Using the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s as a foundation for a viable business today can be done - just look at Body Shop and Sir Richard Branson's various endeavours - but it is not easy. Such enterprises often come with baggage.

Jonathan Hook arrived at the start of this year as managing director of Neal's Yard Remedies, which provides mainly organically sourced health treatments. It grew out of a single shop opened in 1981 by Romy Fraser, recently appointed OBE for services to health, in a hippy enclave of former flower market warehouses tucked away off Monmouth Street in Covent Garden.

The head office comprises a shop and treatment rooms, where various New Age therapies are carried out. Its neighbours include a shiatsu school, a couple of salad bars and a shop selling “music for relaxation”. In an appropriately surreal touch, a blue plaque notes the writing, on the floor above the Neal's Yard shop, of some Monty Python scripts.

It is the sort of retailer that should thrive today, when price, at the top end of the market at least, often takes second place to ethics. Mr Hook's job is to expand what was once an unworldly niche brand into the high street.

Neal's Yard has about 30 stores in the UK and also sells its products, in their distinctive blue bottles and packaging, through upmarket retailers, such as Waitrose and Selfridges. It is undeniably an odd product range - and a pricey one. Aside from the various lotions, balms and dietary additives, stored around the walls in huge glass jars are herbs and plant extracts, well-known and obscure. Sage, sarsaparilla, bladderwrack - but what is devil's claw, boneset or boldo?

The various therapies range from the fringe but generally respectable (acupuncture) to the medically discredited (homeopathy). And what about Hopi ear-candling, whereby aromatic candles based on a Native American recipe draw away impurities from the ear?

One detects a slight ambivalence in Mr Hook to this abundance of oddness. He emphasises that he has been in place only two months and is no expert on natural remedies.

The business is perched between medicine and cosmetics. There can be no claims that a product might cure a condition, but some undeniably bring comfort. “All our products have a therapeutic intent as well as being beautiful,” he says. “You can say: ‘This is really gentle, it will do good.' You can't say: 'It will cure eczema.'”

Of the 600-plus products, nearly all are organic. Cosmetics are not as rigorously policed as in other areas, such as food, and Mr Hook says that some competitors cut corners.

Where Neal's Yard products are not, this is for a good reason. For example, goods sourced from the wild, such as frankincense picked as a resin from trees in Somalia, cannot be verified as such. Everything is sourced sustainably. Where it cannot be, it is not stocked. “That's where our ethics come in,” Mr Hook says, “but we're not purist about it. Our ultimate aim is to be entirely organic. That's a journey. You can't just flick a switch.”

Customers go into the shops for what sounds like a New Age version of a medical check-up. Eighty per cent of staff have relevant qualifications in natural medicine. They ask about lifestyle, diet, stress levels, patterns of sleep and try to suggest the appropriate product, perhaps a tincture to help to combat insomnia, perhaps a shampoo or a conditioner. “It's a holistic approach.” Mr Hook himself, although initially sceptical, tried acupuncture several years ago for a bad back. “He stuck needles in places I never thought I would want needles stuck, and it worked.” But isn't much of the therapy simply the placebo effect? “It's the same for Prozac, I would argue. If people think it makes them better, that's a therapy. You've got problems and you are unloading your mind, that's a therapy. We evangelise about the benefits of natural health, but we don't say modern medicine is evil.”

Mr Hook studied the odd combination of economics and environmental biology at Oxford Polytechnic. He was already fascinated by moths and butterflies - nowadays he restricts himself to photography, collecting having become unacceptable - and gives lectures on the subject at a school near his home in Haddenham, Buckinghamshire.

He was working for Orange when he heard of the Neal's Yard job. At first, the company would not consider a mobile phone salesman, but Peter Kindersley, the entrepreneur behind the Dorling Kindersley publisher, who bought Neal's Yard in 2005, is an evangelical organic farmer with a large spread in Berkshire. When he heard that Mr Hook's father also farmed organically, the son was in.

The main attraction of the job was a powerful but underused brand. “It's a hidden gem.” The business has 10 per cent of the market in natural organic beauty products, which is worth £140 million and growing at more than 20 per cent a year.

The aim is to expand the chain to 50 branches by 2010, while boosting links with other retailers and upmarket hotel chains, and £10 million has been raised to fund this expansion from the Kindersley family and Triodos, the ethical bank.

Thus far, the stores have been tucked away, not always in prime retail locations. By contrast, last month one opened in the newly renovated St Pancras railway station. Mr Hook is targetting other areas of high footfall.

“The potential to grow the brand and make these fantastic products and remedies available to the public is hugely exciting,” he says. “I don't want our customers forever to be white, middle-class women.”

A little bit more

Born: 1968

1991: Graduated from Oxford Polytechnic, degree in economics and environmental biology

1988-93: Oddbins shop assistant and store manager

1995-2006: Carphone Warehouse, rising to managing director, UK Retail

2007: Orange Group, director, Channel Management

January 2008: Managing director, Neal’s Yard Remedies

Family: Married, two sons and a daughter

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