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As people amble through a shopping centre in Carmarthen, none of them recognise the man standing outside its newest store.

Smartly dressed, unassuming, quiet, nobody notices him until the clicks from a photographer’s camera start to arouse the interest of passers-by.

"Who’s the guy in the suit?" one man asks.

He's a billionaire, and he’s from Carmarthenshire.

His father was a policeman and his grandparents were farmers in the county for generations. When he left to go to Cardiff University, he got the maximum grant possible - £300 a year.

“That was a lot of money in those days - I was very grateful for it,” he says, sitting proudly in his company's recently opened Carmarthen branch.

Doug Perkins co-founded Specsavers in 1984 with his wife, Mary, in Guernsey. Thirty-three years later, the number of stores is quickly reaching 2,000 - from Carmarthen to London, Guernsey to Aberdeen, Spain to New Zealand.

Selling hundreds of millions of pairs of glasses and contact lenses each year, the store that Doug and Mary set up is now the biggest private optician chain in the world.

According to this year’s Sunday Times Rich List, the couple are worth around £1.6 billion. Not bad for a boy from Llanelli.

(Image: Chris Tostevin-Hall)

He puts his staggering success down to a background and an upbringing that taught him that if you didn't work, you didn't get: a mantra that he swears by to this day: "I am well and truly working class. And I’ve used it as an advantage: it gives you extra drive, there’s no doubt about that. When others may have slackened off, I’ve kept with the same work ethic for 50 years and I really enjoy what I do.”

This propensity for hard work and honest graft is, says Doug, what enabled him and his wife to build such a vast empire from such humble beginnings (he used to work in a bowling alley in Ammanford) and what has kept their business where it is: on top.

“Being working class gives you a work ethic but it also allows you to identify, always, with the importance of the customer, young and old, rich and poor,” he says.

“That’s one of the reasons why we’ve never gone on the stock exchange, because then you would spend half your time talking to institutional shareholders.

“I’m not working for next year’s results like most people on the stock exchange, watching the share price bob up and down - that doesn't interest me at all. My shareholders are out there on the shop floor.”

After his modest upbringing, things changed for Doug in the 1970s. Having met Mary and gotten married, the couple moved to Guernsey to be near her parents, who lived on the island. They set up a business called Bebbington and Perkins ("in those days you had to call your business by your proper names"). After selling the company, the couple decided to set up a new one, and called it Specsavers.

“It was a project. We had invented this concept and we wanted to prove that the concept was a winner against some of these corporate companies. It got so exciting that we just wanted to keep going and we still feel that way.

“We didn't have any big ambitions then, only to come back to Wales and to the west country, but we had so much interest that we decided to go national.”

(Image: Mike Walters)

Doug still visits Carmarthenshire regularly to visit family and to keep in touch with his beloved Scarlets ("and to support the academy, which is the best in Wales").

His infatuation with rugby saw him playing for the Carmarthen Quins in the 1965/66 season and he thinks the town, and the county, have come a long way since then.

Despite some big changes, Doug says: “I recognise that Carmarthen has kept its character - it still works as a market town, and it still brings people in from great distances.

“Carmarthen works, Llanelli works, but I do think Carmarthen probably works better because it’s retained its central character - not too much has gone to the outskirts - but Carmarthenshire as a whole is a great retreat. It’s not a surprise to know that more people are coming here. West Wales in general has hugely improved; it’s an amazing place.”

While he enjoys a visit to his home county, the chances of Doug moving back to West Wales permanently are non-existent, as he reveals that he has lived in the same house that he and Mary bought together when Specsavers was just a dream in their collective minds.

“I've not been attracted to move anywhere else and I normally keep the same car for about 10 years!

“People think 'This guy might be bonkers'. They might think why on earth, if he lives on an island and he’s got the same house and the same car, is he still working? I can’t really answer that.”

As for the future, Doug thinks that, with an ageing population, more and more people are going to need to wear glasses than ever before.

“If you’re going to live until you’re 90, you’re going to get eye problems. We can help stop that. I think we would like to grow where we can make a difference. We have a very good team of people now and we’re ambitious to do even more significant things.”

Taking a significant role among those plans will be Doug, now into his 70s, who will continue to expand a business that has, at its core, a hard-working ethos, while entrusting some of the work to his trusted lieutenants in Specsavers stores across Europe and the rest of the world.

“In terms of our senior management, I think a fair number of them have working class backgrounds. They seem to identify better with the value for money and the personal service side of things,” he says.

“I don’t personally go out looking for working class executives, but they seem attracted to the values that we have.”