Sitting behind his large desk, Mike Hawker has in his hands the fate of 7,500 staff and more than £1 billion in turnover - and he admits it is quite a responsibility.

The 51-year-old is chief executive of two of the biggest mail order catalogue companies in the country and the largest private employers in Bradford.

He is responsible for Otto UK, the British subsidiary of German company Otto Versand which owns the Grattan and Freemans catalogue firms, former rivals, as well as Look Again and Kaleidoscope.

Announcing the company's plans for the future, Mr Hawker admits the two main forces in Otto's UK portfolio have some work to do to regain the reputation they each held in the past.

"We have a programme we are working on to establish our products and service - for a while we weren't concentrating on any of them. Sometimes if you have a successful business, things can lose their way."

The company believed the best way for all four titles to grow and maintain their own identity was to bring them under the same roof, a move which saw job losses.

But luckily for Bradford, it chose Grattan's headquarters in Ingleby Road as opposed to the Freemans base in London.

The decision, taken at the end of last year, was based on the quality of the team in place at Bradford.

"I joined Grattan almost 12 months ago from Empire Stores and we created a plan for the future which was acceptable to the parent company.

"They probably decided they would have greater confidence running the whole operation in the UK from the Bradford base which had a more powerful management team."

The aim for Mr Hawker is to take the company to the top of the UK mail order list, which would mean passing Great Universal Stores.

"We have traditionally been stronger than GUS. We are not that at the moment but we will be in the future," he said.

The main route is by enlarging the catalogues' customer base and inroads into the more affluent market with Kaleidoscope highlight this.

But recent joint ventures with other high profile names signal moves in a different direction.

Mr Hawker said: "We have a distribution network called Parcelnet which couriers purchases for Freemans and Grattan, but other firms are also approaching us to utilise the resource, such as Debenhams."

The company has also linked up with Tesco Direct to provide a home shopping service which has created 350 jobs and uses Otto UK's expertise in catalogue ordering over the Internet.