Anya Hindmarch started her handbag business at 19, when she imported a style from Italy. Today she has 46 shops worldwide and is a celebrity favourite; everyone from Lucy Liu to Baroness Thatcher carries her bags. Essex-born Hindmarch, almost 40, was recently the first recipient of Brand of the Year at the British Fashion Awards and had success with her ethical initiative, I’m Not a Plastic Bag. She lives in London with her husband and five children.

My style does change. I am brain-washed by trends. It’s amazing how one minute you think drainpipes are your only option and the next minute you want skirts. Getting the right dress for a big event, however, is part of my job. My team makes sure I don’t wear something I’ve been seen in ten times. But I’m not a slave to fashion. However nice it makes you feel, it is a frivolous subject in that it doesn’t save lives.

Recently I went to Moscow, and it was everything I’d hoped for in terms of the fur and Pucci. They have fun with fashion, perhaps a bit too much fun, but the women there are incredibly savvy. They are living in a place of rapid development and it feels exciting. Every woman I met, while there to open my shop, has started her own business. The fashion world is watching Russia and following its lead.

My bags are about craftsmanship. If I could be allowed just one from my extensive collection, it would be my bespoke Ebury that has a lovely message inscribed inside from my husband and children. And I want my children to pass it down. My mother gave me one of her Gucci cast-offs when I was 16 and it made me feel fantastic. The power of that handbag was the impetus for my business. I was planning to go to university, but went to Italy and found a bag that I thought women would like. I sent it to Harpers and Queen, they placed it in the magazine and I ended up selling 500.

If I had to describe the brand in three words, they would be: British, humorous and bespoke. It’s still very connected to London, where it started in 1993. I am British and proud to be so, plus you absorb so much of what is around you. When I started, I spent time in Hackney, alongside leather and metalworkers, so it’s really part of the brand’s DNA. What I like is the feeling that anything can happen in London.

It is very frustrating when you see a copy of one of your bags. So much hard work has gone into each one. Often we can take 15 or 16 attempts to get an angle right. That said, when I saw my first copy on Canal Street in New York, there was a moment of “Yes! We’ve made it”, quickly followed by: “What creeps, you’ve stolen my idea.”

Looking back, I wouldn’t have done anything differently with the I’m Not a Plastic Bag initiative. It was hard though, because the criticism wasn’t against us, it was against Sainsbury’s. We were accused of being unethical because the bags were made in China, hinting, of course, that they were made by child labour, which they were not. I checked extremely carefully myself.

We’d have loved the bag to have been made from organic cotton, but we could not find enough. It’s a very limited market. We were trying to raise awareness of wasted plastic bags. The campaign’s success was overwhelming: 80,000 people queued on one day in England alone. And 30 people in Beijing were treated in hospital after being caught in a scrum. That was awful.

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