Hello, I'm Kirstie Young. Thank you for downloading this podcast of Desert Island Disks from BBC Radio 4.

For rights reasons, the music choices are shorter than in the radio broadcast.

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Radio 4. My My castaway this week is the designer, Cath Kidston, cheerful and practical with a nostalgic

nod to the 50s. Her look is for homemakers channeling Doris Day. It started with ironing board

covers, but now you could make a call on a Cath Kidston branded mobile phone, pitch

one of her daisy printed tents, or jazz up the kid's bedroom with her

lassoing cowboy wallpaper. In her own bedroom as a child, she used to play at keeping shop, and

she began her business by rooting around in car boot sales and doing up the

odd bit of furniture. Now her company has a yearly turnover of more than 50 million

and you can buy an English rose peg bag anywhere from Kuwait to Kyoto and plenty places in between.

I employ around 650 full-time members of staff, she says.

That's a lot of people's livelihoods. So it's not me playing shop anymore. It's

about looking after that wider picture and the wider people. So, Keith Kittston, was there a point where

it went from being your small business a sort of

handmade concern to being this great global concern that you actually realise was there a tipping

point you thought right now this is properly serious? You know I don't know the exact point I really felt from very very

early on I was onto something with the notion of what I was doing I remember feeling

I'd really overstepped the mark when I opened my second shop

thinking that's probably going a stage too far what am I doing? So two shops are tricky.

How many shops do you have now? I think it's 40 stores in the UK and about 10 abroad.

There's stores in Japan and two just opened in Korea. Two shops was the worst.

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