Fair trade kinky cuffs?

It is quite an experience walking into the Covent Garden shop Coco de Mer. It seems part sex shop, erotic emporium and picture porn gallery. Later on, Samantha (Sam) Roddick, daughter of the Body Shop's Anita, tells me it's far more complicated than that.

"It's not like a traditional sex shop," she says, "where everything is on show. It's quite something else. I love to nurture people and as this shop is all about me and my character, you'll find it's very female-centric. It's about how sensuality flows into sexuality which then turns into eroticism. Do you see what I mean?" No, I say, I don't really. Maybe it's just me.

She then takes me around the shop, her two elfin assistants in tow alternately flicking me with what seem to be miniature feather dusters. " Ticklish, yes?" says one. We all come to a halt in front of the seemingly innocuous bedding range. "You see this cushion?" says Roddick, pointing to a white cushion with very rude words in red old-fashioned embroidered writing on it. "In the cold light of day it looks crude, doesn't it? But when you team it with one of my sensual quilted bed spreads and maybe a pair of silk camiknickers it all becomes beautifully erotic. Do you see?"

We then move on to the sex-toy department which is full of a baffling range of items. There are silver trinkets. Something I can only think is a christening bracelet. She then goes on to describe what to do with the string of pearls.

"It's for, well, you know ... sexual things." Sam Roddick looks a bit cross with herself. "I'm usually very open about these things," she says a touch irritably. "Lord knows why I'm mincing my words now."

But the more she talks, the more like her mother she becomes. Thirty-three-year-old Sam is the daughter of Body Shop creators Anita and Gordon Roddick. She looks very like her mother - small, wiry dark hair, attractive, earthy. She has her mother's pale skin and that strange combination of being utterly intolerant and convinced she is right about everything while also being rather sweet and well-meaning.

She is incapable of seeing the slight incongruity in what she is doing. She shows me a pair of pale pink leather handcuffs. "They're made in Brazil," she says. "All our products are fair trade." The concept of fair trade kinky handcuffs makes me giggle. "What's funny?" she asks, looking baffled.

Again, with the conviction her mother has always possessed, she says that when she realised that she wanted to run a sex shop for women, it never occurred to her that the concept might not work. "Why wouldn't it work?" she says. "I was doing photography and I had girlfriends who wanted me to take seductive photos of them to give to their boyfriends and I couldn't find any proper sensual props that weren't offensive. That's where it came from and once I had the idea I knew I had to do it."

So, hey presto! Coco de Mer came in to being. It almost didn't happen, though. For years she wasn't sure what to do with herself and ricocheted from political activism to a period of what she describes as "total purism".

Basically, she left boarding school, Frensham Heights in Surrey, at the age of 15 with no qualifications. "I was terribly dyslexic," she says, "but no one realised that until I was 14. By then I had learned to be the rebel, the class clown, to disguise my feelings of embarrassment at not being able to read or write.

"I never felt stupid. I could draw everything I wanted to say, but it meant I failed dismally in anything academic. It was very painful for me but my mother was so supportive. She would say, 'You're perfectly intelligent, you just haven't found the way to express it yet,' so I stayed pretty confident."

At 16, Sam Roddick finally found the way when she went to Nepal. "I saw inequalities," she says. "I couldn't understand them. I couldn't see how half of the world could live well while ignoring the other half." So she decided to go around schools and talk about social inequality. Then she ended up in Vancouver where, all of a sudden, in her mid-twenties, everything changed for her.

"I had a breakdown really," she says. "I was exhausted and disillusioned. I had seen child-slave labour and people dying trying to stop logging in Brazil. I had experienced things most people never do in their entire lifetime and I was too young to cope."

Her reaction was to embark on what she describes as her "period of purism". For three years she gave up everything, bar her shabby rented digs, and turned into a "dumpster diver".

"I didn't spend any money at all," she says, "apart from on rent. I ate out of dumpsters. You should see what people throw away! Especially organic shops. I traded clothes with friends. I lived with homeless people. It was very hard work, actually, just surviving."

Was she in touch with her parents at the time? "Yes," she says. Were they worried about her? "To be honest," she says, "my mother was beside herself."

She came back to the UK with Kunja, a drummer who works "erratically". He was brought up in a Hari Krishna community near Vancouver and left when he was 13. They met through their joint love of all things ethical, then married, because she found out she was pregnant with her daughter, Osha, who is now five.

"Maybe it sorted me out," she says. "I didn't have many friends here. While I was off saving the world, they were all shopping for shoes and handbags. I suppose I was a bit intense."

Now, though, she seems to have left her political activism far behind. "Oh, but I spent years running away from retail," she says. "My mum and dad were all about that. I spent my childhood having holidays which coincided with a conference here and a business something there. I also spent my youth travelling around with my mother while she researched products, which was fascinating, but I vowed I'd never be like her."

By the time we get to the erotic literature, my head is spinning. "It's all very carefully researched," says Roddick. She takes it all very seriously. "Oh yes," she says. "My husband and I do try things out. We have to really, or else we don't know if it will work." Like what? "Oh, use your imagination," she says.

The prices in the shop range from £12 for a feather tickler, £140 for the human-hair whip, £1,000 for a silver collar and lead, up to £12,000 for the jewelled whip. Lacy undies come in between £30 and £60 a pair.

The shop is obviously a huge success. Most of that is probably down to Roddick herself. There is something very focused and driven about her. For example, just last week she insisted on going to court in a trademark battle against Chanel.

"It's a point of principle," she says. "We have our brand of products here. We do the bath oils and massage oils and scents and things but we also do the lingerie and the sex toys. Chanel was worried that people would get muddled up with our products and theirs because of the Coco part of the name. I think what they do and what I do is so utterly removed from each other that I can't imagine anyone getting muddled ... but we had to fight it and we lost."

What were the consequences? "It's very complicated," she says. "It doesn't affect our massage products because Chanel don't do that, but it does affect our leather goods because Chanel do handbags and luggage. I'm not quite sure what we are going to do yet."

At the moment, she and Kunja are trying to decide whether to have another baby. "I want to, but I'm so busy. I started out thinking that I would have everyone working from my home and a cook would come in and make us wonderful food because I don't think you can work to the best of your ability if you don't eat things made with love.

"Then we'd have massages and reiki sessions and ... " It all sounds marvellous, I say. "Yes, but so expensive!" she says. "You see, I'm an idealist and a practicalist at the same time. It's tough."

She is right, it is a tough one, but I'm sure she'll sort it all out. Before I leave she tells me that, unlike her mother's Body Shop chain, she doesn't really want to expand the business. "Maybe another shop," she says, "but no department store stuff. That's just not me. I'm not in it for the money and it dilutes the product."

But didn't her mother say that before Body Shop took over the world while sort-of forgetting it was supposed to be saving it?

"I'm not getting into that!" she says, and suddenly starts advancing on me with yet another one of her French feather ticklers. As I run into the rather sober coffee shop next door, I realise I've just had a lucky escape. She could have been brandishing an object that I can only describe as a champagne stopper.