She’s famous for designing luxury handbags, but Anya Hindmarch CBE is hoping to change the world with her latest creation for supermarkets: the Universal Bag. Emma Higginbotham meets her

Back in 2007, when Greta Thunberg was at preschool and Cop 26 would have sounded like a futuristic police drama, Anya Hindmarch decided it was time to save the planet.

She was an unlikely activist. A celebrated handbag designer, best known for creating Princess Diana’s little satin ‘cleavage bags’ (so named because she’d clasp them to her chest when climbing out of cars in front of the paparazzi), glamorous Anya was the opposite of a Swampy-style eco-warrior. Yet she was uncomfortable with single-use plastic bags, and suspected she could use her job to make a difference.

“I was double-bagging at the supermarket, and getting home and putting them all in the bin,” she recalls. “It’s nuts, isn’t it? It feels so wrong, like smoking. It was bothering me, but I didn’t know what I could do.

“Then someone wrote a book called Change the World for a Fiver. The book was £5, and inside were 40 actions, and the first was ‘wherever possible, refuse plastic bags’. They came to me saying could I help amplify that message? And I had one of those moments of going ‘I can do this!’ So we designed a really nice bag to sell for a fiver as well.”

Given that her handbags usually cost hundreds of pounds, the cotton tote, emblazoned with the words ‘I am not a plastic bag’, was, she says, “obviously a loss-making project for us. But we felt it was important. Very simply the aim was around awareness, to say take your reusable shopping bag.”

What she didn’t expect was the global frenzy. Photographed on the shoulders of celebs including Claudia Schiffer, Reece Witherspoon and Keira Knightly, the bag quickly gained cult status, selling out within hours of its staggered release and reappearing on eBay at hugely inflated prices. In Taiwan, 30 people were hospitalised in the stampede to buy one.

“It went crazy,” she recalls. “In Tokyo I went out to dinner at 8 o’clock the night before the launch, which was 10 o’clock the next morning, and there was a queue all the way round the department store, and all the way round the next block, with people sleeping overnight. It was quite bizarre. But what it did was drive awareness.”

It certainly did. The British Retail Consortium estimates that in 2006 the UK used 10.6 billion plastic bags; this dropped to 6.1 billion after the project. “Then legislation came in saying you had to charge 5p for a bag, which was fantastic,” says Anya. “We were really proud of it. It nearly killed us, but it made a difference, and we felt that we could go back to our day jobs.”

Which they did. Fast forward a decade, however, and Anya realised the problem was far from over. “Yes, people are more aware, but the conversation has changed to ‘how can you keep things out of landfill?’ There’s still eight billion tons of plastic on the planet, apparently, and how can we put it back into things that stay in circulation?”

Her answer was a swishy handbag made from recycled plastic bottles and car windscreens, adorned with the words ‘I AM a plastic bag’. For its launch during Fashion Week last year, Anya closed her London stores and instead filled them with 90,000 used plastic bottles. “We’re so disconnected from what we throw away and what happens to it,” she explains. “I wanted people to register that when you throw something away, there is no ‘away’. And actually if we each had to bury everything that we couldn’t recycle in our own garden, you would soon stop taking more stuff.”

But with the range averaging £695 for a handbag, she’s opted to do something more accessible for her latest project, the Universal Bag.

Capacious and sturdy, the £10 shopper is Anya’s solution to ditching flimsy grocery bags for good. Made entirely from recycled materials and fully recyclable itself, it’s universal in two ways: not only is it roomy enough to transport everything from your supermarket purchases to your laundry, picnics, kids’ sleepover essentials and so on, but the plan is to stock it in every supermarket, with each Universal Bag carrying the shop’s individual colours. The one Anya shows Weekend, in Waitrose’s familiar dark and lime green, will initially be available in 90 stores from the end of March 2022.

“I’m obsessed with this idea of ‘eco, not ego’. Everyone has their own colour, but actually this could be the de facto shopping bag, and it’s so big of the grocers to do this together – that’s almost the coolest thing about this,” she says. “I really feel that we can make a difference. We will always have to carry things around, that’s a fact of life, so let’s do it in a way that’s saving bottles from landfill, that you can recycle, that’s guaranteed to last.”

Countless hours have gone into the design of the bag, which can be carried over the shoulder. “It takes a huge weight, and it’s waterproof – you can wipe it clean if your chicken leaks, and you can put it on the puddly ground when you’re waiting for a bus – so it’s really practical. And it’s nice!” she adds with a laugh. “That’s really important, because actually a Bag for Life is not something you’re particularly proud to use. If it’s desirable, it encourages people to use it.”

Anya knows a thing or two about desirability. Born in 1968, the middle of three children growing up in Essex, she recalls being “pretty unexceptional” at school, but creative and with an eye for design. Her lightbulb moment was aged 16, when her mum gave her one of her old handbags: “I remember how it made me feel, and it was very powerful. I found fashion very interesting in that way.”

Her family was full of entrepreneurs – not least her father, who ran a plastic flowerpot empire (the irony doesn’t escape her) – and she recalls Christmas lunches feeling like board meetings, with everyone delivering their end-of-year results over the roast potatoes. So it was no big deal when Anya announced, aged 18, that she wasn’t going to university, she was going to start her own handbag business instead.

She duly flew to Florence, the home of leather, and noticed that the Italian girls were all carrying a chic drawstring duffel. “It was the days before cheap flights, when people didn’t travel much, so I hadn’t seen it in London,” she recalls. “It was just a really nice bag, and I managed to draw my own version and have it made by a factory there.” Fashion magazine Harpers & Queen soon picked up on Anya’s bags, and before long she’d picked up celebrity fans, not least a certain royal (“It was a great honour, obviously, to make handbags for Princess Diana,” she says).

The business flourished. At its peak they had nearly 60 stores worldwide, but today Anya has closed all but a handful to concentrate on online sales, instead opening a ‘village’ of pop-up stores around her very first shop, in Chelsea’s Pont Street, to give customers a proper retail experience. “It’s been really fun to do. We’ve got five stores now, including a little café. I think the next 10 years are going to be about localisation over globalisation.”

During lockdown, Anya wrote a book, If In Doubt, Wash Your Hair, detailing what she’s learned about business and beyond. “You get to 50 and you realise there are so many things you wish you’d known,” she says. “It’s good to share openly.”

She’s open about her anxiety issues, particularly around speaking in public: “The fact is everyone feels like that, and no one’s honest about it. So actually why don’t we just be honest about it? Because otherwise the person who’s feeling that feels bad about themselves. I thought if it helps one person, it’s been worth doing.”

She’s also open about her unusual family life. Anya was 25 when she met James Seymour, a father of three children under the age of four, who’d been widowed six months earlier. When they became a couple, she found herself with an instant family.

“People were obviously concerned that it was a lot to take on, but I think you’re quite determined, aren’t you, when you’re young.” She and James, who joined her in the business, went on to have two more sons, taking the total to five; the youngest has just started university. “It’s a huge privilege having a big family, but it’s not without a lot of work,” she grins. “And yet there are so many modern families like mine now that it feels quite normal. It’s lovely, but it’s certainly a busy life.”

Being a parent, however, compounds her fears for the future. “I’m super-frightened about this environmental situation. Properly frightened. I just don’t think people are quite registering how serious it is,” she says. “I had my first climate incident, actually, with flooding during that awful biblical rain in August, and this is going to become more and more regular.

“We cannot carry on as we are. We’ve got to make changes. It’s incumbent on us to do it for our kids – not even our grand-kids, I hate to say – and it’s going to be a hell of a challenge. But the great thing is that actually we can all work together to come up with ways to solve the problem, and I’m hugely optimistic: you only have to look at the amazing Sarah Gilbert and the vaccine. We will solve this, but we’re all going to have to really pull together.”

Which is why a project like the Universal Bag gives her hope. “Exactly! When would you ever bring big grocers together to work together in such a collaborative way? It’s fantastic, and such a step forward. That’s probably the most exciting part, actually, because that inspires others to work together too.”

ALWAYS IN FASHION

• A top tip from Anya’s book is to make peace with not being a perfect parent. “I’m working as hard as my father, yet I have the role model of my mother, who didn’t work much, and struggling to be the perfect homemaker - which I’m not! It’s impossible.”

• Her favourite handbag? “The crisp packet is a really special one. It’s really complicated to make, and it’s so beautiful watching the craftsmen in Florence make it: it’s all hand-cast and hand-polished and hand-plated. It’s really a little piece of art.”

• The Universal Bag is guaranteed for 10 years, “so that’s a pound a year to transport your things,” says Anya. “And then inside, there’s a Freepost pocket: you literally fold it into that, and recycle it by putting it in the letterbox.”

An edited version of this interview appeared in Waitrose Weekend in November 2021 (c) Waitrose