I’m guessing the funeral home entrepreneur “Man in the Van” has been around for going on 50 years. My idea of the “Man in the Van” or mobile funeral home operator, is that individual funeral director business operator who operates without a permanent venue. In essence, they take calls over the internet or the phone and make arrangements with families in the survivors’ homes. Any services are conducted in public venues such as churches or cemeteries. They generally use trade […]
Earth Funeral, which calls itself a “soil transformation provider” announced earlier this month in this press release that they will be expanding services to the state of Oregon. According to the press release, Oregon began allowing soil transformation (Natural Organic Reduction or NOR) on July 1, 2022. That makes Oregon the 3rd state, joining Washington and Colorado, as a legal location for what some refer to as “human composting” as a method of human disposition. I should note that Vermont […]
I’m surprised I missed this article last October when it was originally published by CBS Sports. However, I’m glad that I found it recently while researching another article for Funeral Director Daily. The article touches on sports but is, in my opinion, an article on death care, grief, the human psyche, and the movement of “remembrance” into a much more personal realm than many death care professionals acknowledge. The article points out that Green Bay Packers running back Aaron Jones […]
Bare, the Australian death care start-up that was founded in 2019 and already has a staff of 42 and has served over 15,000 Australians to date announced in June that it had raised AUS $10 million (US $6.82 million) in a round of Series A funding to advance their growth journey. This article from Smart Company indicates that Perennial Partners and Ord Minnett Private Capital have joined the group of funders which includes former NBA basketball star Andrew Bogut. Bare […]
Claesson Koivisto Rune design studio co-founder Marten Claesson made the following comment in this recent article from dezeen, “This is an unusual assignment for us. The funeral homes of Sweden are dominated by a few chains and Systrarna Ocklind is a very rare independent funeral home.. . . .(they) are daring to offer an alternative, also by introducing an urn that is so different to what anyone has seen before – and this in a trade where you don’t break […]
Canadian company, Kinwood, issued this press release last month about a recent submission to the Competition Bureau that they say is “evidence to the Competition Bureau that shows the commercial funeral industry, and its regulator are stifling competition in the funeral sector”. Kinwood CEO, Jeff Corcoran, is quoted with this comment in the press release, “The funeral & bereavement business is a mix of vulnerable clients, a predatory business model, and old-school funeral companies, all overseen by a regulatory body […]
It’s another way I see that the death care world has changed since I left the active profession in 2013. That’s only nine years ago but even how funeral and memorial services are paid for has changed. In my day families came in to the arrangement conference and almost all services were financed by savings, credit card, or pre-arrangements set up in advance. Today, there is a growing trend to finance funerals through crowd-funding such as sites like “GoFundMe”. So […]
Saturday was going to be a busy day of working in the yard for me. So, after my morning bike ride I showered up and told Angie I’m going to McDonalds for some breakfast and a chance to sit down and read the newspaper before I got down to doing that work. As like so many places today they were short on help and there was no one at the order cash register and customers – McDonald’s like to call […]
Every week as I’m looking researching through death care articles looking for topics to write on for Funeral Director Daily I will come across an article from some United States newspaper announcing that the local funeral home has just added pet cremation services to its line of service offerings. I’ve also seen, as this article from Business News Australia and a 2020 article from Funeral Director Daily point out, Australia’s largest funeral care provider, InvoCare, purchased two chains of pet […]
I’m always on the look out for whatever I can find that puts me at the front edge of “change” in the death care profession. Change in our profession used to happen pretty slow. . . . from home visitations to funeral homes, from wood caskets to metal caskets, to the slow methodical march of a society that now prefers cremation to earth burial. One of the great features and attributes of success of the generational family funeral homes over […]
