Meet The Manufacturer Making Reusable Totes For Dior

Lisa Grainger meets Smruti Sriram OBE, the dynamo now at the helm of Bags of Ethics, the world’s largest manufacturer of ethical packaging, with Dior and the Royal Palaces among its clients.

Bags of Ethics: The Journey So Far

When 38-year-old Smruti Sriram thinks back to why she became involved in her father’s business, she giggles with embarrassment. After Oxford – and work experience at the European Parliament, in the US shadowing an American senator, and in London at Deutsche Bank, PWC and Saatchi & Saatchi – she’d assumed she would be snapped up by the city. Then suddenly the financial crisis of 2008 hit. ‘So I thought: “Why not go into the family business for a few months?”’ she says, clearly cringing at the size of her youthful ego. ‘It can’t do any harm.’

Today, as the CEO of her father’s company, Supreme Creations, and its sub-brand Bags of Ethics, the north Londoner is not only in awe of the empire her father, Dr R Sri Ram, has built – but just how much she had to learn from him. Today, their company is the world’s largest ethical manufacturer of reusable bags and eco-packaging – ranging from fashionable totes for Selfridges and Dior to gardening mats for the Royal Palaces’ shops – and is regularly cited as an example of a business that’s good for both planet and people.

Smruti Sriram

The business began, Sriram explains, when her father realised that if the supermarkets were going to start charging for plastic bags, customers might prefer to use reusable totes. As a young man, he’d been one of the largest traders in jute and cotton in Europe, and so knew the suppliers. He’d met the CEOs of Tesco and M&S, and they wanted to work with him. So, at the age of 40, he went to Pondicherry in India, where the jute was grown, and built a factory. Six months later, he had a multinational business employing 1,500.

Today, under the leadership of Sriram, they make packaging for more than 60,000 brands internationally and during Covid became the largest supplier of recyclable masks in the UK.

That they’re commercially successful is obviously pleasing to the 38-year-old – not least because that allows her family to support various charities involved in education, sustainability, tree-planting, design and art (including the mentoring charity they started, Wings of Hope). But what she is clearly really proud of is the way they do business, from their ethical supply chain to the conditions in their Pondicherry factory, whose workforce is 80 percent female. When clients visit, she says, they often say they can’t believe what a lovely place it is to work. Surrounded by established gardens, the sprawling, low, pink French-style building – ‘which looks more like a palace in Jaipur than a factory in South India,’ she says – has music wafting through it for the staff. And inside, it is a buzzing, clean, bright modern area with lots of air flow, to keep workers cool. The former high commissioner to India, Sir Richard Stagg, called it ‘a beacon of hope’.

Working with a beautiful ethical factory that her father built in Pondicherry and where 80 percent of the staff are female, Sriram is a real trailblazer in the sustainable space

Since she took over as CEO in 2013, she has grown her father’s three pillars of Professional, Ethical and Green, and carved out a role as a smart leader in the sustainable business world, giving lectures, appearing on panels and interviewing specialists on topics from cotton to plastic.

This year, to her surprise, she was honoured with an OBE, in recognition of her role as an ethical leader. Although she can’t imagine leading in any other way, she says. ‘Service was instilled in me from a very young age. My family are very generous people. If someone is hungry, they will feed them. If a staff-member’s family is sick, they will help them. I remember my grandmother would break off a little roti, or rice, to feed the birds before she had a mouthful. They are overflowing with kindness. So I know nothing else.’

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