Ron Warren may be a wizard in industrial and product design but he's slightly backward in the self-promotion department.

A self-effacing man, he has been dreading being interviewed and expects that what he has to say will be said in 10 minutes. Two hours later he still is talking animatedly about how good design not only improves products but saves the manufacturer money as well.

He even laments the fact that nobody has yet come up with the right combination for a domestic iron and board.

One of the five founders of Glen Electric, which, in what he terms a "David and Goliath" takeover, acquired the Dimplex Heaters company in the late 1970s, he is still, at 65, the design brain behind the products manufactured by the 20 factories the Glen Dimplex group owns in Europe and Canada, including the main one at Dunleer in Co Louth.

But he doesn't hog the design area, preferring his designers in different factories to use their skills.

"You have to let them have a little bit of free rein. They are all qualified. I tend to use different designers in different companies and let them put their own style into it. I tend to be the ideas man more than anything else these days." His son Paul works in the company's studio in Maidenhead in Berkshire near where Ron lives.

He has been working between Britain and Ireland for three decades and clearly loves it over here. He thinks the Irish are very creative and that designers like Louise Kennedy are making a big impression on industrialists about the need for good design.

He thinks it is great to see people like Kennedy and John Rocha designing products other than clothes. "All designers are versatile. A designer sees what's wrong and likes to put it right."

Ron Warren is in Dublin to promote the Glen Dimplex-sponsored All-Ireland Design Awards, for which he is a judge. "We realised a long time ago how important design was to industry. I've made my living here for 35 years or longer and I'm delighted to put something back into the design side of business in Ireland." This year, for the first time, the competition is open to designers in Northern Ireland and the 15 categories for entries range from furniture and multimedia to products, architecture and graphics.

He himself took the scenic route to becoming a designer. After second-level education at the Tottenham College of Technology in London, he started as a trainee draughtsman with City Display Ltd in London and returned there after the interruption of military service in the early 1950s.

"I never officially qualified; I don't have any degree - a couple of diplomas - it was just something I always needed to do. I had to go into the army.

"It's not harmful. I think it actually helped me during the transition period of boy-to-man situation. The discipline was very good for me. I didn't want to go myself and I was very pleased to get out."

Back at City Display, he "got a bit ambitious". The work there largely involved setting up exhibitions, which lasted about three days. "I wanted to go into something that lasted longer. I went into kitchens. I just needed to make things look better and make them better to use. And then I did product design with a consultant.

He says again he feels "a little shy of my background" because he doesn't have a degree, but his career path provided something else: "It probably gave me a cunning I wouldn't have had."

In 1973, he found himself working as a consultant to AET in Newry in Co Down, together with Martin Naughton, who is now chairman of Glen Dimplex, the largest private company in Ireland, Arthur Purton (engineering), Doug Lally (tooling) and Malcolm Stuart (sales and marketing).

There was an unwelcome change of management and the five decided to go it alone. Glen Electric was born. "We didn't even have an accountant. We had five directors and six or eight employees and one product which we designed and engineered.

"We, at that time, were a little bit on our uppers and the company was struggling a bit. A designer in a company like that wasn't kept busy enough.

"Because of the situation we were in, having difficulties paying our bills, I was driving lorries backwards and forwards to England, begging suppliers to let us have controls, everything. It wasn't very pleasant driving trucks. There was one route I took, Roden Street, that frightened the life out of me, with houses all bombed out on one side." He has plenty of stories about scary drives around Border areas around this time.

Their fortunes improved and, within a few years, they had acquired Dimplex for . . . "I think I remember seeing a £1 million cheque". Backed by the then Northern Ireland Development Association, they mortgaged their homes and got some bank funding. "It was a risk but we were so happy working for ourselves. It was a lovely feeling. I never regretted it."

Glen Dimplex is a very large company, the biggest Irish private company and the largest manufacturer of electrical heating products in the world.

It has an annual turnover of £600 million (€762 million) and employs 6,500 people, 2,700 in Ireland.

Why has it never gone public? Stressing that he is not involved in that side of the business, he said: "I suppose we don't need outside funding. I don't know . . . Martin Naughton has always had it as a private company, always kept bank borrowings low . . . maybe we don't need to go public.

"It gives us a little bit of freedom in my job. You can make proposals on designs and even decisions to make samples, which maybe in a public company you wouldn't be so free to do."

He married twice, first to Mary Daly from Killaloe in Co Clare, who died after 38 years of marriage (that's when he discovered the horrors of irons and ironing boards), and now is married to Ethna Gough from Dublin, who runs her own insurance brokerage.

He likes to sail but says he hasn't much time for it these days and likes wandering around old buildings . . ."the texture and feel . . . they are usually so much nicer-proportioned".

The oddest thing he was ever asked to design, he remembers with a grimace, was a houseboat for the principal in the consultancy where he then worked.

He designed the first of the new flame-effect electric fires which have been further refined and have found markets - and imitators - worldwide.

One of the most interesting domestic products he has designed is a cooker. A cooker? - "For Belling . . . it has double doors, no handles, all electronic. It's totally new thinking. Now we have to think of next year's. It's nice to have a flagship product. It's great to be ahead of the posse."