The Soap That Bought a Country
On a single day in 1929, a grocer's son from Bolton, Lancashire, paid the British government £865,000 for the Royal Niger Company — and with it, effective commercial sovereignty over an area of West Africa roughly the size of France. William Lever, by then the first Viscount Leverhulme, had already built the world's largest soap empire, transformed a slab of Cheshire marshland into a model village called Port Sunlight, and pioneered the radical proposition that workers who were clean, housed, and reasonably content would produce more bars of Sunlight soap per hour. Now he needed palm oil — oceans of it — and he was willing to buy entire nations to secure the supply chain. The purchase was, by any modern reckoning, a colonial atrocity dressed in commercial logic. It was also the foundational act of what would become Unilever: a company that has spent nearly a century oscillating between genuine idealism and ruthless extraction, between feeding the world and selling it skin-lightening cream, between the conviction that doing good is good business and the recurring discovery that shareholders have a more precise definition of "good" than activists do.
That tension — between purpose and profit, between local embeddedness and global scale, between owning four hundred brands and knowing which ones actually matter — is the central paradox of Unilever's existence. It is a company that in 2024 generated €60.8 billion in revenue, employed approximately 127,000 people across more than 190 countries, and sold products ranging from Dove soap to Hellmann's mayonnaise to Magnum ice cream bars to roughly 3.4 billion consumers daily. And it is a company that, in February 2025, fired its second CEO in six years for insufficient urgency, elevated its CFO to the top job, and embarked on yet another strategic reinvention — its third in a decade — because even €60.8 billion, when it grows at a rate that trails Procter & Gamble's by a widening margin, is not enough.
By the Numbers
Unilever at Scale
€60.8BRevenue in FY2024
~127,000Employees worldwide
400+Brands in portfolio
190+Countries of operation
3.4BConsumers reached daily
~€124BApproximate market capitalization (early 2025)
4.2%Underlying sales growth, FY2024
18.4%Underlying operating margin, FY2024
Two Rivers, One Company
The name itself is an artifact of a merger that nearly didn't happen. In September 1929, the Margarine Unie — a Dutch conglomerate that had consolidated Europe's butter-substitute industry — and Lever Brothers, the British soap colossus William Lever had built from a single shop in Wigan, agreed to combine operations. The logic was brutal and elegant: both companies depended on the same tropical oils (palm, coconut, whale), both operated sprawling networks of factories and trading posts across the same colonial geographies, and both were bleeding margins from competition with each other. On January 1, 1930, Unilever was born — not as a unified corporation but as a twinned entity, Unilever N.V. in Rotterdam and Unilever PLC in London, sharing a single chairman but maintaining separate legal identities, separate stock listings, separate national loyalties. This dual structure would persist for ninety years, an organizational oddity that embodied the company's deeper identity crisis: Was it Dutch or British? Global or local? A food company or a chemicals company? The answer, for most of its existence, was yes.
William Hesketh Lever — born in 1851, the sixth of seven surviving children of a wholesale grocer in Bolton — possessed two qualities that would define the company's DNA for a century: an obsessive belief that consumer brands could be built through advertising and standardization, and an equally obsessive paternalism that assumed the working class needed improvement as much as soap. He had started selling his father's grocery products at sixteen, but what he really sold was cleanliness as a moral proposition. When he launched Sunlight Soap in 1885, he didn't just brand a commodity — he branded the idea that hygiene was virtue, that a woman who kept a clean home was a better citizen, that the industrial working class could be uplifted, literally, through lather. Port Sunlight, the village he constructed for his workers beginning in 1888 on the Wirral Peninsula, featured a library, a gymnasium, a swimming pool, an art gallery, and — crucially — no pub. Lever controlled his workers' leisure as assiduously as he controlled his supply chains.
Adam Macqueen, in
The King of Sunlight, captured the paradox at the heart of Lever's empire: a genuine humanitarian impulse inseparable from an almost pathological need for control, a reformer whose idea of reform was to make the world exactly as clean and orderly as he believed it ought to be. That same impulse — improve people's lives, by selling them things, while maintaining absolute control over the narrative — runs through Unilever like a watermark.
The Darwinian Corporation
What distinguished Unilever from its peers in the decades following the merger was not strategic brilliance but adaptive resilience — what former chairman Floris Maljers described in a 1992 Harvard Business Review essay as "a Darwinian system of retaining what was useful and rejecting what no longer worked." This was, characteristically, both honest and slightly evasive. What Maljers meant was that Unilever had stumbled into multinational competence not by design but by accident — or, more precisely, by the accident of being a Dutch-British enterprise born at the end of empire.
When Unilever was founded in 1930 as a Dutch-British company, it produced soap, processed foods, and a wide array of other consumer goods in many countries. Ever since then, the company has evolved mainly through a Darwinian system of retaining what was useful and rejecting what no longer worked — in other words, through actual practice as a business responding to the marketplace.
Because Unilever operated in dozens of countries with wildly different consumer preferences, regulatory regimes, and distribution infrastructures, it developed — out of necessity — a decentralized operating model that gave enormous autonomy to local managers. An Indian subsidiary could formulate a shampoo for women who washed their hair in cold water from a communal tap. A Nigerian subsidiary could package detergent in single-use sachets for consumers who couldn't afford a full box. A Brazilian subsidiary could develop a margarine with a different fat profile for tropical climates. This wasn't "glocalization" as a strategy deck would later brand it. It was survival. And it produced something genuinely rare: a company that understood emerging-market consumers decades before its competitors thought to care.
By the 1980s, Unilever was a sprawling conglomerate with fingers in chemicals, packaging, animal feeds, plantations, and hundreds of food and personal-care brands across every continent. It was profitable but unfocused, a hydra with too many heads. The next two decades would be defined by a long, painful process of pruning — selling off the chemicals business, exiting plantations, consolidating brands, and gradually converging on the shape the company holds today: Beauty & Wellbeing, Personal Care, Home Care, Nutrition, and (until the coming spin-off) Ice Cream.
The Polman Experiment
Paul Polman arrived as CEO in January 2009 — the first outsider to run Unilever in its history — and within his first week, did something no chief executive of a major European public company had done: he abolished quarterly earnings guidance. The message to short-term investors was deliberately hostile. Leave. Polman, a Dutchman who had spent twenty-seven years at Procter & Gamble and Nestlé before being recruited to London, possessed the conviction of a convert and the intensity of a man who believed that consumer-goods companies, specifically his consumer-goods company, could save the world.
In November 2010, Polman launched the Unilever Sustainable Living Plan (USLP): a set of targets to double revenue while halving the company's environmental footprint, all by 2020. The plan called for improving the health and well-being of more than one billion people, sourcing 100% of agricultural raw materials sustainably, and linking 500,000 smallholder farmers to Unilever's supply chain. It was, by any measure, astonishingly ambitious. It was also, Polman insisted, not philanthropy but strategy.
We think that increasingly, businesses that are responsible and actually make a contribution to society in its positive sense, make it part of their overall business model, will be very successful. So for us, it's an accelerator of our business.
The numbers, for a while, supported the thesis. Polman managed to reduce Unilever's hedge-fund shareholder base from 15% to below 5%, partly by refusing to play the quarterly game and partly by actively courting long-term institutional investors — an approach he described with almost confrontational pride. By 2012, sustainable sourcing of agricultural raw materials had nearly doubled in twelve months to 24%. The company hit its target for 100% certified sustainable palm oil three years ahead of schedule. Between 2009 and 2019, Unilever delivered a total shareholder return of approximately 290%.
But Polman's decade was not without contradictions. The Sustainable Living Plan's consumer-facing targets — reducing water use, encouraging handwashing, changing nutritional habits — proved far harder to move than supply-chain inputs. The company continued to sell Fair & Lovely, a skin-lightening cream marketed across South and Southeast Asia, whose very existence sat in queasy tension with Unilever's stated commitment to "positive beauty." (The product was eventually renamed "Glow & Lovely" in 2020, after the killing of George Floyd and the surge of the Black Lives Matter movement made the brand's optics untenable — though Unilever emphasized the product had "never been a bleaching product" and continued to sell it.) And while the USLP attracted enormous praise from sustainability advocates, some investors began to wonder whether Polman was more interested in being right than in being profitable.
The most revealing test came in February 2017, when Kraft Heinz — backed by the formidable cost-cutting machine of 3G Capital and Berkshire Hathaway — made an unsolicited $143 billion offer to acquire Unilever. Polman rejected the bid within forty-eight hours, framing the refusal as a defense of long-term value creation against short-term extraction. It was also a defense of his vision of stakeholder capitalism against the zero-based-budgeting philosophy that 3G had used to strip Heinz and Kraft to the bone. The bid was withdrawn. Polman survived. But the episode left a mark: Unilever subsequently unified its dual corporate structure into a single London-listed entity (Unilever PLC) in 2020, partly to simplify governance and partly to make itself a less awkward target for future approaches.
The Purpose Trap
Alan Jope inherited the CEO role on January 1, 2019, as Polman's handpicked successor — a Scottish career Unilever executive who had run the company's beauty and personal-care division and who pledged to extend Polman's purpose-driven model "long into the future." What he inherited, more precisely, was a company whose philosophical commitments had begun to outrun its operating performance, and whose portfolio contained within it a contradiction that would eventually blow up in public.
The contradiction had a name: Ben & Jerry's.
When Unilever acquired the Vermont ice cream maker in 2000 for $326 million, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield — two childhood friends who had started the company in a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vermont, in 1978 — extracted an unusual concession: an independent board responsible for safeguarding the brand's "social mission." This board had the authority to press Unilever on social and political issues, a structure that was, as Bloomberg's Devin Leonard and Dasha Afanasieva later documented, "an anomaly in the corporate world." Among the board members recruited over the years was Anuradha Mittal, an Indian-born activist who had been politically awakened as a college student volunteering in Bhopal, had spent a decade combating "corporate control of our food system" in Oakland, and had founded a think tank whose name deliberately invoked the Black Panther Party.
I wanted someone who had a strong sense of social justice.
In 2021, the Ben & Jerry's board announced that the company would stop selling ice cream in Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. The decision detonated. Several U.S. states with anti-BDS (Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions) laws divested pension-fund holdings in Unilever stock. Pro-Israel groups launched campaigns. Unilever's share price wobbled. Jope, caught between the independent board's activism and Unilever's fiduciary obligations, eventually sold the Israeli Ben & Jerry's business to a local licensee — a move that infuriated Ben & Jerry's founders, led to an ongoing court dispute, and satisfied no one.
The Ben & Jerry's debacle crystallized a broader problem. Under Jope, "purpose" had become a corporate shibboleth applied indiscriminately: individual brands were being assigned social missions whether or not consumers wanted them. The mayonnaise did not need a manifesto. Investors noticed. While Unilever's stock essentially flatlined during Jope's tenure, P&G delivered a 47% total shareholder return and Nestlé returned 33%. In September 2022, Jope announced he would retire at the end of 2023 — well ahead of his effective departure date, in a manner that read more like a forced exit than a graceful transition.
CEO performance vs. peer group, 2019–2022
| Company | CEO | Total Shareholder Return (2019–2022) |
|---|
| Procter & Gamble | Jon Moeller / David Taylor | ~+47% |
| Nestlé | Mark Schneider | ~+33% |
| Unilever | Alan Jope | ~Flat |
The other wound was self-inflicted. In late 2021, Jope launched a £50 billion ($68 billion) bid for GlaxoSmithKline's consumer health care arm — the division that housed Sensodyne toothpaste, Advil, and Centrum vitamins. The strategic logic was debatable: Jope wanted to pivot Unilever toward health and beauty, away from the lower-growth food categories. But the execution was disastrous. Analysts blasted the bid as having "little justification strategically, operationally or financially." The activist investor Nelson Peltz's Trian Partners took a significant stake and won a board seat. The bid was abandoned, and what remained was a company visibly adrift — uncertain whether it was a purpose-driven pioneer, a brand conglomerate, or a turnaround story.
Schumacher's Hundred Days
Hein Schumacher, Unilever's new CEO as of July 2023, arrived from Royal FrieslandCampina — a Dutch dairy cooperative — with a mandate to do what his predecessors had not: choose. Choose which brands mattered. Choose which markets to prioritize. Choose whether Unilever was a conglomerate or a focused consumer-goods company. His early rhetoric was bracingly direct. He warned of "pockets of mediocrity" across the organization, language that FT headline writers correctly identified as a declaration of war on the company's own culture of genteel underperformance.
The plan he unveiled in October 2023 was called, with deliberate simplicity, the Growth Action Plan. Its core proposition: double down on the top 30 "power brands" that comprised roughly 75% of revenue, shed or scale down everything else, and drive operational productivity through €800 million in cost savings over three years. In March 2024, Unilever announced it would spin off its entire ice cream division — Magnum, Ben & Jerry's, Wall's, Cornetto — via a triple stock listing, citing a "very different operating model" that required dedicated cold-chain logistics incompatible with the rest of the portfolio. Seven thousand five hundred jobs would be cut globally. Food brands worth €1 billion in cumulative annual sales would be sold.
For a few quarters, the surgery appeared to be working. Unilever beat analyst expectations through 2024. Shares climbed 23% over the year. Underlying sales growth hit 4.2% for the full year. Volume growth — the metric that matters most in consumer staples, because it measures actual consumption rather than inflation pass-through — returned.
Then, in February 2025, Unilever fired Schumacher. Just eighteen months into the job. The stated reason: the board had "been impressed with Fernando's decisive and results-oriented approach" — Fernando being Fernando Fernandez, the CFO since January 2024, previously head of the Beauty & Wellbeing division. The unstated reason: Schumacher had warned of a "slower start to 2025," shaking investor confidence, and the board, under chairman Ian Meakins, had decided that the pace of transformation was not fast enough. "While the Board is pleased with Unilever's performance in 2024, there is much further to go to deliver best-in-class results," Meakins said, in a statement whose praise-then-pivot structure was itself a kind of corporate decapitation.
Jefferies analyst David Hayes captured the ambiguity: Fernandez's "direct approach" would be "liked by many investors," but "some may also see his style as somewhat maverick."
Four Hundred Brands and the Question of Focus
To understand Unilever's strategic dilemma, consider the portfolio. More than 400 brands, spanning five business groups: Beauty & Wellbeing (Dove, Vaseline, Sunsilk, TRESemmé — €13.2 billion in FY2024 turnover), Personal Care (Axe, Rexona, Lifebuoy — €13.6 billion), Home Care (Omo/Persil, Domestos, Cif — €12.4 billion), Nutrition (Knorr, Hellmann's, Maizena — €13.4 billion), and Ice Cream (Magnum, Ben & Jerry's, Wall's — €8.0 billion). The top 30 brands generate approximately three-quarters of total revenue. Which means the remaining 370-plus brands — many of them regional favorites, some of them relics, a few of them hidden growth stories — collectively account for roughly €15 billion in sales. That's a Fortune 500 company's worth of revenue in what Unilever has implicitly labeled as the tail.
The tension is ancient. Procter & Gamble, under A.G. Lafley and then David Taylor and Jon Moeller, spent the 2010s ruthlessly pruning its portfolio from roughly 170 brands to about 65, selling off Duracell, Pringles, and dozens of beauty brands to focus on categories where it could be number one or number two. The result: a leaner, higher-margin, faster-growing machine that has widened its lead over Unilever in nearly every financial metric. Nestlé, under Mark Schneider, pursued a similar strategy, exiting confectionery (selling its U.S. candy business to Ferrero), water brands, and its skin health division to refocus on coffee, pet care, and nutrition.
Unilever's problem is that it tried to do everything at once: be purposeful and profitable, decentralized and disciplined, present in 190 countries and focused on 30 brands. The Darwinian adaptability that Maljers celebrated in 1992 had, by the 2020s, become a euphemism for institutional indecision. Every brand had a constituency. Every country manager had a fiefdom. The matrix structure that had once been Unilever's great competitive advantage — local responsiveness married to global scale — had ossified into bureaucratic complexity.
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A Century of Strategic Pivots
Key moments in Unilever's portfolio evolution
1930Margarine Unie and Lever Brothers merge to form Unilever, with dual headquarters in Rotterdam and London.
1937Unilever enters the U.S. market through acquisitions, building positions in foods and personal care.
1984Acquires Brooke Bond (tea) and Chesebrough-Pond's (Vaseline, Ragu) in rapid succession, consolidating food and personal care.
2000Acquires Ben & Jerry's for $326 million; acquires Bestfoods (Knorr, Hellmann's) for $20.3 billion — its largest deal ever.
2009Paul Polman becomes first outside CEO; eliminates quarterly earnings guidance.
2017Rejects Kraft Heinz's $143 billion hostile bid. Announces €5 billion share buyback.
2018Sells spreads division (including Flora/Becel) to KKR for €6.8 billion.
The Emerging-Market Bet
There is one dimension of Unilever's story that its competitors have never been able to replicate at the same scale, and it is rooted in that original colonial infrastructure William Lever built: the company's penetration of emerging markets. Roughly 58% of Unilever's revenue comes from developing and emerging economies — a share that dwarfs P&G (approximately 35%) and Nestlé (roughly 42%). In India, where Hindustan Unilever Limited (HUL) is a publicly listed subsidiary and one of the most valuable companies on the Bombay Stock Exchange, Unilever occupies a position analogous to what P&G occupies in the United States: the default presence in nearly every consumer category, from detergent to tea to hair oil to toothpaste.
This emerging-market exposure is simultaneously Unilever's greatest strategic asset and its most persistent source of volatility. When currencies in Brazil, Turkey, Argentina, and Nigeria depreciate — as they do, repeatedly, sometimes catastrophically — Unilever's translated revenue in euros shrinks, even as underlying volumes grow. When commodity prices spike, emerging-market consumers are the first to trade down. When political instability strikes, Unilever's factories and distribution networks are on the front line. The Wall Street Journal, in a March 2025 analysis, noted that P&G's recent outperformance was partly attributable to its more developed-market-weighted portfolio being less exposed to the turbulence of emerging-market currencies and China's economic slowdown.
But the flip side is equally powerful. India alone is projected to add hundreds of millions of middle-class consumers over the next two decades. Sub-Saharan Africa's population will double by 2050. Southeast Asia's per-capita consumption of personal-care products remains a fraction of developed-market levels. Unilever's deep distribution networks in these geographies — the ability to reach a rural village in Bihar through a network of micro-distributors, the single-use sachet strategy that makes Surf Excel or Clinic Plus affordable at ₹1 or ₹2 — are not assets that can be built overnight. They are the accumulation of decades of local investment, local hiring, and local adaptation. The question for Fernandez's Unilever is whether the long game in emerging markets can coexist with the short-term demand for margin expansion and consistent, above-peer growth.
The Price of Conscience
The Fair & Lovely saga deserves its own reckoning, because it illuminates the precise fracture line in Unilever's brand of purpose-driven capitalism. The product — launched in India in 1975 by Hindustan Lever (now HUL) — was for decades the market leader in skin-lightening creams, a multibillion-dollar category across South Asia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East, and parts of Africa. Its advertisements featured Bollywood celebrities; its implicit promise was that lighter skin led to better marriage prospects, better jobs, a better life. A 2011 WHO survey found that approximately 40% of women in Africa bleached their skin.
Unilever insisted the product was not a "bleaching cream" but a skincare product that addressed uneven tone and sun damage. But the branding told a different story. "Fair" was the aspiration. "Lovely" was the reward. And the company made an enormous amount of money selling that aspiration to women in societies where colorism was — and remains — deeply entrenched.
Under pressure from anti-racism activists, two petitions with over 18,000 signatures, and the global reckoning following George Floyd's murder in May 2020, Unilever renamed the product "Glow & Lovely" and removed references to "whitening," "lightening," and "fairness" from packaging. Writer and activist Poorna Bell called the move "hugely disappointing," arguing that "renaming the products doesn't mean anything — that's still just colourism by another word." She was right that the reformulation was cosmetic in the pejorative sense: the product itself was not discontinued, and its market position in India remained enormous.
The episode crystallized a question that every Unilever CEO has had to navigate: What does "purpose" mean when a significant portion of your revenue comes from selling products that many thoughtful people find ethically indefensible? Polman's answer was to set ambitious targets and change the conversation. Jope's answer was to assign purpose to every brand, even when the brand resisted it. Schumacher's answer was to stop talking about purpose and start talking about performance. Fernandez has not yet given his answer, but the Growth Action Plan 2030 conspicuously subordinates sustainability language to growth language. The pendulum, for now, has swung.
The Activist at the Gate
Nelson Peltz's Trian Partners took a stake in Unilever in early 2022 and secured a board seat for Peltz himself by mid-year — an arrival that signaled, as clearly as any earnings miss, that the era of patient, purpose-first governance was over. Peltz, whose previous campaigns at P&G, PepsiCo, and Wendy's had followed a consistent playbook — demand margin improvement, operational focus, and portfolio simplification — brought to Unilever a specific diagnosis: the company had too many brands, too much bureaucracy, and too little accountability for performance.
The diagnosis was not novel. P&G's own turnaround under Lafley and then Moeller had followed essentially the same prescription. What was novel was the speed of its adoption. Within two years of Peltz joining the board, Unilever had announced the ice cream spin-off, the €1 billion food divestiture program, and the 7,500 job cuts. Whether Peltz caused these changes or merely accelerated them is an unanswerable question — the strategic review had begun under Schumacher independently — but the activist's presence transformed the governance calculus. Every decision was now refracted through the lens of what Trian would think.
The February 2025 CEO change bore the fingerprints of this new reality. Schumacher's warning about a "slower start to 2025" — a factual statement about macroeconomic headwinds — was treated as a failure of narrative management. Fernandez, whose tenure as CFO had been marked by what the board called a "decisive and results-oriented approach," was elevated precisely because he projected the urgency that investors and activists demanded. The message was unmistakable: at this Unilever, growth is not a philosophical aspiration. It is a deadline.
Growth Action Plan 2030
The strategic document that now governs Unilever's direction is the Growth Action Plan 2030, or GAP 2030 — a framework announced in the 2024 annual report and designed to "unlock the full potential of Unilever to deliver best-in-class performance." The language itself represents a tonal revolution. Where the Sustainable Living Plan spoke of "improving the lives of the world's citizens," GAP 2030 speaks of "focus, excel and accelerate." Where Polman cited smallholder farmers and marine stewardship, the new plan cites "innovative, market-making and pioneering capabilities."
Sustainability has not disappeared — it remains embedded in the annual report's strategic review — but it has been demoted from protagonist to supporting cast.
The operational architecture is built around three priorities: fewer, bigger, better innovations; productivity savings reinvested in brand building and R&D; and a "leaner, more productive organisational model." In practice, this means concentrating investment behind the power brands (Dove alone generates more than €5 billion in annual sales), exiting non-core categories and geographies, and fundamentally restructuring the organization from five business groups into what management describes as a more integrated, faster-moving structure.
The ice cream spin-off, expected to complete in 2025 via a triple stock listing, is the most dramatic manifestation. By separating approximately €8 billion of revenue — complete with its own cold-chain logistics, seasonal demand patterns, and the perpetual governance headache that is Ben & Jerry's — Unilever is simultaneously simplifying its operating model and removing its most culturally distinctive, most politically controversial, and arguably most emotionally resonant business.
The Machine and the Mission
The deeper story of Unilever — the one that connects William Lever's Port Sunlight to Paul Polman's Sustainable Living Plan to Fernando Fernandez's Growth Action Plan — is about the limits of paternalism at scale. Every era of Unilever's history has been defined by a leader who believed that the corporation could be a vehicle for improvement: Lever improving the hygiene of the working class, Polman improving the sustainability of the global food system, Schumacher improving the operational discipline of a bloated conglomerate. Each was right about the problem and partially wrong about the solution, because each assumed that the corporation's interests and the world's interests were, at some fundamental level, aligned.
They are aligned, of course — until they aren't. Until the skin-lightening cream becomes indefensible. Until the independent board of the ice cream subsidiary decides to wade into Middle Eastern politics. Until the emerging-market bet that funded three decades of growth turns into a currency trap. Until the purpose that attracted long-term investors becomes the excuse that repels activist ones.
Unilever in 2025 is a company in its third strategic reinvention in a decade, led by its fourth CEO in six years, shedding its most famous ice cream brand, and trying to convince investors that a €60.8 billion enterprise can grow as fast as a focused, disciplined competitor half its complexity. The Darwinian system that Maljers described in 1992 — retaining what was useful, rejecting what no longer worked — is being applied now, at speed, to the organism itself.
In the lobby of Unilever's London headquarters at 100 Victoria Embankment, a building that opened in 1933 on the Thames, there are Art Deco murals depicting Lever Brothers' global operations — palm plantations, whaling ships, African trading posts, English factory floors. They are beautiful and troubling in exactly the way Unilever itself is beautiful and troubling: a monument to the conviction that commerce can improve the world, decorated with evidence of all the ways it hasn't.
