He was not to know it, but the first time Andrew Dunn went skiing at the age of 21 was to prove a pivotal moment in his life.

He was in his last year at polytechnic when he went to stay with one of his sisters who was working as a chalet girl in Verbier in Switzerland. Unable to afford a full day’s ski pass, he would help her with chores in the morning before skiing all afternoon.

“I had never skied before and I fell totally and utterly in love with skiing. Then I thought — how can I do more of this?”

The middle of five children, Dunn was brought up in Hampshire, where his father was an optician with his own firm, and at the age of eight he was sent away to boarding school. It was not a happy time. “I used to cry myself to sleep,” he said.

On leaving school he went to Oxford Polytechnic to study biology and psychology, but it was not until he tried skiing that he discovered what he wanted to do in life.

After graduating, Dunn bought a Land Rover and returned to the ski resorts. He spent a year doing odd jobs such as ferrying people from the railway station to their chalets so he could ski in his spare time.

He leased a flat and rented out beds to impoverished skiers. “We had a one-bedroom apartment and seven of us living there,” said Dunn. “It was fantastic.”

He also started asking skiers what they liked and disliked about the ski companies they had booked with. “I told my mates I was going to start a ski company and they all laughed.”

Undaunted he rented a couple of larger chalets for the following season at Champéry in the Swiss Alps, borrowing £5,000 from the bank. Out of the blue one of the customers he had ferried from the railway station also offered to invest £10,000 in return for a 25% stake in the business.

Back in Britain in 1986, Dunn had planned to call the business Ski Skint in the belief that it would appeal to students. But his grandmother suggested he call it Scott Dunn (Scott being a family name) to attract a better class of customer.

He persuaded his mother to do all the administration for his fledgling company. Then he created a database of potential customers by delving into all his friends’ address books and produced a six-page brochure, which stood out from others because it had no pictures in it. The front cover carried only the words Scott Dunn and the words Nulli Secundus — “second to none” in Latin.

He used the £5,000 loan to get the catalogue printed and sent it to the 1,000 people on his database.

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