TWO friends who quit their office jobs to launch a market stall celebrating Eastern culture have turned it into a shop and served 10,000 customers in a year.

The idea spawned the Happy Buddha in Boscombe, where the friends are offering free mindfulness and meditation classes.

Chris Kettle and Mike Powell set up a stall after discovering a mutual interest in Eastern culture and deciding to quit their day jobs as a web developer and an accountant.

It was intended to be an occasional weekend venture but expanded into 13 stalls across Dorset, which they consolidated into five small indoor emporiums.

Eventually they decided to concentrate on opening their first shop, in the Sovereign Shopping Centre. Its range includes traditional Buddhist statues, soft Huggy Buddha toys, gem stones, incense and water features.

It has been boosted by a rise in the popularity of practices such as meditation and yoga.

The pair have an online shop, Aria Crafts, selling 1,800 products, including fair trade crafts and clothes from as far afield as Bali, where they say the workers receive higher than normal price.

The pair employ two full-time and two part-time staff at the Boscombe shop and a second shop on Poole High Street.

They plan to launch the free mindfulness and meditation classes this spring.

Mr Powell, 30, from Poole, first discovered meditation a decade ago when he started using it to help ease worries and anxiety.

It also helped deal with his grief at the loss of his former business partner, who was also a friend of Mike’s, to liver disease in 2014.

Mr Powell, now a practicing Buddhist, said: “The wonderful thing is that we have learned so much from our customers.

“Meditation and mindfulness is really popular now, so many people are using it to help cope in their daily lives.

“It can help calm your mind and take you away from the hustle and bustle of everyday modern life and the more people who learn about it the better.”

The pair met in 2004, when Mr Powell was looking for someone to set up a website for his company Aria Business Consulting.

Mr Kettle said: “I’d known Mike for a while and we’d become friends. After I lost my business partner in 2014 we were chatting and Mike told me he’d got this idea to set up a market stall.

“It was only meant to be a weekend thing. We never thought it would go this far but it’s the best thing we’ve ever done.”