AN entrepreneur who started selling briefcases to bankers in the City has moved his now established bags business to York.

William Forshaw set up Maxwell Scott ten years ago. With the business developing its online presence in the United States and other global markets, he has now bought premises in Dunnington , York.

During his schooldays at Ashville School in Harrogate and later when he graduated from the University of Hertfordshire, William always wanted to go into advertising and started at M&C Saatchi in London.

He said: “As soon as I started on day one I felt very uncomfortable. It sounded amazing but was the most cut-throat industry I could imagine.”

After nine months the business downsized and William was one of a number of redundancies. He went on holiday to Italy to ponder whether he really wanted to go back into advertising and it was then that he came up with the idea.

“As we went through the market square we saw people selling all these leather products. I remembered some of my old clients who were on six figure salaries, people like directors of Merrill Lynch, who had the most horrific briefcases or came to meetings with carrier bags,” he said. He visited a factory which sold to the market sellers and bought home about 12 bags.

William sold the bags in receptions and cafeterias, or hired a meeting room and advertised around the office buildings.

“For the first two years it was like printing money, I was selling these at very competitive prices and buying directly from the factories in Italy.”

The success of the first two years gave him the money to expand to do exhibitions and he had stalls at Cheltenham Racecourse, Burley and Badminton Horse Trials and at the peak did 50 shows a year with his wife, Charlotte.

The corporate side started to slow down as more and more sellers jumped on the band wagon and about four years ago the business launched its first website.

Now Maxwell Scott, a blend of William and his brother’s middle names, conceived by his mother, who used to own the Yorkshire Lass pub in Knaresborough, designs its own bags in house creating one full bag for the Italian factory to copy.

William chooses and designs every aspect of the range of briefcases and holdalls, testing their strength before giving everything a lifetime guarantee.

Since launching the website, the business has been growing turnover by 30 to 40 per cent every year and this year, with a US website to launch imminently, he expects it could grow more.

So from a small warehouse in London, William took the decision to buy a bigger property in Chessingham Park, Dunnington, which also meant a better quality of life for his new baby, Liliana, named after the wife of the Italian factory owner.

William said the business, which employs six people, has room to expand at the new premises and will be employing more people in the next few months.

“The US is the biggest market in the world for online sales and then we’ll be looking at a Dutch website, Chinese, Japanese, and Australian,” he said.