A PAST triple Press Business Award winner has returned for the event's 25th anniversary year, 17 years after the business was founded, and seven years after the original venture was liquidated.

The Japanese Shop, which imports and sells Japanese gifts is entering the Small Business of the Year and Family Business of the Year categories in this years awards, having three times won the Retailer of the Year Award, and being named overall winner in 2004.

The company was originally set up by husband and wife duo Jez and Hiromi Willard, and started trading in 1998 with the objective of opening 30 shops across the UK.

By September 2008 the venture was forecasting record profits on sales of nearly £1.5 million from its three shops in Harrogate, York and Chester.

However within just four months as the financial crisis took hold, the pound had halved in value versus the Japanese Yen and the company was put into liquidation.

Managing director Mr Willard said: "It was like being hit by an economic tsunami.

"In January 2009 I lost my father, who worked with us, had to make redundant all but one of our 23 wonderful staff and lost our business, which Hiromi and I had built over the last 10 years. We were completely devastated."

Mr and Mrs Willard then agreed a deal with the administrators to buy back the stock and the website, turned one of their bedrooms into a storeroom, another into a small office and set out to do it all over again.

The Japanese Shop, mark 2, at this stage is purely an online retailer, and began trading in February 2009.

Mrs Willard said: "In a strange way we were quite excited, we had built a successful business once and were very determined that we could put to good use everything that we had learned and do it all over again."

With support from their Japanese suppliers the couple began learning about the new world of e-commerce and in 2012 made a substantial investment in a new website and opened a showroom in Harrogate.

The Japanese Shop has also opened up new marketplaces and is now trading profitably on Amazon, eBay and will soon add the Rakuten to the portfolio.

With exports accounting for only about 10 per cent of sales, the company has wholesale customers in Italy, Spain, Poland, Ireland and Slovakia, and has shipped private orders to nearly 50 countries in the last three years, even to Japan.

The company now has around19,000 retail customers, 50 wholesale customers, including the British Museum, and is particularly proud to have won contracts to supply corporate gifts to clients including Nissan and Toyota.

Mr Willard said: "Valuable lessons have been learnt, particularly ‘turnover is vanity, profit is sanity’.

"The future for The Japanese Shop looks extremely positive, there is huge growth potential in new European markets and we remain determined to realise efficiency improvements."