casket sales
For a period of time it was unknown to the owners of Caskets of Honor, located in Calvin, Oklahoma, that selling caskets in their home state was illegal without the procurement of a funeral director’s license. Then, according to this recent story from KFOR-TV of Oklahoma City, the husband and wife ownership team of…
Yesterday Funeral Director Daily’s feature article was about Matthews International and its 1st Quarter 2025 Fiscal Year results press release. As we digested that report, which like many public company reports, is big on numbers and sometimes small on the underlying issues and causes, we were informed that Matthews International had suffered a…
Matthews International, the conglomerate company with their largest portion of sales in Death Care, or what they call their Memorialization Segment, reported gross sales for their First Fiscal Quarter (October thru December 2023) of 2024 coming in at $450 million as compared to $449.2 million for the same period one year ago. …
2023 marked the 60th anniversary of Jessica Mitford’s book related to the customs of American funerals, “The American Way of Death“. If you are much younger than I am you probably don’t even remember it or have never heard of the book. It is my opinion that funeral directors and funeral homes…
In any given year there is a lot that happens in any industry or profession. And, there was a lot that happened in death care in 2023 such as the continuing Federal Trade Commission continuing to look into and holding hearings on the status of “The Funeral Rule”. Or, on the more…
Mathews International’s sales rose about 7.8% year over year for their 2nd Quarter of 2023 as compared to the same quarter of 2022. Matthews is on a fiscal year so their 2nd Quarter comprises the months of January, February, and March. Most of the sales increase occured in Matthews Industrial Technologies segment. …
I’ve been maligned and others in the profession have told me I am wrong when I say the funeral directors and funeral home owners can be “Entrepreneurial”. Several people have dropped me notes or emails that tell me I am “dead wrong” and death care is a business that is not entrepreneurial, but…
Victoriaville & Co., the Canadian based company that provides death care merchandise on three continents, announced in this press release a 67,000 square foot manufacturing facility in Cleveland, Ohio. According to Alain Dumont, President and CEO of Victoriaville & Co., “This manufacturing addition to our existing capacity has become necessary in order to…
Public company Matthews International, with a stake in the death care business, reported their Fiscal Year 2023 First Quarter last week and in doing so reported a company-wide quarter over quarter sales revenue increase of about 2.4%. The entire revenue increase, however, comes from their much heralded investment in the energy storage solutions business.…
At least in my area the idea of consumers purchasing caskets either online or in person from Costco and WalMart does not seem to have caught on. I think one of the reasons why is that area funeral homes have not warmed to that idea and don’t like the competition from those large retailers. However,…
