Ragbag: “Free karma with each bag”

A story from rags to riches

Creating a product that not only sells, but also cleans the streets and provides honest employment in low-cost countries: impossible? Enter Ragbag, a Dutch company that makes fashionable bags from recycled plastic waste bags, helping local people and cleaning the streets in the process. A story from rags to riches.

Founder of Ragbag Siem Haffmans (43) sits in his shared office in Amsterdam. Carton bags are lined up against the wall, all filled with new products by Ragbag. Haffmans, an industrial design graduate who used to work as a product designer in the plastic industry, started his company in 2005. “I used to design products for DIY stores when I started thinking: who am I doing this for? I wasn’t really behind what I was doing, and it certainly wasn’t something I wanted to be doing for the rest of my life.” Haffmans decided to go in a completely different direction: together with five friends he started a partnership called Ideal & co, specialising on sustainable design. “A while later I was invited to come to Delhi for a conference on eco-design and talk about what we do in the area of sustainable design. While I was there, I met some people who had invented a process of pressing plastic waste bags together into useable sheets. I really liked the material they used and the idea behind it, but the execution wasn’t very good yet, so I decided to start a project and work with these people - and that was the beginning of Ragbag.”

Success from the start

Haffmans came up with a name, and found a designer in Rietveld Academy graduate Ellen Sillekens. With a small collection of shoulder bags, organisers and accessories, Ragbag was a success from the start. Organisations such as Greenpeace and Oxfam Novib added the brand to their catalogues and a special bag was designed for Amnesty International. The combination of the social aspect, the recycling aspect and the nice-looking bag seems to work well. Haffmans: “We have been working like this for the last ten years, but now that sustainable design is receiving so much attention, it obviously helps to sell the product. We help people who live in the slums, clean up the mess, recycle garbage and come up with a cool bag as well. And of course there’s the feel-good aspect: free karma with each bag!”

Participation in the BiD Challenge competition (Business in Development) forced Haffmans to write a business plan, something he hadn’t done yet, despite already having placed his first order for bags in Delhi. Haffmans won second prize in the competition and ended up with a business plan worthy of pursuing. Later he received the ‘Ei van Columbus’ (Egg of Columbus), a prize for sustainable innovation awarded by six Dutch government ministries, in the category of international cooperation. He also won the European Business Award for the Environment. Haffmans: “We were standing on stage with such big-name brands as Volkswagen and BASF. Pretty impressive for a small up-and-coming brand from the Netherlands!”

Luxury problem

There now is a worldwide demand for Ragbags – with 50 shops in 7 countries, including the US and Japan, the brand sold over 5,000 items last year and plans are to double this number for 2008 - but demand isn’t the problem. The small factory in Delhi already has problems keeping up with the demand as it is, meaning that most shops run out of stock very quickly. A luxury problem, says Haffmans, who has already found ways to diversify his line of products. There’s the project in Calcutta, where recycled saris are ripped into small strips and woven into new fabric to make bags out of them. Commercial prints on spare wheel covers for scooters in Bhopal inspired Haffmans to design a new line of backpacks called ‘scooterbags’. In Cameroon, local women are now working on a project to knit used plastic bags into Ragbags. The projects are purposely dissimilar: “I prefer to do something different with each group, rather than trying to implement my old ideas elsewhere. By doing so, we have more opportunities business-wise and we do not limit our creativity.”

Riding the wave

With only a small budget for advertising and promotion, Haffmans mainly depends on word of mouth and free publicity to promote his brand. “Ragbag gives you something extra. The design is key, but the social aspect of our company might just give people the extra push and have them spread the word. We had a feature on the national news last year when Holland’s Queen Beatrix was on a trip to India. They followed our operation there and we ended up with a three-minute special on prime-time TV. Sustainable design is hot and we are gratefully riding the wave.”

Due to his success, Haffmans has now hired an intern as well as freelance designers to work on his website. He is also thinking about outsourcing the distribution and hiring a commercial partner to make the most of the business. “I want to increase sales, and keep diversifying the line of products. Our aim is to set up loads of cells worldwide, which provide us with our products and partner with us to develop ideas and products to sell all around the world.”

www.ragbag.eu