VIRTUAL shoe shop tycoon Stuart Paver of York has laced up a £1 million deal to build a new head office and distribution centre at Northminster Business Park, York to cope with breathtaking expansion.

With recorded sales on his www.shoe-shop.com zooming by 8,000 per cent in its first full year, Mr Paver has been forced to sell the centre he bought a year ago in Clifton Moor in favour of this new 18,000 sq ft structure Upper Poppleton. And he expects that his 25 Internet company staff will expand to about 55 within two years.

They should be moving into the new premises in August, by which time Mr Paver hopes to have tied a bow on the sale of his 3,500 sq ft Clifton Moor warehouse to a firm which for now he will only describe as "an interiors business from Harrogate."

Mr Paver's dot.com success has not been at the expense of his real chain of 22 family-owned Paver shoe shops for which he has drawn up plans for a further four, targeting Brighton and Manchester over the next six months. "The success of the virtual sales rely on the success of the real shops," he said.

The Northminster Park structure will consist of offices and 16,000 sq ft devoted to warehousing. "But we will have room to expand when it proves necessary," he said, adding that given that at one point as many as 10,000 shoe-browsers logged on to his site at the same time, that day could come sooner rather than later.

"The reason we have been so successful is that we have avoided the mistakes of other Internet companies which took on exorbitant costs before achieving the necessary sales. We spend whenever it is justified," he said.

Meanwhile, his brother Graham Paver, logistics director, has met up with Martin Burgess, the managing director of the site developers Northminster Properties Ltd and Andrew Eccles, a Northminster director to finalise details.