 2024, the first Braille store in the brand's history, followed by a phased rollout across the country under its 2024 strategy.
The store changes sat alongside a wider inclusion push: gender-inclusive hiring and training shaped by council member Ankita Mehra, ten staff identifying across the LGBTQA+ spectrum, and a company-wide diversity and inclusion workshop. Harmeet Singh, chief brand officer for Asia South, framed the Braille integration as the natural continuation of 18 years of ethical positioning.
Why it lands
- It redesigned the core shopping task — finding a category — instead of adding a separate 'accessible' channel, so the benefit was invisible-but-universal to every customer.
- The idea was generated by a user inside the decision-making body (the Youth Collective Council), so it solved the actual problem in the first attempt instead of after an expensive research cycle.
- Framing it as a phased programme rather than a single-store stunt connected the pilot to strategy, giving the measure a rollout path and defensible business framing.
What it did
The brand's first Braille store, announced with its 18th-anniversary milestone; positioned as a phased nationwide programme tied to its 2024 brand strategy on accessibility.
What you can take
Accessibility in retail means re-printing the core wayfinding shoppers perform, not adding a separate entrance. The cheapest fix: put the user group inside the decision body before the brief exists.
Since then
After the Palladium pilot, The Body Shop India began extending the Braille features store by store under its 2024 brand strategy, alongside the same council-driven gender-inclusivity changes to hiring and training. The 18th-anniversary rollout was widely covered by Indian industry media as a first for the brand, and the Youth Collective Council mechanism continued to feed strategy from young and disabled consumers' perspectives.
Sources
- The Body Shop introduces Braille features at its Activist Workshop store in Mumbai's Palladium Mall
- The Body Shop India is set to implement strategic initiatives outlined by Youth Collective Council
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