The two-year-old company from the west side of Lewis is getting used to the bright lights. It was already named Textile Brand of the Year at the 2009 Scottish Fashion Awards held at Stirling Castle, and was in the news again recently for providing the fabrics for Glasgow’s first five-star hotel, Blythswood Square, due to open this month.

All this on top of giving partners of world leaders attending the G20 summit in London in March, including US First Lady Michelle Obama and Carla Bruni-Sarkozy,

wife of France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy, a wrap made from a specially produced tweed.

The two former Labour politicians on the board – chairman Brian Wilson and director Alasdair Morrison – still know a good story when they see one. (They also know a bad one and moved quickly to ridicule a report their company was denying its Scottish identity to appease US opinion following the Lockerbie bomber’s release).

The company’s rise appears a fitting warm up to next year’s celebration of 100 years of the Orb, which, along with a Maltese cross, is the symbol of the Harris Tweed trademark registered in 1910.

It is has been in continuous use ever since, a record which no other trademark can match. But a little over two years ago there were some serious doubts that the celebrated island industry would even survive to its centenary.

In 2002, Derick Murray, managing director of the KM Harris Tweed Group, announced he was putting the business up for sale.

The KM Group incorporated Kenneth Mackenzie Ltd, The Harris Tweed Trading Company, and Kenneth Macleod (Shawbost) Ltd, and had a 97% share of Harris Tweed production that season.

KM Harris Tweed is sold to leading designers and major brands worldwide.

The group had a 70-strong workforce and commissioned more than 200 self-employed home weavers. KM had two mills – in Stornoway and Shawbost on Lewis.

But it wasn’t until December 2006 that Yorkshire textiles magnate Brian Haggas bought the KM group. Owner of the textile firm the John Haggas Group, he settled on a radical prescription to save the ailing industry.

He reduced all the 8000 Harris Tweed designs down to four, refused to sell to anyone else and started producing exclusively for his own garment production.

It was a dubious strategy. He ceased production altogether in March to recoup the costs of producing 75,000 jackets, leaving more than 100 self-employed weavers without work.

Mr Haggas couldn’t be contacted last week, but he said last month: “When I took on Harris Tweed I went on a world tour. I was talking to customers and the exciting thing was that everyone had heard of it.

“I was so elated that people talked about Harris Tweed with fondness and nostalgia that I thought there was going to be a huge demand for it, so we decided to put 75,000 jackets into stock. In the first 12 months, we sold about 5000. It gradually dawned on me that the task was a lot bigger than I first thought.”

When he embarked on this strategy there was only one other mill still working, the Harris Tweed Textiles (HTT) small operation in Carloway. But when Mr Haggas bought the KM Group in 2006, the sale had not included the mill at Shawbost, which was sitting idle. Enter Brian Wilson, the former trade minister whose home is on Lewis.

Mr Wilson told The Herald: “When people in the industry realised what Haggas was up to, they came to me and said this was a disaster in the making, but did I know that the Shawbost mill had never been included in the sale and it still had all the equipment there?”

He contacted Ian Taylor, an American with Scottish forebears, who is president of oil trader Vitol. He had met him when they were dinner guests of Fidel Castro in Havana, when Wilson was trade minister. Taylor agreed to become the main shareholder and Harris Tweed Hebrides was born.

That was less than two years ago, but the company has made such progress since that it has surprised even Brian Wilson. He said: “We have over 95% production, employ 40 at the mill and provide work for around 100 weavers. We never sought that but that’s what happened because of what happened to Brian Haggas. But things have gone better, faster than we had imagined.

“In five years’ time we hope to have confirmed our reputation as one of the world’s most sought-after fabrics, with a real cache.

“I am really interested in developing the Harris Tweed Hebrides brand because historically the tweed has just been sent away as a commodity fabric without the added value coming back to the community.

“So I think there is big potential in slowly developing a retail brand which complements the basic business, which is the mill. For example, we are producing Harris Tweed Hebrides bags which we’re going to start marketing, which I think have great potential and other accessories will follow. In five years, we want to be able to say to all the self-employed weavers that we will be able to keep you going with good money all the year round.” He dismisses suggestions that the definition of Harris Tweed should be revisited as lunacy.

Meanwhile, Lorna Macaulay, chief executive of the Harris Tweed Authority, said prospects for the hard-pressed industry were improving.

She said: “There is no doubt that given the way things have worked out for Mr Haggas, had Harris Tweed Hebrides not emerged as a phoenix from the ashes, it would have been just one small mill in Carloway.

“That would have been a very difficult place to grow the industry again from at this time.

“We are clearly keen now to get away from peaks and troughs so it is year-round employment and with the application of tweed to things other than clothes.

“When you are just dealing with clothes, Harris Tweed just features in the autumn and winter ranges. Its application to interiors, soft furnishings and accessories helps do away with the seasonality issue. Carloway and Shawbost can co-exist. I think there is market share for them both.

“Carloway wish to niche as a supplier of small bespoke designs. Shawbost are going for volume and innovation.”