She's one of the darlings of Kiwi fashion at the heart of the industry for almost her whole life.

But after years of running her successful business, Dame Trelise Cooper has revealed it was brought 'almost to the brink of extinction' after she gave responsibility for operations to someone else.

"I had been very seduced by the idea of someone coming in and running the business side of things so all I needed to focus on was the design, the part I really, really love."

Dame Trelise says she loved taking her eye off the ball. "But unfortunately in not understanding what was happening in the business, not understanding the systems that had been put in place - where it looked like my business was really successful, the back end was anything but. I was blind-sided by how scary it was, I could lose everything."

A scary example of how systems were failing, came thanks to a chance meeting with a former staff member. She mentioned something about a storage unit to Dame Trelise, who then tracked down the unit, broke in, and found a million dollars worth of unsold stock that she had no idea about.

"It looked like everything as selling well, I had great retail sales, but actually the back end was not being taken care of'.

Dame Trelise says what she learned from that, is she needs to know about every part of the business. "I need to understand and have it reported on, because at the end of the day, I am responsible."

You can hear more about Trelise Cooper's business in this week's episode of HP Business Class here