AS THE festive season draws nearer, Emily Cheetham feels ever greater trepidation. She is not worrying over Christmas gifts or party outfits but about expanding her successful handbag business, Cheet: Bags of Style, into a thriving large-scale enterprise with a long-term future.

At 28, this former PR executive had long dreamt of moving into something more creative, and has made a significant pre-Christmas investment in her company.

She is now praying that sales from husbands snapping up brightly coloured bags for wives, and women buying presents for friends, will bring in a healthy profit and help to move her business on to its next stage.

Cheet, whose handbags are clutched by celebrities such as the actress Jennifer Love-Hewitt, began as a hobby. “I had always looked at bags in high street stores and thought I could do better, so I decided to give it a go,” explains Miss Cheetham.

Working on her great-aunt’s old sewing machine — “it’s practically an antique” — she made a bag, then, dissatisfied, made another. “It was like a bug. I started to spend all my free time working on bags,” she says. Her mother, who had years of sewing experience, helped, showing her the best way to cut patterns and stitch them together.

Impressed with her efforts, friends were soon asking for handbags to match particular outfits, or to buy as gifts for others. Spurred on by such commissions, by August last year she had decided to leave her day job and start up as a full-time sole trader running her own company.

At that time it was a low-risk venture: start-up outlay was minimal and she worked from a room in her flat. In terms of financial commitments, she had only her rent to worry about — which she knew could be met by doing an odd week of temping work. “I felt like I had nothing to lose,” she says.

With little business experience, she happily admits that she made mistakes at first. She decided on a collection of bags to sell ready-made — only to find that her first customers wanted to choose their own features and styles. “I was left with a whole load of stock that I couldn’t sell,” she admits, “so I had to return to bespoke- only bags.”

Apart from that slip-up, she has kept costs down on every front. One designer friend created her website in return for a free handbag. Another accepted a bag as payment for designing the company logos.

Although then only a novice businesswoman, she “shamelessly exploited” everyone she knew in an effort to keep down her marketing costs.

“I talked to everyone with a boutique, or a connection to a boutique, where potentially my bags could be sold,” she explains. Through friends who were working in the City she learnt about social events at big banks and law firms where she could present a showcase for her products.

More friends recommended her business and regularly invited her to business occasions or featured her on their office intranet sites.

But Miss Cheetham has also had inspired marketing ideas of her own, or borrowed from elsewhere, such as hosting handbag parties. “I invite 14 or 15 friends around, give them drinks and nibbles, and then bring out the bags,” she says.