Here’s a little taste of our interview with Cath Kidston in Idler 92, out now

What’s it like when the shop you open under your own name, selling retro-looking floral ironing board covers and painted furniture, grows to a £150 million a year business with 250 shops around the world, and is then sold for a vast sum? That’s the strange and extraordinary thing that happened to Cath Kidston, who opened a small, slightly eccentric Bagpuss-style boutique in Holland Park in 1993, and found herself both jobless and rich 23 years later.

One spring afternoon I took the train from Paddington to Stroud to visit Cath in her country retreat, to hear her story and find out what she’s up to now.

The first thing you notice is that Cath Kidston’s house, a lovely castellated villa with outhouses, pool, greenhouse and vegetable garden, is not particularly Cath Kidston-y. “It’s not all flowery. I’m not a fifties replica!” she says, sitting in the farmhousey kitchen, with Chris Ofilis on the wall.

I started by putting it to Cath: you must have been fairly ambitious, as these things don’t happen of their own accord.

“My biggest ambition was to make a shop that had a special atmosphere and that people would remember,” she says. “When I was a kid I used to go to a place called Kensington Market. It was like going to heaven. And – I wanted to pay my mortgage. Those were the two things I expected to achieve. I never expected to have more than one shop.”

At the beginning, she funded her shop through her second job as an interior decorator. She’d worked for Nicky Haslam and clearly had a great eye.

“The first five years I worked crazy long hours, doing my decorating in the week, and buying stock at weekends. Sunday was a busy day as I’d go to car boots and wash the stock. Hugh [Padgham, her record producer husband] was very tolerant.”

She had breast cancer in 1998 and decided it was time to slow down a bit. She chucked in the second job.

“I was always worried the shop wouldn’t pay but it was when I stopped the decorating that the shop actually took off. Because I focused on it.”

Cath says she’s loved both making and selling since she was a child.

“There was a plant at home that had very round leaves. And I used them as money. I would make things – paint rocks or something like that – and try to sell them with the green leaf money. So it’s not just designing; bartering also comes naturally to me.”

In 2001, she raised money by selling a part of the business to a network of small investors. They helped her to grow. Her favourite occupation during these busy years was poring over sales figures. “My bedtime reading was seeing what was selling and what wasn’t. We had something like 3,000 SKUs [stock keeping units, i.e. different products].

And I’d go to bed with a highlighter pen and find out that, for example, red was selling better than blue. I knew absolutely everything that was happening with our stock.”

This is an extract from a longer interview with Cath Kidston in the September/October edition of the Idler.

Our September/October issue is available is available in Waitrose, Waterstones, Smiths Travel outlets, select Smiths high street branches and in around 100 indie stores. Click here for your nearest stockist.