How many have you got? Be honest.
I have a good clear-out of mine once a year and I’m still clocking in at thirty. I’m talking, of course, about branded cotton totes. From Daunt Books to Beija Bras, and my newest crush, a promotional tote that says “I Love Jilly Cooper” on it, they colonise an entire corner of my kitchen. My husband hates them and doesn’t see why I need more than one.
Yet I have to stop myself from gathering yet increasing numbers. When I see a really nice one – lovely solid handle, a rectangular base, perhaps an internal pocket, or even just with a cool design or a quirky brand name, I have to bite both my hands so as not to reach out for it.
And it’s not just me. You can’t walk down any street in the UK without passing someone with something jaunty from the V&A or with a natty slogan about a niche hobby or band. What cotton tote you tote has become an externalisation of your identity as much as ear piercings (or lack of) and tattoos (or lack of).
It all started in 2007. When the designer Anya Hindmarch issued a limited collection of her rope-handled cotton bag with “I’m Not a Plastic Bag” written on it, thousands queued up to buy one from Sainsbury’s. I was working at a local London paper at the time and two boys on news secured promotional totes for their girlfriends and I was fuming at missing out, let me tell you. Later, in 2015, a 5p levy was added to supermarket plastic bags and the trickle of cotton tote bags turned into a flood.
The cotton tote is flipping everywhere, despite borderline dodgy eco credentials. An organic cotton tote needs to be used 20,000 times to offset its impact on the planet because of the energy and water needed to produce it, according to a Danish study. That’s the equivalent of using just one tote bag for more than 50 years. Yet, they are handed out willy-nilly and included free-with-purchase in all sorts of places. I have to stop my local bookshop from giving me yet another cotton tote, as of my thirty bags, ten are from there.
I think the only person with more cotton totes than me is the fashion editor Alex Stedman.
“I’m not sure I love cotton tote bags as much as I just accumulate them,” she says. “And then I can never get rid of them, I will reuse them until I die. As a lover of a crossbody bag, it will always be accompanied with a cotton tote to carry everything else. They have their own memories: the I heart Tooting one my sister used to sell in her shop, the one I got from a weird book launch where I didn’t know anyone, the one my friend sent from San Diego.”
And there is a hierarchy, of course. Not all cotton tote bags are created equal. For a certain sort of person, only a bag from Daunt Books, the old-school, polished-wood bookshop with its flagship in Marylebone High Street, will do. There are two types of Daunt bag – one is cotton and is free with a purchase of over £40. The other is canvas (with an internal pocket!) and is free with a purchase of over £80. They retail at £10 and £15 respectively.
“The classic olive green is the most popular,” Brett, the manager of Daunt Books tells me. “But this season our teal bag also seems to be doing very well.”
But there are also reverse-snob rebels, like me, who consider a Daunt Books bag to be a bit obvious. I prefer totes from obscure conferences, leftover promotional merchandise from a failed period product or printed with childish pictures of Snoopy. The only bookshop tote I will carry is from the very tiny store “Mermaid Tales”, which is on Vancouver Island.
It’s easy to forget that when we carry a branded tote, we are working as unpaid ad-boards. Although the great businessmen John Wanamaker once said, “Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is, I don’t know which half”, it is generally considered that money spent on printing branded totes is never wasted.
Sarah Ridley, who is the marketing director at Transworld and oversaw the printing of the Jilly Cooper totes says, “We had about 1,000 printed, primarily for bookshops. For a brand like Jilly they are a great way of adding extra value as well as helping spread the word when people are out and about with them.”
Waitrose, that absolute cast-iron super-brand, which says so much just with its sans-serif font and particular shade of green, has so many reusable bags available at checkout that they are in danger of looking like a branch of Accessorize.
Tim Shaw, Waitrose buyer for non-foods (sorry, how do I get this job?), says, “We have up to 20 reusable shopping bags on sale at any time, made mainly from cotton, a jute/cotton mixture or recycled plastic according to their purpose – for example insulated bags to carry chilled and frozen food home, or fold-up pouch bags which can fit in a coat pocket.”
Waitrose customers are absolute freaks for branded totes. One of their bestsellers has been a Lulu Guinness design, which was manufactured from recycled PET drinks bottles. “On launch day it was the best-selling line in the whole of Waitrose,” says Tim Shaw. “It sold more than any single line of milk, bananas or toilet roll and was selling on eBay for four times the in store price by the time the shops closed that evening.”
Whatever tote you favour, they are going nowhere and the answer – in as much as we need one – is to integrate them in every area of our lives.
“My sister and I have been known to use them as sort of internal mail,” says Alex Stedman. “She drops me her kid’s old clothes in a tote, I send a thank you note and the lip balm she left back in the same tote. It’s all part of our circular economy.”