• News
• Online Articles

Break of Day Gift Baskets

Yvonne Clark
http://www.breakofday.biz

What prompted you to start Break of Day Gift Baskets?

My dad had been a fashion designer and had his own store on Queen Street in Brisbane a long time ago. Although he died when I was young, I heard many stories about his shop and from when I was 7 I wanted to have my own store. I started a gift shop in Paddington in 1986 that had a unique focus and it was successful from day one. A customer and business friend suggested I provide Gift Baskets as part of the business and I acted on their suggestion. The gift basket side of things took over and I moved away from Paddington to concentrate on the baskets.

Break of Day has been successfully trading for 20 years. Do you have any tips or business principles you’d like to share?

I great piece of advice I was given early on in business was to do what you say you are going to do. This really isn’t very difficult as you are the one setting the terms of trade but the result is that you have happy customers. I simply provided the goods or services according to what I said. Customers view that as integrity.

How has your new website helped your business?

The growth has been huge. In one year we increased turnover by nearly 100% and it has continued to grow. The majority of my customers don’t even live in Australia. They reside overseas but send gifts to friends, family and colleagues in Australia. I never envisaged the customer base extending from Russia to the Falkland Islands.

Your husband, Gary Clark, creates cartoon strip “Swamp”. In the early days of “Swamp”, you became his syndicate. Were you doing this while you were establishing Break of Day?

I had been working with Gary for 5 years before starting Break of Day and had his cartoon strip well syndicated in Australia. I had negotiated a contract with a major Swedish publishing company who bought the European rights for Swamp, so to some extent I had done myself out of job.

How did you balance your workload?

I love being busy and doing lots of different things. I get bored if I don’t have challenges. Sometimes it does get very hectic though!

You can visit the website here: http://www.breakofday.biz