Mike France is, in his own words, a "retail lifer". Having joined the Littlewoods management training scheme after leaving school, he found himself running a store with 350 staff by the age of 22, on the board of BHS in his early 30s and managing some of Sears' most prominent brands in the mid-90s.

It was during this time that he met his long-term business partner Peter Ellis, and the duo started to explore the possibility of taking over a retail operation themselves. "We decided that we'd had enough for making money for other people," he says.

After talks to take over one of the Sears brands France was managing broke down, they came close to taking over Littlewoods, with the intention of making it a low-cost outlet along the lines Primark would later exploit, before an opportunity to get involved with Early Learning Centre came up.

"We'd heard that Early Learning Centre was in trouble and that Menzies, who were the owners, needed to turn it round and could be interested in selling it at some point," recalls France. "The then CEO asked me if I would become CEO. I said ‘no, but my company would be very happy to be employed by you to run Early Learning Centre, provided that if and when you decided to take it off your balance sheet you gave us first refusal'." It was an unusual arrangement back then, but the deal was done and France and Ellis took over the business in September 1997.

At the time, the company was losing £10 million a year; something the new owners would turn into a £10 million profit by the time Menzies agreed to sell in 2001. There were, says France, a number of reasons behind the transformation, but perhaps the most notable was to overhaul the previous strategy of expanding the children's toy retailer into the space-intensive, but low-margin, nursery sector.

"If you don't know what's going wrong you don't know which levers to pull to put it right, and I think that was the difficulty that the previous board had," said France. "They'd been there when life was relatively straightforward in the 1980s when the business was a retail phenomenon, but in the early 1990s brands such as Toys R Us landed on these shores, and the competition was getting much fiercer."

Learning curve

The move into the nursery space emanated from this, he adds, but saw profitable stores forced to move into bigger premises with higher costs, changing into loss-making outlets almost overnight. "I always tell a classic story of Kingston Upon Thames, which was heartland territory for an Early Learning Centre," says France. "They had a 1,000 square foot shop in a secondary pitch in Kingston upon Thames and they closed it down to open a 7,500 square foot store in the centre of Kingston upon Thames, which was prime location.

"The rent went up by a factor of about eight or nine, the space cost went up by a factor of four or five and their sales went up by a factor of 1.3," he recalls. "It went from making £250,000 profit to losing £250,000 in a single stroke, and they multiplied that by around about 22 times with other stores." Within a month the new owners had sacked the whole board, while France took the team of nursery buyers - some of whom had worked for him previously - and moved them into the core business of toys, and started sourcing products from the Far East rather than the UK. "We effectively turned the model upside down," he says.

Despite his decades of retail experience, France's stint with the Early Learning Centre was his first where he had a genuine stake in the business, but the principles were the same. "The difference was that I had a physical stake in it, as well as a mental stake, but operationally I've never treated any business any differently," he says. "Every penny counts, and cash is always king. You want to make sure that you get every last ounce out of whatever investment you're putting in, and if you treat other people's money as your own, you don't go far wrong."

He admits, however, that after seven years at the helm he was exhausted, and in 2004 he and Ellis decided to sell to retail entrepreneur Tim Waterstone, in a £60 million deal. "We felt we'd done everything that we wanted to and the business was very healthy," he says. "We'd always intended to have an exit at some point between five and 10 years, and the offers were raining in. It just felt that it was the right time to sell."

The challenge for France was what to do next. "After a month of lying on a beach I was bored, and Peter and I were ready for the next phase," he recalls. They were also joined by Chris Ward, a former colleague of France's from his days at Littlewoods, and the trio set about identifying a sector in which they felt they could create a new start-up.

"We decided it should be online," says France. "We had an online arm at Early Learning Centre in 1998 when it was fairly fledgling stuff. But people had said we'd never sell things like climbing frames online, that turned out to be not the case at all. By 2004 the world was

beginning to shape up differently and we felt that online was likely to be where most of the future growth was going to come from.  We'd had years of bricks-and-mortar and frankly felt that that was going to be a struggle in many places in future."

Watching out

That still left the issue of what kind of online retailer they would be. "We wanted a combination of doing something that we liked but also something that had global reach," he says. "If you're going online that means essentially packages that are small enough to be sent around the world at a sensible cost."

After rejecting the idea of jewellery, the trio honed in on watches, and through a contact were able to get in touch with people who gave them the industry insight they needed. "We were given information that you could spend an entire career working in the sector and still not know," says France. Out of this emerged two important pieces of insight which convinced them that not only could they move into the market, but also that this was a sector ripe for a new - and disruptive - entrant. "The first thing we learned was that we could acquire the same components as those used by nearly all of those famous brands, and they were available to anyone.

"The second thing we discovered was the multiples that some of these brands were applying to the cost price of the watches. In one case it was 34 times cost, and the average was 10-12 times. It was then entirely a traditional wholesale model, so there was very little vertical retailing going on from the brands because they all had distribution models through other retailers, and that was doubling the price." The three entrepreneurs decided they would use the same components as the top brands to make the watches but sell direct to consumers over the internet. Named after one of the three founders, Christopher Ward was born in 2005.

There was another big difference too. "The model that existed then, and still does today, revolved around heavy marketing costs including paying celebrities millions of pounds to wear their watches," says France. "We thought if we could access the same components and sold online, it should be possible for us with much lower overheads and a vertical business model to sell at much lower multiples. We decided on a three-times multiple, which meant that immediately we were a third of the price of the average for the same quality. We would be the first luxury watch brand to go online, and only sell online."

Running a start-up business was a very different experience. "The big shift for me was one minute I was running a business of 3,000 people with a board to take care of all the operational issues, and the next I'm packing and sending out watches," he says. "When we started off there was just the three of us, and we were doing everything, and in some ways that was one of the best things that could have happened. Apart from anything else it brings you back down to earth but, secondly, because you're involved in everything you re-learn things that you probably wouldn't if you were still at the top of a very large organisation, because you're having to do things at the detail level."

Going global

Just over a decade on, the business remains an online entity, although it does also have a showroom in Maidenhead to cater for customers who like to see items before they purchase. It currently turns over £10 million a year, employing people in both the UK and Switzerland, and looks to grow by around 20-25% a year. All three founders remain involved, with France overseeing the new product development and marketing, Ellis taking care of the finances and Ward handling operations and IT.

Around half the revenue comes from overseas, says France, with around half of that originating in the US, and it is here where France believes the next big source of growth lies. "We anticipate the North American market becoming our largest area of business within three years," he says. "But there's a lot of focus internationally, and we're also growing in Europe, particularly Scandinavia, and also in many of the English-speaking places around the world, such as Australia and New Zealand."

There have, of course, been lessons along the way, he admits. "We've got some fantastic people now in terms of designers and marketers, and I would have probably employed some of them earlier if I could," he says. "It wasn't so much a mistake, but if we'd had them in earlier I think our growth rate would have been even higher."

Within a decade, France believes the business could be turning over anything up to £100 million a year, although he concedes this will require external funding, rather than the organic growth on which it has relied so far. "We have a model that works, and what's required now is the marketing dollars to deliver that," he says. "But, at some point, to get to where we think this brand can get to we will almost certainly have to look at external funding, and that's something that's beginning to exercise our minds now."

Facing the future

Further into the future, all three founders are keen to hand the business on to a new generation when the time is right.

"We're building up a really great team beneath us, and at the right point we may exit, but the business won't," he says. "One of the focuses we have at the moment is developing the generation beneath us to take things on. I want this business to be here in 25 years' time, but it's unlikely I'll be involved then."

Having taken his own start-up from concept through to an international business, France knows what it takes to turn vision into reality. The most important element is the concept itself. "You have to be providing something that is different, whatever that might be - product, pricing, distribution model - otherwise don't even think about it," he says.

"Assuming you've got something that is different and has legs, then funding is the issue that you're going to have. Most businesses fail in the first year, so whatever funds you think you'll need, treble it. Make sure that cash is the thing that you are completely focused on from day one and that you've built in enough headroom so that you can afford to make a few mistakes."

Outside of work, France keeps himself busy with a range of sporting activities. "I love racketball and play about four times a week," he says. "We're lucky enough to have a house on the beach down in Cornwall, and I've taken a fancy to kayaking too. Music is a great love of mine as well; when I need to take myself away from myself I normally head to Spotify these days."

Most of the time, however, his focus remains on Christopher Ward. "This is the big unfinished business for me, and I want to do everything I can with my colleagues here to secure the long-term future of this business and give it the foundation that means that it can grow and flourish when I've long gone. I think as the team beneath us develops that will take its natural course."

Yet anyone thinking the retail veteran is about to head off into the sunset would be advised to think again. "I'm not a believer in retiring," he says. "As long as I've got some value to add and I'm not in the way, I will always want to have some sort of role here."