Put your shirt on it, this is no upper-class Tyrwhitt

It's a bizarre place for a company (it's pronounced Tirrit) that specialises in selling double-cuffs to bankers by mail order. Inside, the contrast continues. The premises are functional and shabby. Already, the elements for what is a very successful business model are falling into place.

The boss, Nick Wheeler, sits in a scruffy room dotted with paraphernalia from current and former marketing campaigns. Only a watercolour of a large country house and a snap of an Aston Martin car give any hint as to his antecedents.

Wheeler, 42, went to Eton. Along with fellow OE, Johnnie Boden, he's in the vanguard of the phenomenon that is giving the traditional High Street a good kicking. While shops struggle to get people through their doors, Wheeler and Boden get them in their homes with smart catalogues.

It's turned into a pukkah industry (I was going to use the word cottage, but the numbers are much bigger than that). Wheeler's wife is Chris Rucker, founder of that other brochure that lands on the doorstep and lies around the house, The White Company.

There are so many firms getting in on the act, all with similar credentials and methodology, that you wonder if the whole of the upper class isn't engaged in sourcing fabrics and hand-carved storage boxes from the deepest recesses of Asia and using photographs of their impossibly good-looking friends and houses to promote them. Heavens, even the family of the girlfriend to the heir to the throne is at it - Kate Middleton's parents flog toys and party accessories this way.

It's as if anyone who fancies themselves as an entrepreneur, who might once have headed for a smart job in the City or for a mainstream company, is setting up on their own and selling direct.

But it's not to be mocked. Having succeeded with his catalogues, Wheeler has opened Charles Tyrwhitt stores. He now has nine, including two in Manhattan - one under Lehman Brothers, the other under Bear Stearns. This year, he wants to take the business to the stock market, to AIM, in order to raise enough cash to open 50 shops.

Still boyish-looking, with thick and almost slightly-too-long hair, he comes across as part-enthusiast, part-highly focused. He's got the self-confidence to admit to having made awful blunders in the past - like when he was persuaded Charles Tyrwhitt could broaden its mix.

"We made a big mistake, trying to be all things to all people. It was back in 2005, we went for womenswear and childrenswear, in addition to our shirts, ties, cufflinks, suits and shoes." He shakes his head. "I don't know why we thought we could do childrenswear and womenswear." He adds, smiling ruefully-"It's not as if Boden didn't already exist." The company was in danger of forgetting its core product, he says, "a shirt with a collar, with or without a tie".

He's wearing one of his shirts, with a tie, and you soon realise that for all the laid-back nature of his surroundings, he pays enormous attention to detail. Shirts are his thing and boy, does he know them.

Don't, for instance, get him started on breast pockets. "A well-constructed shirt is a thing of great beauty. A breast pocket is an unsightly, and modern, addition that completely ruins the look. It is like adding a roof rack to a Ferrari."

Golly. But that doesn't stop him supplying the customer what they want and, if that means breast pockets, so be it. So about 10% request the extra pocket and they're sewn on by his tailors.

He's doing £50 million of sales a year. The figure has stayed the same these past two years while he's wrestled with the error of widening the brand (he took a back seat for a while and let a new management team have their head, only to cock it up).

"We went from 100 pages to 200 pages," he says of the catalogue, shaking his head again. But while overall sales have remained flat, the company is back on song: he is selling a million shirts a year, up 70% year on year, he says, . Ties are up 52%. "I don't know where they're going - fewer people are wearing ties but we're selling more than ever."

Wheeler won't say what his current profits are, but on £50 million it's a safe assumption he's making around £5 million. The business must be worth around £500 million.

He grew up in Shropshire (until recently he lived there but has now moved nearer London, to the Bucks-Oxford border), one of seven children. "We were fighting always." His father was an industrialist and he duly went to Eton, then to Bristol University to study geography. Somehow, despite having gained a lower second he landed a high-flying job at Bain, the management consultants. "I must have interviewed very well," he says, laughing.

Bain probably liked him because he was different. While at Eton he'd run a photographic business and sold Christmas trees. " I was always entrepreneurial."

He spent part of his gap year in Simla, in India. "I'd always wanted my own business and I had this idea for shoes. Customers would draw round their feet and fax the outline to Simla, to a shoemaker who would make shoes in exactly that shape. But the fax machine didn't work properly and they all came back looking like the sort of thing pixies or clowns wear."

Even though his "whole world collapsed", he picked himself up and alighted on shirts. "Thomas Pink had just opened and I could understand shirts. I wore them, I could get a feel for the fabric." He tracked down a shirtmaker in Clacton who agreed to run up shirts for him. From the outset, it was mail order. "I didn't have the money to do anything else." He put together a simple leaflet on A5 paper, used his middle names Charles and Tyrwhitt, and got in touch with his cousin who was in the army. He supplied with him with the address book of the 17/21st Lancers and he loaded it on to his Amstrad PCW - it was his first database.

While at Bain, the shirts were a hobby but gradually, they took over. "I could have done better at Bain if I'd worked harder. They were bright, friendly people with an incredible work ethic. It was a bit of a macho thing - I remember once working for three days and three nights without leaving." The pull of running his own show became too strong and he left. "I was 24, I thought life was passing me by."

He didn't have enough to grow mailing lists, to start producing decent brochures and building stock - and to employ people. He'd been left an £8,000 inheritance and borrowed a further £17,000 from Barclays. He bought an Aston Martin DB1 for £25,000 and sold it for £100,000. "He had a DB 2,3,4,5 and 6, but not a DB1. It was a great lesson in supply and demand."

In 1994, he met Chris while she was working at Harpers & Queen. He persuaded her to follow him into mail order. "My wife is more successful than me, it's terribly depressing," he says.

He put in £5000 in return for 25% but when he failed to ask her to marry him she repaid the money and he handed back the shares. Later, after he had asked for her hand, as a wedding present she gave him 1%.

"We keep the businesses separate," he says. "We've talked about merging but I want people who love Charles Tyrwhitt, not people who love Charles Tyrwhitt and The White Company. I don't want to be one of those outfits where the receptionist says, 'Hello, Charles Tyrwhitt,' then the light changes colour on the next call and she says, 'Hello, The White Company.'"

Adds Wheeler: "We try not to talk business at home but it creeps in."

THE internet has worked in tandem with the catalogues. The breakdown is 65% online, where the customer has received a catalogue; 1% pure mail order and 20% shops. But there are people who will never buy clothes online or by mail order and there are some items - shoes and suits - that lend themselves to retail. Plus, he says, it helps having a physical presence in the High Street - hence his push for more branches.

"We may float at the end of the year," he says. "For that to happen, the market sentiment towards retail has to change. Right now, we feel it isn't good, but I'm sure it will change. We're not a cyclical business." He adds: "We're a simple business that keeps on growing."

Wheeler smiles. He's aware of what he's just said. It doesn't get any better than that.