Anya Hindmarch: from rats to £12,500 crocodile skin handbags Hindmarch now has 57 shops worldwide and is opening a flagship store in New York this year. Business turnover is about £20m. Winning Business Woman of the Year has come at a pivotal point for the British fashion designer. She has recently taken the decision to "demote" herself from running her business - she hired a new chief executive last year - to get back to the nitty-gritty of designing bags. Far from the modern and "sterile" fashion industry today, however, Hindmarch wants more of her shops to look and feel exactly like this one on Pont Street: luxurious and warm, with a nod to the 1920s and traditional haberdashery. I'm going to establish my mark on the direction of the product. I want to merge this bespoke store, which is unique, into other stores," she says. I want to connect more with the craftsman process because it's become quite sterile and I want to set up more workshops. I've got a million things on my to-do list. Hindmarch started the business at her kitchen table in 1987, aged 18. She thinks back to the challenges she faced, such as ordering far too many bags, which lay under her kitchen table for weeks when she could not sell them. Those bags were featured in a newspaper article but I only sold four of them. Every time I sat down to have breakfast they were staring at me," she says. Hindmarch has come a long way since then. Her most expensive handbags, made from crocodile skin, fetch around £12,500. She has shops in Hong Kong, Japan and Malaysia. At the top of her to-do list is recruiting and managing the best teams. Making sure you get the right teams, that's a big hurdle. I employ lots of wonderful women but you're dancing around maternity leave and personal issues. You have to make sure the teams are strong, as the people element [of a business] is what we're most vulnerable to," she says. But she fears it will be difficult to find the right staff in future. Lots of people want to work on the PR team but the craft is the really exciting thing. We need to make it cool to learn skills again," she says. In her role as non-executive director at the British Fashion Council, Hindmarch promotes fashion careers in schools: "If there's more people shouting about learning a skill, the better." She also hires apprentices at her Pont Street workshop. However, the Tory donor is frustrated that "interning" has a bad name, warning that it prevents firms from offering unpaid opportunities to young people. Intern is a dirty word, I'm quite cross about that. It's very hard to take on interns because the laws are so particular. Having an intern is not fun for an employer, you're helping them get a job. Growing firms need Government to "get out of the picture," she says. What you want is simple employment laws, easy tax systems. Hindmarch's efforts in supporting the next generation of entrepreneurs is one reason for winning the Veuve Clicquot award. Another is her "I'm not a plastic bag" campaign, which cut shoppers" reliance on plastic bags. As we sit among her luxury bags, worth tens of thousands of pounds, she says: "There used to be 15 people in the basement, with no natural light, with rats everywhere. One day I was working and I saw this horrible tail come down. We had the rat catcher in every month. The key is to face hurdles head-on. "There's a thousand mountains to climb when you're growing your business and you're very naive if you don't feel breathlessly challenged by each one," she says. Business for me is about hitting a brick wall and either going around it, over it or through it.