FEW local businessmen feature on national radio and in the broadsheets. But Mark Constantine does.

Having founded Poole based ethical beauty products company Lush with his wife Mo in 1994 it is now probably the largest soap manufacturer in the UK.

Even Jude Law buys the uniquely fragranced, natural products.

It all started at the bustling high street shop at Poole Quay. The company laboratories are still there while there's a factory at Nuffield Industrial Estate.

Today Mark employs 5,000 staff and has 500 shops worldwide - 88 in the UK. The business turns over £145 million. And the profit? "I'm not telling you that, but we make enough!

"A group of us own 85 per cent of the shops and 90 per cent of the business." The property investor Peter Blacker holds a minority stake. According to Companies House, Mark, Mo and Peter shared dividends of about £5 million in 2004 to 2006. The Sunday Times Rich List 2005 included Mark and Mo at position 938 with a fortune of £50 million. That year Simon Cowell was worth the same but now has an estimated wealth of some £100 million So how wealthy are the Constantines? "It's always in relation to selling the business and we aren't intending to - so not as much as we'd like! Businesses like ours sell for about five or six times sales."

He puts his entrepreneurialism down to his psychological profile. "My dad left my mum when I was three. Mum had no money. We went to my nan's. She looked after us and mum became a journalist with the Dorset Evening Echo - I was brought up in Weymouth.

"Mum married again and my stepdad wasn't very nice. I ended up leaving home at 16." Mark was forced to live in woodland on the edge of Dorchester. "It was on and off for a couple of months."

But things improved and from the age of 22 he has worked for himself. Before that he worked for the make-up, skin care and fragrance producer Elizabeth Arden. "I left because the guys fancied me!"

The next move was to a hairdressing salon in Weymouth. "I wanted to do theatrical make-up. The only way to do that was to train as a stylist."

It was studying trichology where he learnt how to make soap. "I spotted Anita Roddick's name in a paper. She had a shop. I met her and started making her products. That was it - she adopted me."

And who could imagine that years later he would try to buy the Body Shop and that Dame Anita Roddick would sell out to l'Oreal for £130 million?

Mark and Mo set up beauty products group Constantine & Weir in 1976 with Elizabeth Weir - now retail director at Lush. The business became Body Shop's biggest supplier until, in the early 90s it bought the Constantines out for £9m. This was ploughed into Cosmetics to Go which then folded. Faced with debts, they sold what was left over.

All was not lost. "A friend, Helen Ambrosen came up with this idea for a block of deodorant which was partly based on soap. She created a large pot of deodorant which could be cut. It was amazing and I thought we could produce soaps like that. Mo - the soap making queen - jumped at the chance and started making soap in cat litter trays."

With no money for packaging or marketing, blackboards and chalk were cheap, effective ways of promotion, which are still used today.