Johnnie Boden's fashion brand is the love of his life At 16, he was recruited to edit the Menswear Section of the Harpers & Queen Teenage Edition of 1977. I was really excited. But, I'll never forget, my father was so dismissive. He called it a 'bloody stupid job."" Boden returned to a more orthodox career path, via Oriel College, Oxford, into stockbroking with Barclays Merchant Banking. The City was my first job, to which I was thoroughly ill-suited - really bad at it. I had no feel for the product and I didn't really respect the people. Every share I recommended went down. My friends were doing things they really enjoyed and were good at, but I felt a failure. Then he received an inheritance from a childless uncle, left the City job to run a couple of pubs before turning to teaching, which he enjoyed, apart from the poor salary. But Boden's thing was fashion. Ten years of wrong turns and a banking secondment to New York gave him the impetus. While on Wall Street, he was struck by the effectiveness of the US mail-order system, with its ambitiously successful brands like J Crew and LL Bean, and by the apparent gap in the market: it seemed busy executives needed quick and easy access to good quality, casual clothing. In 1991, working from his flat , Boden launched the eponymous catalogue. The pictures were hand-drawn by one of his pals and there were fewer than a dozen menswear items for sale. Within three years Boden had his successful womenswear range in place, with Mini Boden following in 1996. Before long, Boden clothing was the relaxed lifestyle choice of the modestly comfortable professional classes, but behind the scenes, he was expending both energy and capital. "I did lots of things really badly," he recalls. We completely ran out of money; my inheritance disappeared within three years. Then I hired a guy who I thought I could trust, who turned out to be dishonest. Then we had a major burglary. Then I had a really tricky investor. It was at least 10 years before things became financially stable. I had to put the house on the line. Even in 2000, we were still having to find money. Having been there, I don't want to be there again. Boden has a near-pathological dislike of debt and borrowing. He respects money in a way that is often characteristic of wealthy people who were once in dire straits. I think if you had access to a limitless supply of money, you would definitely cock things up. Stresses and disciplines are useful . I had to learn lots of hard things, but what really helped was that I knew how to ask somebody something and say please and thank you. That was the best thing my parents gave to me.  The door bursts off its hinges and Sophie (Mrs Boden) and Sprout (the dog) enter the office at speed. Actually, it's less an entry and more an arrested carrier-landing. She is a nuclear-powered life-management unit. Boden recalls meeting Sophie for the first time: "She said to me, 'You're a bloody failure. You've had the most amazing start in life, but you're squandering it. You keep swapping and changing. What the hell do you want to do? I got rather crestfallen at that, but accepted that she was fundamentally right. So I told her I had this idea for a mail-order clothing business and she said, 'Well, let's just do it! You're in the last chance saloon. Get on with it! So that's why and how it started. Sophie was incredibly supportive and believed in me. I needed that, because I can get pretty low. On the whole, I'm quite a positive person, but I do try to be honest with myself. If the telephone stops ringing, it's because I've done something stupid. The thing about retail is that you are only as good as your last range . I f you ever feel you're doing something right, you're probably about to make a terrible mistake - so it's not a bad thing to be neurotic and self-doubting. Sometimes we get products wrong; we can get service wrong; we can get marketing things wrong. If you become satisfied with your success, you become boring and complacent and that is fatal . Boden's brand is the love of his life, second only to his wife and family. There is a symbiosis between man and brand . It's a very crowded marketplace so you need as many things as you can to make your business stand out - putting my name behind it gives the customers some sort of extra reassurance . It upsets a lot of people who think I'm pompous, but I think there is still the sense of a person behind it who is on the customer's side, who is ensuring that it'd better be good. It's like putting your house on the line; if you're not willing to do it, your business doesn't deserve to succeed. This is a vehicle for my talents, such as they are, and I enjoy it. I know people who have done it - sold out - and regretted it. They get bored. I don't want to do nothing at all, and I don't want to go back into the early stages of another business because it's bloody hard. Boden, as modelled by Helena Christensen. Photo: Boden. He takes his commitment home. If Sophie buys the children something awful-looking, I get really upset. I want them to wear nice things, even around the house. Design is very important and I think it affects your mood. Boden self-effacingly describes how, at a board meeting in 1998, he forecast that retail use of the internet would never take off. It is odd - or maybe it's just a personality trait - that Boden concentrates so much on where he has gone wrong, when so much of what he had done has plainly gone right. Had he not defied the wrath of his father, one of the greatest British brand names would have been one of the worst City brokers. He talks about his original ambition, which was to make the business single-mindedly personal, so that people felt they were talking to him, writing to him - and, indeed, for many years, they often were. At first, Boden answered all his own mail until it became physically impossible. One of his most obvious strengths is empathy. He explains how, when things are going badly, he tries to be the first to take responsibility: a kind of fault-owning from the front. He hates blame culture and defensive behaviour. Hence, he likes upward appraisals, where junior staff give feedback on seniors. When Julian Granville, now my fantastic MD, came in as finance director, I realised very quickly that he was a much better manager than I was. Entrepreneurs like me make for terrible managers. So I stepped down. From having a demanding father, I think I developed a lack of arrogance. I think a lot of entrepreneurs fail because they have too strong a self-belief, which means that they don't listen. The Boden operation is growing worldwide, and there are plans for more international expansion. He is aware of the pitfalls, such as overstretching or "Boden fatigue" phenomenon. You can't be too confident . The biggest mistake you can make is to stop listening to your customers. I sometimes overhear people saying, 'Oh, that's not very Boden. Even if I'm in the room. Some people know the brand better than I do. The 2012 Sunday Times Rich List puts Boden at number 255 of the UK's richest estates, valued at £320m. Yet he is "terrified of losing money and having to borrow, because of what I've been through." Obviously, I am affluent and I'm extremely grateful for that, but I've worked hard for it. Now, I want for nothing financially, which is great . There are upsides to wealth, but there are downsides as well. If you're neurotic like me, you worry all the time. I'd say three nights a week I wake up at about four o'clock and worry. Boden is cursed by self-doubt, but gifted with personableness and entrepreneurial skill. An hour or so with Boden makes the world seem all right. That's why people love the brand - because it bears the name and spirit and set of values of a truly likeable character.