And now operates out of a new £10 million warehouse, with a turnover of £25 million.

New Business finds out how that happened.

Eureka moment

The "Eureka" moment for Andrew James came when James invited Jill (my wife) and I round for dinner. Instead of cooking a meal for us, he asked us to cook our own food using a table-top Raclette Grill which his parents had brought from Germany. I thought this was a bit of a cop-out to be honest! But having loved the food (and more importantly the raclette) I spotted an opportunity when we realised they weren't available in the UK, and James and I decided to source our own. We ordered a container of 3,000 and began travelling the country selling at trade shows, but soon e-tail overtook retail, and we began selling online in much larger volumes.

Financing

James and I funded our first container of raclettes, so it was something of a risk! We were storing them in our homes and garages at first, until our families made us invest in our first business premises, and we haven't looked back!

Regrets

Not putting stronger warehousing systems in place sooner to cope with unexpected rapid growth. We have world class systems and facilities in place now, however a few years ago we were in an unfortunate situation where customer demand exceeded the capacity of our system, resulting in us having to work extremely hard to satisfy customers who had been affected. The facilities we have now put into place give us confidence we can cope with any situation in the future.

What would you have changed?

I would have introduced HR earlier in our growth cycle. This relieved a lot of pressure and really formalised our structure, it has allowed us to introduce many benefits for the people who work at Andrew James.

For more information visit www.andrewjamesworldwide.com