How I spiced up the Shopping Channel to make a million

Five years ago, Hasfa Abubacker saw a product demonstration at the Ideal Home Exhibition and decided to film it. A year later she was head of her own production company.

Running a business turning over £8.5m a year hasn't left 34-year-old Hasfa Abubacker much spare time for interior design. The mother-of-one moved into her home in the Hampshire village of Wheathampstead four years ago and it still doesn't have any curtains. "There's never any food in the fridge" either, she says. "We're never home." But asked if she'd like to return to her old job in a TV company, and the answer is a definite no.

The daughter of immigrants from Kerala, India, Abubacker worked as a buyer for a TV shopping channel from 2001-2004, bringing in US commercials to broadcast in Britain. "After a while I began to think the commercials were all a bit samey," she says, "a bit cheesy and exaggerated." The point of buying a product is that it brings some benefit, such as reducing the amount of time you spend cooking or cleaning. But the American commercial presenters never convinced you of that, she says. The actors would read off a script, "with this exaggerated look on their face like their whole life had been turned around", even if it was just a hose or a set of knives they were selling.

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