Our Story

In the early 2000s, Chief Executives from large supermarkets and retailers in the UK came together, along with British Prime Minister Tony Blair, to form the “Courtauld Pact” as part of the UK’s Waste and Recycling Action Programme (WRAP).

Sir Terry Leahy of Tesco, Sir Stuart Rose of M&S, and other business leaders made a commitment to reduce single-use plastic bags from their shops as part of a bold new sustainability agenda.

The BBC had just aired the ground-breaking documentary by Sir David Attenborough called “Blue Planet” which showed to millions of viewers the devastation plastic waste can have to wildlife in green spaces, waterways, and oceans.

A solitary turtle chewing on a plastic bag in an ocean became a modern-day icon of the insatiable appetite humans have for disposable packaging in the form of plastic.

In the early 2000s Supreme Creations was selling reusable bags and packaging made from cotton to small health food shops, and to forward-thinking sustainable companies like Mooncup, and Bodyshop which wanted alternatives to single-use plastic.

At the time Sri was also the largest wholesaler in Europe of a natural yarn called jute – a “golden fibre” which was used to form the backing of carpets, but could also be transformed into sacks, bags, and packaging…

It was however a chance encounter with the parents of two girls taking part in The Wings of Hope Achievement Awards, a charity co-founded by Dr R Sri Ram and his wife Rajni, that turned Supreme Creations from being a wholesale business to a major manufacturing one.

Two 14-year-old girls invited Sri and Rajni, as their “guests of honour”, to witness the launch of hundreds of balloons in central London, as part of their fundraising project for the Wings of Hope Children’s Charity.

During the photoshoot, the parents of one of the students thanked Sri and Rajni for giving their daughter the chance to be a young entrepreneur for a great cause and invited Sri to his offices that week for a coffee.

This chance meeting led Dr R. Sri Ram to be summoned by the Board of Tesco, the UK’s largest supermarket (whom this parent happened to be associated with) to help lead an initiative on using new alternative materials to plastic.

Overnight, the pressure was on as the race to become the first supermarket to launch a reusable shopping bag commenced.

Retailers scoured the world to find a manufacturer who could meet the demand to hit the ambitious targets of reducing billions of single-use plastic bags.

Dr Sri decided that the small manufacturing unit he had in Wales was not large enough to cope with the scale of the requirements he had from the likes of Tesco, Sainsbury’s, ASDA,  The Co-Op, Boots, Debenhams and others.

He turned to the city of Pondicherry in South India, an old French colonial coastal city which was not a traditional major manufacturing hub but sat within the textile belt of India.

Through local connections, Dr Sri decided to create a factory with tailors and printing experts to sample, and subsequently, scale up production of reusable bags.

Dr Sri had a passion for architecture, particularly classical architecture, and wanted to create a haven for his newly recruited team so that they could enjoy working in a factory.

From pediments to arches and columns, water features and garden spaces, the architects drew up a beautiful factory which was pink and cream as the new manufacturing home for Supreme Creations.

In 2008, multitasking between production and scaling up the factory, Dr Sri invited the British High Commissioner to India, Sir Richard Stagg, to officially inaugurate the factory.

For context, Pondicherry is not a major city like Delhi or Bombay, but Sir Richard, along with his family, made the journey to this coastal town because he cared deeply about Supreme Creations’ mission and vision to be a beacon of UK and India relations.

He was met with great fanfare – flower garlands, drummers, and Indian trumpets playing “Nadaswaram”. At the inauguration ceremony was also the Head of Fairtrade at the Co-Op, Brad Hill.

A pioneer in transparency and supporting ethical practice in supply chains, Brad led countless initiatives for the Fairtrade movement, for farmers around the world to get better wages and a stable demand for crops from their far-flung customers.

Brad convinced Sri to invest in becoming Fairtrade accredited, and to undergo the strict auditing practices. With this, grew a lifelong friendship and even bolder ambition to support everyone along the supply chain, and with this The Co-Op became the first supermarket in the UK, followed swiftly by Sainsbury’s to launch Fairtrade cotton shopping bags.

This single-handedly transformed the cotton industry for Fairtrade farmers and gave them a new source of income.

It soon became apparent that our mission to support the planet was jointly embedded in a mission to support people along the supply chain. Local TV adverts were aired as part of a recruitment drive for employees to join the Supreme Creations factory.

However, Dr Sri was clear that he wanted to have local tailors, preferably women so that they could have a source of stable income for themselves and their families.

Through word-of-mouth, Sai Supreme (the name of the factory) became a beacon of employment for hundreds of women who were going to be trained in skills of tailoring, quality control, printing, colour-mixing and more.

To this present day 80%+ of the workforce are women, many of whom were the original recruits 15+ years ago – a remarkable tenure for employees in the textiles industry which has high worker turnover rates.

In 2009, The Prince’s Charity, Business in the Community, founded by the now King Charles the Third, presented Dr Sri Ram, with the national award for Most Ethical Supply Chain.

An enormous vote of confidence, after being in the running for the title against EDF Energy and United Utilities – large conglomerates in comparison to Supreme Creations.

At a reception at St. James’ Palace, HRH The Prince of Wales presented a ceramic decorative bowl from Highgrove and an oak sapling. The oak tree is now 30ft tall in Sri’s garden in London and fairing well in the British weather.

Supreme Creations and the work it was doing for brands in the UK and Europe, for its own label manufacturing, started to become known for custom-made, reusable products which delivered design punch.

The technical investment in machinery, from automated printing machines to high-grade silk screen meshes, and stitching machines, was greatly appreciated by the art directors, and graphic designers of global brands – from Nike to Topshop, Google, to Gleneagles, Sephora to Selfridges.

However, it was the “soul” of the company that people loved to learn more about.

Bags of Ethics was a care label that was stitched inside every product to show that it was made in an ethically audited factory, which was producing reusable items. But Bags of Ethics quickly became the label that people wanted to have more visible in their products.

It stood for more than a product and had a call to action for a sustainable mission which was easy to understand at all levels – by consumers, and businesses. Little did we know that Bags of Ethics would become the calling card for the business.

A humble little, smiley label, that stood for so much. Fashion brands wanted to collaborate with “Bags of Ethics” be it Mulberry, Dior, Julien Macdonald, or Zuhair Murad, to be seen and worn at London Fashion Week or in the coolest shops in Tokyo, Berlin, Paris, New York, Milan or Mumbai.

As the climate crisis evolves and consumerism needs to be stymied, the role of advocacy in creating sustainable business models and circularity have now become a central pillar of Bags of Ethics work.

Dr Sri Ram, alongside his daughter Smruti, are now guest lecturers in several global business schools and universities including London Business School, the University of Vermont Grossman School of Business, the University of Oxford, the University of Westminster and more.

Bags of Ethics is now a case study for sustainable family businesses, and regularly comments on retail practices, supply chains, and is now hosting various conferences globally to understand sustainability in practice.

However, when it comes to community work, much of it is focussed on the natural world, and working in close connection with it.

Sri is a compulsive gardener and has a passion for organic food, trees, and growing plants and flowers which are good pollinators.

One of Dr Sri’s proudest charity campaigns has been to support the work of The Queen’s Green Canopy which helped plant over 3.75 million trees in the UK, as part of the Platinum Jubilee celebrations of the regretted Queen Elizabeth the Third.  The latest charity campaign is the Green Tree Badge, a partnership with the Royal Forestry Society. The Green Tree Badge supports a better understanding of trees by children. The Scouts and various community trusts have been instrumental in the ambitious target to get 1 million children to love trees more.