The Body Shop’s Kate Levine put her background in drama to use in corporate communications. She talks theatre, travel and sustainability with Brittany Golob

Photographs by Jeff Leyshon

Kate Levine has always loved performance. From drama productions at school to a university degree in English, philosophy and drama to a London-based theatre group with fellow amateur actors, Levine’s passion for acting has followed her from Australia to the UK. She carries that through to her role in corporate communications at the Body Shop. As director of commitment and corporate communications, her training on the stage has been invaluable preparation for the challenges of running comms for a global business.

Levine says she has come across creative performers throughout her career in communications, “I’ve found so many people in PR who sing or act or do things of that ilk.” The confidence, talkativeness and presentation- driven approach meshes well with the skills required of a public relations professional. That meant Levine found a natural home in communications after finishing her degree at the University of Sydney.

Yet, before beginning her career, the young Levine was a bit of a nomad. The daughter of an American father from New Orleans and an Australian mother, travel was a large part of Levine’s childhood. Spending a year in Oxford and early years in New Orleans gave her a global outlook early on. After university, like many Australians, Levine strapped on a backpack and took to the Eurasian continent. She visited Beijing before travelling on the trans-Mongolian railway through Siberia. Alighting in Moscow, she then visited St Petersburg, and Uzbekistan’s Samarkand and Bukhara before heading on to Eastern Europe.

From off the beaten path to the well-trodden route for many Commonwealth young people, Levine wound up in London, broke, but with a working visa. “I stayed for a while and I didn’t like it at first, actually,” she says of London. “I was away from home, I’d spent all my money and when I first got to London, there was no minimum wage.” Seeking an opportunity the likes of which she’d found with WPP-owned research firm Research International in Sydney. “I’d been a medium-small fish in a small pond in Australia and I had a supervisor’s position at RI and they paid me good money. I thought I’d slot into something like that in London. No chance. I was right down bottom and it was very low paid, it was pretty much unskilled work and I found that really hard.”

But the natural performer soon made friends, joined theatre courses at the City Literature Institute of London and met, “A lovely bloke from the Wirral,” who became her husband. She began to love the city in which she’d made a new home. The friends she made are now part of her expat family in London. Having the Globe right on her doorstep also helps. “One of the reasons I live in London is because the theatre is just so good here,” she says.

However, Levine’s love of London was not only down to theatre. She transferred a volunteer job in AIDS and HIV support in Sydney to volunteer for the HIV and AIDS charity, the Terrence Higgins Trust. Simultaneously, she found a job on the mental health team at the Lambeth Council. “I feel really strongly that people who were sick need to be looked after and not treated as pariahs. I thought one of the best things to do would be to volunteer and start giving out information,” she says of her volunteer work. Eventually, Levine became a volunteer for Body and Soul, a charity designed to support women and children with HIV and AIDS. Anita and Gordon Roddick became patrons of the charity and years before she took a role with the Body Shop, Levine came into contact with the people behind the organisation.
But the Lambeth Council role was her primary employment and Levine nearly pursued a master’s degree in social work to support her career with the council. But, “As luck would have it, a job came up at the Lambeth Council in the publicity and communications department and I thought, ‘Actually that is probably better suited to me,’” she says.

In her first “proper job” in communications, Levine found a home at last. Overseeing internal and external comms and marketing covered everything but media relations and Levine thrived for a time. But she wanted to gain more experience in media relations and so took a post with the Consumer’s Association, the campaigning arm of Which?, now run under the latter’s brand. “It was a very full-on press office,” she says. “I remember walking in on my first day and I’d really only spoken to a journalist a few times in my life and the phone just rang off the hook,” she says.

However, the trial by fire gave Levine the press relations experience she needed. After two years with the Consumer’s Association, Levine took her first agency role with Hill+Knowlton Strategies. “I immediately felt at home will all the people I was working with. In agencies you really get to hone your skills. A good agency will take the time to develop those skills. That was great for me, at that time in my career it was perfect,” she says.

Hill+Knowlton allowed Levine to combine all of her communications skills to that point and to work on exciting B2B campaigns for the likes of Rightmove, Greenpeace and npower. But it also sparked an interest in the other side of her role at the Body Shop. As director of commitment, she is responsible for communicating about the company’s sustainability positioning and campaigns. Through communicating a successful partnership between npower and Greenpeace, Levine says, “I just realised I loved sustainability and I loved corporate responsibility. It made me feel like I was doing something positive in the world. But I also realised you can’t just say, ‘This will be a good story.’ You’ve got to back that up with all of the proof points and the messaging and get all of that right.”

She adds, “I think often when you’re doing something for business for good, you need to think about all the holes people might pick.”

For 10 years, Levine took on sustainability and corporate communications clients at Hill+Knowlton. Yet, the needs of her two young children, now aged eight and 11, pushed her to rethink her circumstances.

Levine decided to take some time off before establishing herself as a freelancer. She then spent two years freelancing and taking fixed-term contracts with agencies in London. This allowed her to spend time with her family and choose which clients with whom she would work.

Retaining female workers who are seeking a flexible working schedule is a key issue in communications. Agencies are working across the industry to ensure that having a family and a career are not mutually exclusive. And that has also been Levine’s experience. She says, “All of the agencies that I’ve worked for either on a short term contract or a permanent contract have been fantastic. All of them have been flexible and they’ve all let me work part-time.”

However, in 2011, Levine was contacted by a former colleague who went on to found corporate comms agency Pagefield. Co- founders Sara Price and Mark Gallagher asked her to lead the communications for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. It was an opportunity Levine couldn’t turn down. “It was a real departure from business and sustainability communications, but this was such an amazing opportunity. It was brilliant. I’ve never done anything like it,” she says.

Levine’s team was effectively both agency and client for the Jubilee and thus was charged with everything from event planning to liaising with boat owners to securing media partners to working with Clarence House and the Port of London Authority.

It put all of Levine’s experience to the test, particularly regarding media relations. “One objective was making sure we had good broadcast coverage,” she says. Pagefield secured the BBC as a broadcast partner, established a media village on the banks of the Thames and offered Thames Clipper boats to the Sun and the Mirror to participate in the flotilla.

Following this foray into national, royal communications, Levine settled back into sustainability comms at Pagefield. Then, in 2014, she attended a deforestation conference with her client Sime Darby, a sustainable palm oil producer in Malaysia, and, perhaps through a resurgence of her passion for performing, found she wanted to speak on sustainability communications at a conference. “To have the credibility to do that, it just struck me, I needed to be in house. It was that day that I thought, ‘I need to think about what my next move is,’” she says.

With a stroke of luck, a week later, a former Hill+Knowlton colleague set up a meeting with Jeremy Schwartz, the CEO of the Body Shop. The company, now part of the L’Oréal group, has a strong foundation in sustainability and in communications. It puts its sustainable positioning at the forefront of its brand and doesn’t hold back when communicating about tough issues.

Levine joined in May 2015 and has since been able to combine her history in B2C, B2B, media relations and sustainability communications at the Body Shop. One of her recent projects was a global brand campaign on biodiversity that ran worldwide over Valentine’s Day this year.

To execute that campaign, called ‘Find Reggie Love,’ Levine liaised with the Body Shops local comms teams to encourage their support for the campaign, led a press trip to Vietnam to explore the ecological habitat there and communicate the organisation’s sustainability positioning, ‘Enrich Not Exploit.

Now, the former nomad is settled firmly in London. But her love of travel, of theatre and of performing are still fostered. “I’m reading Harry Potter to the kids,” Levine says. “Maybe it’s my acting background, but I love reading it in lots of different accents.” She travels locally with her family and globally with the Body Shop, and manages to get home in the evenings to spend time with her kids.

The key to a successful communications career, Levine says, is to, “Try and learn from everything you do.” Perhaps that’s why each of Levine’s roles has built upon her experience, her interests and her drive to do good in the world.

Curriculum vitae: Kate Levine
2015-present Director of commitment and corporate communications, The Body Shop
2011-2015 Partner, Pagefield 2010-2011 Freelance communications consultant, Seven Hills
2010-2010 Senior consultant, Forster
2009-2010 Director, corporate, Cohn & Wolfe
2009-2009 Freelance corporate communications consultant, Kate Levine Communications
2001-2009 Senior associate director, Hill & Knowlton
1999-2001 Press officer, Which?
1996-1999 Communications manager, Lambeth Council