On the shop floor with......the multi-faceted Alan Giles

This all contributes to making Alan Giles pretty well-suited to the role of chairman of the youthful clothing brand Fat Face. This is one of a number of roles he fulfils now that he no longer holds a full-time executive position.

But of course it is his rich 30 years of retail experience that is most useful to the Fat Face, latterly as the chief executive of HMV Group. The company is certainly getting the benefit of somebody who seems to have had their fair share of challenging roles, dating back to the 1980s when as operations and development director at Do It All he reckons he faced a DIY market that was "just as bad" as it is today.

He says the creation of the business - through a merger of the Boots-owned Payless chain and WH Smith's Do It All operation - was "the worst possible merger". Giles found himself involved in another merger of two weak players in a tough market when Kwik Save tied the knot with Somerfield where he was a non-executive director.

Although he says the new group delivered all the synergies that had been promised the problem was the poor quality of the Kwik Save operation: "There had not been a focus on the underlying state of the Kwik Save business. That's what Somerfield had not looked at."

In defence of Somerfield he says many people have written it off but it is still here with a chunk of market share and looks likely to soon become part of the Co-operative Group.

During his earlier years as a non-exec at Somerfield, Giles' day job was managing director of the Waterstone's business, then part of WH Smith. This he says was "his most enjoyable time in retail" and is probably down to the empathy he seems to have with the book trade despite self-effacingly describing himself as the "most poorly read person to ever run a book business".

This period was certainly productive as he says he took what was an entrepreneurial brand (created by Tim Waterstone) and turned it into a profitable concern: "We built a solid, enduring business with great management that has been hugely successful."

Despite this success Giles' record of being involved in challenging roles continued as the parlous state of WH Smith had led its management to take a look at what they could sell off in order to raise funds. The pick of its saleable assets was Waterstone's and the Megastore business that was run as a joint-venture with Virgin - both of which were represented on the board of WH Smith by Giles.

It seemed appropriate therefore that when private equity firm Advent International and EMI bid jointly for Waterstone's that it should be Giles who was approached to head up the buy-out. The original arrangement was that the EMI-owned Dillons book chain was to be combined with Waterstone's but then the decision was made to also buy HMV and create an entirely new media group.

Giles held the position of chief executive of HMV Group from its formation in 1998 and went on to guide it through a flotation on the stock market in 2002 before calling it a day in 2006. During which time he certainly had a challenging ride.

"The entertainment market was going through massive disruptive change and we believed HMV was best placed to eventually emerge unscathed - as the last person standing. Simon Fox is demonstrating this to be the case. We changed the mix of products so music was a less important category - it's now only 30 per cent of sales, which is a level where if the market shrinks then it is not disastrous. It's still a fabulous business," says Giles.

He recalls the deal he oversaw to buy Ottakar's as an essential move in order to give Waterstone's increased scale and one that took an "almighty fight to get through" the OFT. He laughs about this now as today he is a non-executive director of that very organisation.

This poacher-turned-gamekeeper move fits well with Giles' sense of fairness and his aim of giving the consumer a decent deal. He says all the businesses he has been involved in have "done business properly" and he wants to ensure this remains the case in the wider market and the OFT helps to create this environment.

For somebody without a full-time role Giles says the opportunity to put his feet up and take it easy during the summer months at his Henley home has been thwarted by his decision to co-teach students on the one-year MBA at Oxford Said Business School.

For one day each week during the summer term the experienced academic Jonathan Reynolds teaches the conceptual aspects of retail while Giles seeks to convey the experience of his 30 years of being on the shop floor as part of an MBA module on retail. He has also brought in some big-timers to give talks including Ian Cheshire , Ben Gordon , Mike Shearwood and David North .

The aim is to encourage students to consider retail as a career and the level of sign-ups for the module has increased, with 67 of the 200 students taking the module in its first year while this term it increased to around 100. "It will never be the intention of all 100 to work in retail but 10 to 20 are really interested in careers in the sector and one has gone to work for Westfield," he says.

Undoubtedly these students will have some empathy with the Fat Face brand, which also takes a chunk of Giles' time. He calculates his chairman's role involves him attending the regular board meetings and every seven to 10 days having a phone conversation with the chief executive Louise Barnes and its private equity owner Bridgepoint that bought the business from Advent in early 2007 in a deal worth £360 million.

In many cases such a change of ownership would have signalled the departure of the chairman (since he was originally brought in by Advent) but his strong independence has undoubtedly played a part in Bridgepoint retaining his services. He says his chief role at Fat Face is to bring the board together: "For the vast majority of the time there is no difference between the views of the private equity owners and management. But there could be and then you're there to bring them together."

With 140 Fat Face stores now trading and between 10 and 15 opening each year Giles says this is a brand that is growing fast, and as such, one of its major challenges is the same faced by Waterstone's many years ago - "how do you hang on to the values as the business gets larger and more bureaucratic?" Based on his past experience of challenging situations Fat Face undoubtedly has the right man for the job.