Achieving success for entrepreneurs' daughters

London Business School's Institute of Entrepreneurship and Private Capital (IEPC) was recently host to this year's Family Firm Institute (FFI) Conference.

One area of discussion during the three-day conference which came to prominence was that of succession, in particular the need to bring on and advance the prominence of daughters within family businesses, helping talented female entrepreneurs to take leadership roles.

Entrepreneurs’ Daughters: How Experiences from the Past Influence the Future proved to be one stimulating discussion on the subject. Growing up a daughter of an entrepreneur impacts you for the rest of your life. Heidi Los and Marcella Bos conducted research on daughters of entrepreneurs and the power they gained from it. This workshop focused on the topic of female entrepreneurship in family firms, with a particular emphasis on the role of women's leadership in these businesses. It is based on Heidi Los and Marcella Bos's book The Power of Entrepreneurs’ Daughters: What Growing Up in an Entrepreneurial Family Brings You, which delves into the profound impact of growing up in a family business. Based on a comprehensive mix of quantitative and qualitative research, it unveiled twelve distinctive characteristics of entrepreneurs' daughters. These characteristics ranged from autonomy and realization power to a blend of masculine and feminine qualities, providing a nuanced understanding of the traits developed during early childhood and the growing-up phase.

Another stimulating discussion, Sustainability Strategy in Family Firms: Drawing on the Past and Looking into the Future, took place between Dr. R. Sri Ram and his daughter Smruti Sriram, an LBS alumna (MBA 2018).

The story of Supreme Creations

Sri Ram is founder and chairman of the London-based textiles firm, Supreme Creations. He credits a chance conversation with the father of one of the young people working on projects for his Wings of Hope charity with transforming the fortunes of the business.

Overnight he went from employing ten people in a small factory in Wales to employing 1,500 in a factory in Pondicherry, India, and boasting customers such as Tesco.

Wings of Hope is a small charity that he set up with his wife Rajni 20 years ago. It has an annual income of around £100,000 and helps organise social enterprise programmes in secondary schools. Over 35,000 students have taken part in projects and received face-to-face mentoring with young professionals to help prepare them for their careers.

The charity donates the money raised to poor communities in India and Malawi, providing young people there with a free education.

Ram said the girl’s father was Clive Humby, co-founder of the loyalty card pioneer Dunnhumby. “He led us to Tesco,” Ram recalled. “We then became the supplier of Tesco. It was not some clever planning of mine. It just happened that I was in the right place at the right time.”

The timing was good because the main supermarkets signed up to a voluntary agreement to reduce food and packaging waste in 2005 and were looking to offer customers alternatives to single-use plastic bags. Supreme Creations made reusable cloth bags but had never produced on the scale required to serve a supermarket.

“We got the order from Tesco … and we had to produce an alternative reusable bag,” Ram said. “So from a small factory of ten people in Wales I had to move to south India and scale up very rapidly. From ten employees to 1,500 employees in six months.”

More recently Supreme Creations, which supplies tote bags and other reusable packaging to the likes of Dior, Sephora, Harrods, Space NK and The White Company, has partnered with charitable initiatives such as the Queen’s Green Canopy, which ran from the Platinum Jubilee celebrations to March this year and saw three million trees planted in Queen Elizabeth’s memory.

Ram's daughter, Smruti Sriram, the CEO of Bags of Ethics, arranged a partnership with the Royal Forestry Society, which launched its Green Tree Badge initiative in September. “It takes a huge amount of emotional energy, but our mission is to get one million children to learn more actively about trees,” she said.

Forging a dynamic daughter-father partnership

Smruti and Ram gave a lively account of how Smruti came into the business following her degree at Oxford after gaining her MA Philosophy, Politics and Economics. Smruti told of the exhilaration she felt as she developed her role as Corporate and New Markets Manager, initially with Supreme Creations, but then developing significantly within the company in the form of various roles, first as co-founder of the charity, Wings of Hope, and then becoming CEO of Bags of Ethics and Supreme Creations.

"The Bags of Ethics label was created as a way of supporting and championing the causes that we feel strongly about. Every year we work collaboratively with select brand or charity partners to create products that drive change in these areas." says Smruti.

Smruti Sriram’s list of accolades is hugely impressive. Since joining Supreme Creations, she has received a Prince of Wales award for most ethical supply chain, and was chosen as an ambassador for the UK Trade & Investment’s ‘Business is Great’ campaign. Other accolades includes reaching the final three of the Veuve Clicquot Business Woman: New Generation Award, and being named in the BBC’s 100 Women of 2014. Moreover, Smruti was in Management Today and the Sunday Times’s 35 Women Under 35 list for 2014, and was a finalist in the Asian Woman of Achievement Awards: Young Achiever 2014.

Social impact

As well as picking up awards, Smruti has made a real difference to people’s lives through Supreme Creation’s factory in Pondicherry, India. Women account for about 90 per cent of the factory’s workforce, with many of them coming from less privileged backgrounds. Employees get fair wages, hi-tech working conditions and care programmes for their families. “It’s crucial for jobs to have purpose,” says Smruti. “Everyone gets a voice in the wider process of what Supreme Creations does. That could be through direct contact with clients, collaborating on design or print, or creating a new product. Every employee contributes in a meaningful way.” While at Supreme Creations, Smruti has helped to re-position the reusable bag as the ultimate ‘walking billboard’ for brands. Recognised as an industry expert on ethical manufacture in textiles, the company has worked with Nike, Tesco, John Lewis, Topshop, Google, London Fashion Week and Oxfam. Smruti, whose business boasts a multi-lingual, multi-functional team of 25 in Europe and 700 in India, has also won the contract to supply Tesco’s ‘Green Bag for Life,’ and grown her firm’s client list to more 50,000. Customers include FMCG, fashion, retail, technology and design companies.