The 12-year old Hotel Chocolat business provides a welcome exception to this particular rule. This is a retailer that started life as a catalogue operation and moved into physical retailing less than two years ago. Managing director and co-founder, Angus Thirlwell, says that the company name is a mixture of French romance - "chocolat sounds so much better than chocolate" - and creating "a mystical place that doesn't exist."

There are now 10 terrestrial outlets, of which four are in shopping centres. Given that all of the stores, high street and mall, have opened since October 2004, this a racing start and all are good-looking spaces.

Thirlwell says: 'Our ambition is to be one of the world's top chocolatiers and that's why we've gone for a multi-channel strategy." Hotel Chocolat is not aimed at the mid or lower-mid market. Its stores, stock, and pricing are decidedly aspirational.

This however does not seem to stand in the way of its progress. A new store welcomed customers in Lakeside last month and on opening day, shoppers were flocking to buy Mother's Day presents, Easter Eggs and suchlike.

And as well as the newly-christened Lakeside store, the Royston chocolatier (posh choccie maker) is now up and running in thecentre:mk, Chapelfield in Norwich and the Harlequin centre in Watford, which was the first shop to open. But to date, Thirlwell has resisted the temptation to go for a mall-based roll-out. He says there is a balance to be struck between being available to shoppers seeking out Hotel Chocolat products and becoming ubiquitous. In fact, 20 stores will open in 2006, Plymouth's Drake Circus among them.

Practically, chocolate melts and examples abound at airports of brightly-lit chocolate retailers that have tired product, because it has semi-melted and then re-solidified as the airport has turned up or down the ambient air-conditioning. Thirlwell comments that in a number of mall instances he has insisted on a discrete air-conditioning system, in order that such vagaries can be avoided.

There is also the matter of trading levels. Renting space in a shopping mall can be an expensive business: things have to stack up. This is easier if a mall store is part of a large chain where the cost of renting one outlet can be offset against savings made in another location. But if an operation is small, the cost may mean that a very modest shop, little more than a kiosk, is the only realistic option if a retailer is not to find itself in hock to the bank.

Thirlwell says that to make a profit in a number of the UK's highest profile centres he would have to overtrade from a small space to the extent that "something would have to give" - the store ambiance, something that Thirwell says is an integral part of the brand. He continues: "We don't want to be solely seen as mall operators."

All of whichneed not deter mall-owners from looking at Hotel Chocolat as a potential tenant. As Thirwell says: "We're gradually moving up the pain threshold of what we can succeed at. We know that in a shopping centre we've got to be fundamentally successful from the moment we open. We can't be on a learning curve."

Hotel Chocolat is also ethical. It owns a 130-acre cocoa plantation in St Lucia and is building a £5m factory in-situ to turn beans into melt-in-the-mouth objects of desire. Willy Wonka has nothing on this lot.

Statistics

Hotel Chocolat: The basics

Established: 1994

Founding partners: Angus Thirlwell and Peter Harris

Number of outlets: Ten, with four in shopping centres

Ambition: "To be one of the world's leading upmarket chocolate brands"

Store sizes: 800 - 1,200 sq ft

Group sales to June 2005: £22m

Property advisor: Briant Champion Long

Website: hotelchocolat.com

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