A BUSINESSWOMAN has been named as Young Woman North-East Entrepreneur after refusing to give up when her first company collapsed.

Sarah Agar, 30, started out with £10,000 nine years ago when she opened an audio and visual equipment shop in her home town of Stockton.

That business failed only six months later, but Mrs Agar kept going and now has two thriving stores and an Internet business selling collectable toys and specialist skateboarding equipment.

The married mother-of-two, whose business is called Popcorn, was presented with her Businesslink and Barclays sponsored award by the Women In The Network organisation, in Newcastle.

She said she has two market-leader businesses in Internet sales for her collectible toys shop at Silver Street, Stockton, and skateboard shop, in Northallerton High Street.

She said: "We had such terrible problems in the first years. If I knew then what I knew now I would never have started out with just £10,000 to refurbish and refill an empty shop. You just can't do it.

"However our mission statement was Save Us From The Dole and we refused to give in.

"We've now got a profitable company and the best imaginable, family-based team of ten employees.

"It's a nice living, but really we're just into it.

"My husband is really into the skateboarding and the collectible toys like Lord of the Rings figures and things like that. He's already saying our daughter, Ellie, has to be a skateboarder and she's just two. People often think we must be a bit geeky to be into things like that but we're not."