Christopher Bailey is obsessed with details. 'This carpet should be a little bit thicker,' Burberry's chief creative officer suddenly points out with one look at the floor of the VIP room at Burberry's Ion Orchard boutique.

'Although we do live link ups to the stores when we're building them, now that I've got to the store, I can already see things that need changing,' he explains.

Indeed, Bailey, who was in town to officiate at the opening of its latest store in Singapore last November, is known to be a control freak - a title he has accepted with good humour.

'I think that the people I work with probably do call me that behind my back,' says the 38-year old with a laugh. (He reportedly has to give the go-ahead on anything Burberry from the buildings to its website to the furniture, right down to the bottles of water served.)

'It's probably really annoying and it's really annoying for me, but I have this kind of mind in that I always see the things that we need to improve on. Then again, I think it's also good because being like that keeps you thinking, so you can never become complacent.'

Complacency, he declares, was once the company's downfall. 'When I first joined the company in 2001, everything was about the heritage and nothing else mattered,' he recalls with a shake of his head.

'It didn't matter that people were shopping differently and that people were experiencing clothing differently. They expected the public to conform to the brand's heritage at a time when people wanted newness.'

Today, Burberry is singing a different tune. The once austere label is now a modern company that embraces the digital age.

At the official opening of the new Ion boutique for example, Burberry invited bloggers to be on hand to tweet, blog or update their Facebook as the event unfolded.

Later in November, they went on to launch a new website - artofthetrench.com - for users to post pictures of themselves looking as chic as possible in a Burberry trenchcoat.

The website attracted nearly two million pages views a day and precipitated a tremendous spike in sales at Burberry's online shop.

'The digitization of the world in the last five years has transformed every single one of our lives,' says Bailey, who reportedly personally vets all the users' pictures and chooses which to add to the site.'Everybody in the company, from the people who work in the post room to our CEO, now has to think completely differently, in a modern way.'

Bailey adds that the brand has had to move forward product-wise as well.

'In terms of product, we had to make sure it was exciting. I didn't want to lose the beautiful history because I loved it.

'I wanted to build on that foundation but I didn't want that foundation to be everything and I wanted fashion to be a part of the story. I think that maybe nine years ago, if somebody had said that we're going to be known for our fashion as much as our history, people wouldn't believe it.

'It's very weird. When we were founded more than 150 years ago, fashion was a part of our story but when I first joined, it no longer was like that.

'I sometimes describe the brand as a beautiful, beautiful diamond that has been trodden into the ground and all it needed was a good shining. And that's what we're doing now: we're shining each facet of this diamond to make sure that the company goes on for another 150 years.'

Bailey's latest collection for Burberry in September epitomises his desire and ability to take a modern approach to the classic brand.

With the label showing during London Fashion Week (instead of Milan) for the first time since Bailey joined the company, all eyes - including Mario Testino, Victoria Beckham, Twiggy, Gwyneth Paltrow, Liv Tyler and Mary-Kate Olsen - were trained on the label.

Harry Potter star and new face of Burberry Prorsum Emma Watson even missed Freshers' Week at Brown University to show her support for the brand.

In reply, Bailey responded with what he calls 'a real iconic Burberry show' that drew praise from Vogue's Anna Wintour.

'I really wanted it to be about the trenchcoat, but like the modern interpretation of what the trenchcoat means to so many people now. I literally started with trenchcoats and ended with trenchcoats in every different kind of guise,' explains Bailey.

'I wanted to show the attitude of the Burberry girl whom I sometimes describe as having this kind of effortless elegance. She's not contrived, not too controlled and is somebody who kind of just throws on a coat and runs out of the house.

'To me, that's what I think of when I think of a classic trench coat. You can wear it over anything you're wearing, be it jeans, a suit or evening-wear, I love that kind of attitude.'

Bailey has upped the ante on his Spring/Summer '10 collection by also producing a special punk-inspired trench for the uber-hip French boutique Colette that will be available for purchase on www.colette.com next month, from Feb 22 to 27.

But perhaps more importantly, if Burberry's sales figures are anything to go by, the consumers are definitely biting into Bailey's point of view.

Despite the recession, Burberry entered the FTSE 100 last September after seeing its revenue surpass the £1 billion ($2.27 billion) barrier for the first time (for the year ending March 31, 2009).

It is little wonder then that Bailey has been lauded as Burberry's golden boy and England's Tom Ford.

With Bailey at the helm, the traditional British clothes manufacturer has managed to sweep the cobwebs off its slightly stale past to become one of the hottest fashion labels within international fashion circles.

For his efforts, he was appointed a Member of the Order of the British Empire (MBE) last June for his services to the fashion industry.

Last November, Burberry elevated him from creative director to the post of chief creative officer - a position nobody else holds in the fashion industry.

And just earlier this week, Bailey also won the 2009 Designer of the Year prize at the British Fashion Awards. All in, not bad at all for someone who just sort of 'fell into fashion'.

'I always loved the aesthetic side of life. A funny example: when I was 13 or 14 I once went out shopping with my mum and dad who wanted to buy a new sofa, and they looked at all these sofas and kept saying oh, this one's beautiful or that one's beautiful, and I just didn't find any of them beautiful.

'I didn't express it at that time but it stayed with me, and for a while I was worried that I didn't like anything at all. And then, I would see something in a magazine or something on television that I loved and I started to realise that I had a point of view when it comes to design.

'And then fashion just happened. My art teacher at school suggested I go to art school and I've always been very lucky in that I've met the right people who have guided me in this direction but I have never made a career plan, I just go with the flow.'

Born to a carpenter and a window-dresser for Marks & Spencer in Yorkshire, Bailey is every inch a true Northern lad - he is sensible, down-to-earth and he works incredibly hard.

'Yorkshire - it's the absolute antithesis of being a designer,' says Bailey with a grin. 'But it's very grounding in that it helps me put everything in perspective.

'I'm very fortunate that today I'm in Singapore, tomorrow I'm in Seoul, the day after in Tokyo and then I'm in Yorkshire followed by London.

'I go to these very contradictory places, there's the provincial life in the countryside and then there's the very urban city life where everything is very cosmopolitan and I love it when these two worlds collide in my life.

'I think that that helps me to bring a very unique spirit to Burberry.'

This article was first published in The Business Times.