When Yvonne Ralph’s niece lost a baby, she made a keepsake box that changed her business. This Founder Friday, she shares how purpose brought Chain Valley Gifts back.
“You need to be passionate and excited about your business. Your business needs a purpose bigger than money to make it really successful and fulfilling.”
Yvonne Ralph does not talk about her business the way most founders do. She does not lead with revenue figures or growth rates or market opportunities. She leads with the people she has lost, because that is where Chain Valley Gifts actually began, not in a business plan or a market gap analysis, but in grief.
“We went to bed and woke up the next morning and she was dead,” Yvonne says, recalling the night she lost her fifth child, Jessica, to cot death. Jessica was 18 months old. “It was ruled a cot death. It completely changed my life. It is something that never leaves you. It takes decades, if ever, to move on from that heartache.”
In the years that followed, Yvonne lost her sister and her niece in a car accident, and then her mother-in-law to breast cancer. “It was a traumatic few years for me,” she says quietly. “Those experiences changed the way I see life and love forever.”
Starting from scratch
“Manning a shop seven days a week was really hard work and left very little time for being creative and making products to sell.”
The business did not start with a vision for memorial gifts. It started with candles, a grieving family, and a market stall on the NSW Central Coast. In 2016, Yvonne relocated to Chain Valley Bay with her eldest daughter Cassie after Cassie’s husband passed away, leaving her with a two-year-old son. “As a way to keep busy, my daughter began making candles and selling them at local markets,” Yvonne says. They were both, by her own admission, completely impulsive. Within four months of having the idea to open a small shop, the doors were open.
The shop sold goods from local artists and makers on consignment, alongside their own growing range of laser-cut products and personalised gifts. It looked like a good idea. The reality was something else entirely. “Manning a shop seven days a week was really hard work and left very little time for being creative and making products to sell,” Yvonne says. “We didn’t understand the drain of managing and staffing it. We didn’t take into account the personalities and demands of the local artists, nor the time to manage goods on consignment. We were true novices.”
After one year, they closed the shop. It was the best decision they made. They turned their full attention to building a website, teaching themselves how to do it, and doing courses on SEO until they understood how to get in front of customers without paying someone else to do it. “Teach yourself SEO and Google and Meta ads,” Yvonne says now when asked what advice she would give a new founder. “Even if you hire an agency later, you’ll know where they are spending your money. No one understands your customers and your business like you do.”
When Afterpay launched in Australia, Chain Valley Gifts was among the first to sign up, and for a period they were the only gift shop on the platform. It gave them early momentum. They invested in a UV printer in late 2016, which opened up the ability to print in full colour on timber, leather, acrylic, and more, refining their niche into personalised gifts and giving them the production flexibility that would later define the business.
The pivot that changed everything
For a few years, things grew steadily. The business was seasonal, peaking around Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, Valentine’s Day, and Christmas, with quiet stretches in between. In late 2019, they decided to push into the wedding market, creating a range of wedding signs, guest books, and wedding favours. They built a new website and launched at a wedding expo in Darling Harbour in January 2020.
Then COVID hit. Weddings stopped. The investment of time and money they had made into the wedding venture was going to sit idle for years. “There is no point beating yourselves up over it, or being a victim to circumstances beyond your control,” Yvonne says. “You just need to pick yourself up and keep moving forward.” While the wedding idea stalled, something unexpected happened. With travel restrictions and uncertainty driving people inward, sales of personalised gifts exploded. In mid-2020 they moved to a larger premises and grew their team to eight people.
Then the bubble burst. When sales came back to earth, Yvonne made what she now considers her biggest mistake. She kept the staff. “We tried to not fire anyone, but slowly we let them all go,” she says. “The delay in letting the staff go put us in huge debt and nearly saw the end of the business. What we learned from this was hire slowly and fire quickly. Had we understood this and acted on it, we would not have been on the edge of extinction.”
Nearly losing it all
With just Yvonne and her two daughters left, the three of them worked through a period that was, by Yvonne’s own description, genuinely dark. “It wasn’t fun anymore,” she says. “The dream of growth and expansion appeared to be a thing of the past and survival was what consumed us. Work was hard and even unpleasant some days, whereas before it was exciting and fun.” The personal strain on the family was significant. Long hours, financial pressure, and the emotional weight of keeping the business alive took a toll on all of them.
What pulled them through was another loss. Yvonne’s niece Hannah, who was the same age Jessica would have been, lost her baby in a stillbirth. Yvonne made her a keepsake box and some memorial plaques. “My heart just broke for her,” Yvonne says. “We have a very special relationship and she is such a beautiful person and I know how absolutely devastating it is to lose a child and go through that pain.” The act of making something physical for Hannah, something tangible to hold in the middle of grief, sparked a realisation.
“It made me feel good to be able to give her something physical to help ease her pain at losing her baby, Darcy,” Yvonne says. “I feel an affinity with people who have lost a loved one. So we decided our calling was to create personalised memorial gifts.”
Finding the purpose
The shift to memorial gifts did not just change the product range. It changed everything about how the business felt to run. “There was a huge gap in the market, and this was something we had experienced too many times, something we were passionate about and something that gave real purpose to the business,” Yvonne says. “You need to be passionate and excited about your business. Your business needs a purpose bigger than money to make it really successful and fulfilling.”
Today, Chain Valley Gifts is run by Yvonne and her daughters Cassie and Brigette. The business offers more than 300 personalised memorial products, all designed, made, and shipped from their premises on the NSW Central Coast. Cushions, blankets, photo keepsakes, wind chimes, candles, keepsake boxes, memorial plaques, garden plaques, Christmas ornaments, and a pet memorial range. Everything is made in Australia, under one roof, with a 2 to 3 business day dispatch time that Yvonne notes most competitors cannot match.
Yvonne has also trained as a Master Practitioner of NLP, a qualified Life Coach, and has completed a grief counselling course, because she wanted to be genuinely able to help the people who call. “I take the enquiry calls, and I feel like I am truly able to help people through a challenging time,” she says. “It fills my soul when I can help other people and know what we are creating is soothing for them.”
The phone number is on the website. Yvonne answers it herself. “We are happy to talk to our customers and proudly have our phone number displayed on the website, so customers can get their questions answered quickly by a real person,” she says. For a business built around some of the most painful moments in people’s lives, that directness matters. “We put love and care into everything we make, especially in our memorial range. We understand how important it is to get it right.”
When asked what she would tell someone starting out, Yvonne does not hesitate. “Back yourself, but be ready to pivot. Your first plan will likely change. Treat your customers like family, even the ones that get on your nerves. Answer every email personally. Manage your cash flow, keep costs lean and always know your numbers.” She pauses. “And dreams and hopes are not a business plan. Yes, you need a positive attitude and yes, it is good to have dreams. But action and plans are what makes the difference.”
For Yvonne Ralph, the action has always followed the grief. And somewhere in that process, she built something that helps other people carry theirs.
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