Transcript
Speaker: Hello and welcome to another episode of the Glamour Reaper podcast.
Speaker: I'm your host Jennifer Muldowney and on today's episode we are getting into it with two fun guys called Miles and Max and they're going to tell us how they're making a difference in the funeral industry.
Speaker: Let's take it away.
Speaker: Well, hi guys, and welcome to another episode of the Glam Reaper podcast.
Speaker: I am very excited to welcome my next guests, plural, and I love that their names are Miles and Max.
Speaker: It sounds like I should have twins on the show.
Speaker: I love this.
Speaker: So I'm really excited to hear what these guys have to offer.
Speaker: We have a lot in common, I believe.
Speaker: And so, yeah, I'm going to let them introduce themselves and hear what they have to say.
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: All right, let's go, guys.
Speaker: Tell me which one wants to go first, Miles or Max?
Speaker: Sure, I can jump in first.
Speaker: So my name is Miles Adams.
Speaker: I'm one of the co-founders here at Oaktree Memorials and Loyal.
Speaker: And so prior to this, I worked in the funeral industry for a couple of years.
Speaker: So I helped to start a company called Tulip Cremation, which I know one of your guests previously was Solace.
Speaker: So we were very kind of similar platform.
Speaker: And then prior to that, I did, let's see, consulting and investment banking.
Speaker: And I met Max while I'm consulting.
Speaker: Nice.
Speaker: And Max?
Speaker: Yeah, so I had no prior experience professionally in the end of life or funeral industry, as I'm sure many people who originally got into this also had.
Speaker: But so I met I met Miles when we were in San Francisco working together and consulting from New York City originally.
Speaker: Living in Southern California now, as you can tell, long hair and the nice ceilings.
Speaker: Are you surfing, dude?
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: And no, I did not go surfing this morning.
Speaker: But yes, so I met Miles when we were living in San Francisco in 2018, but then I stayed in touch with him as he went to work at Tulip, reconnected with him a couple of years later in 2019 into 2020.
Speaker: obviously learned more about what he was doing in the industry and had some personal experience going through loss of loved ones and not really even questioning the experience when I was going through it because obviously all the different emotions, family and drama, all that stuff that goes along with it.
Speaker: So the more I realized and the more I learned about what's going on in terms of memorialization and going on in terms of just the whole funeral process and just really educating myself and really through Miles' lens, having done it professionally and having after working
Speaker: worked with a lot of different families, realized that there's a huge, huge opportunity to reshape really the way families memorialize their loved ones as well as pets.
Speaker: So it was really my personal experience that really gave me the onus to start to really focus on this and try to help improve the experience for people.
Speaker: And yeah, we kind of just took it from there and we can talk more about, you know, what we did during 2020 and how we launched then and
Speaker: But yeah, that was really the onus for me getting in there was really to improve the experience, but also show people that they have other options too.
Speaker: It doesn't have to only be that one path.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And it is interesting because most people seem to come into this profession really from either personal experience or having grown up in it.
Speaker: So it's interesting that you're both, you have a bit of each.
Speaker: Yeah, we're both kind of outsiders.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So now tell us what exactly is Oak Tree Memorials?
Speaker: And then you also mentioned Loyal, is it?
Speaker: Yeah, so Oak Tree Memorials is really our kind of human focused brand, if you will.
Speaker: So modern urns that are designed for the ashes of a loved one that's a human.
Speaker: And then on the Loyal side, it's really our pet focused brand.
Speaker: And we have found, we actually initially started with more pet products and then right there, they were actually completely different products than what we have today are really our first line as is true with many startups is you kind of figure things out as you go.
Speaker: And our first line was very different types of products.
Speaker: Still earns and we're trying to be modern, but we had a lot less
Speaker: control over the whole design process for those.
Speaker: And so we were doing those for pets initially.
Speaker: And then during COVID, we had a lot of people reaching out to see if we could make them an urn for a human loved one and that they really liked the style of our urns, that they were
Speaker: modern and different than the traditional kind of brass funeral home urns.
Speaker: And so that's when Max and I, and it was kind of around that time, I really started with the company about six months before Max.
Speaker: And that's kind of around the time Max was joining.
Speaker: And we were both like, there's a really interesting opportunity here to help people memorialize their loved ones that can't find a really
Speaker: kind of modern urn that they'd want to keep in their home, especially for people to have like mid-century or contemporary furniture.
Speaker: The old school brass urn just doesn't really fit that aesthetic.
Speaker: And so it kind of, you know, a light bulb went off for Max and I, and we started really thinking about what, you know, what would our ideal urn collection look like?
Speaker: And so we spent
Speaker: about eight months coming up with that collection and finding the right studios to produce those urns in and the right materials and what colors and types of woods we'd want to use and all that.
Speaker: And that's really how we came up with our current collection.
Speaker: And so that's kind of how we break down the two brands.
Speaker: There is a lot of product crossover because we do find
Speaker: Even for our higher quality, like higher end urns on the human side, we find there's still a lot of pet owners that want something super nice for their pet.
Speaker: And I mean, it's obviously your pet's a very important part of the family.
Speaker: And so we've had plenty of people that have memorialized a pet with an $850 urn or something like that.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Now tell me about the urns themselves.
Speaker: Do you hand make them?
Speaker: Do you seek out artists to hand make them?
Speaker: Do you buy them in?
Speaker: Do you kind of sort of scope around and say, oh, I really like that one.
Speaker: I really like that one and sort of import them into one central spot or are you hand making them or what's the deal there?
Speaker: Yeah, so it's a big mix of kind of the first two options you gave.
Speaker: So really it's a mix of, we do a lot of the designing and then we rely on partners to do a lot of the manufacturing, but we make sure that they're all completely handmade.
Speaker: So we're right now only working with three studios
Speaker: Two are in the U.S. and then one is in Italy.
Speaker: And in Italy, we make probably about 40% or so of our products.
Speaker: And that's all the really kind of luxurious lacquered wood products.
Speaker: And really in central Italy, there's a real art form going back about 200 years for lacquered wood.
Speaker: And so that's something that we felt was kind of both...
Speaker: Both modern, but also not traditional is not quite the right word, but but something that kind of brings a certain like almost like stability to it.
Speaker: Like it's been around a long time and history.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: And so we were seeking that type of finish out for for our products.
Speaker: And so that's that's really I mean, it took a lot of searching to find the right the right studios to work with.
Speaker: And then the last kind of piece is we do have some artist partnerships and we're starting to expand this.
Speaker: On the artist partnerships, we really want, we really kind of seek out having those products be like almost like limited run products.
Speaker: So we ask the artists that we're working with to usually design no more, produce no more than about kind of anywhere, probably no more than about 500, but anywhere from 50 to 500 products.
Speaker: And in terms of just like units of each style,
Speaker: And this way too, I mean, we can really feature their work a lot more by doing this than having it be something that we're just kind of shipping out constantly.
Speaker: And it really lends to the story when we have a lot of, a lot of our families call before they place a purchase.
Speaker: And they want to actually hear a little bit of a story about the different urns we have, want to know where they're made, how they're made.
Speaker: And so having these artists partnerships too, it's really cool to be able to tell someone like, oh, you're from Texas.
Speaker: You know, we have an artist in Texas we can tell you about and showcase some of their work.
Speaker: And it's kind of reassuring in a certain way to be able to tell someone like there are only 250 of these made.
Speaker: And it's something very unique that, you know, your loved one will be resting in.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And what about jewelry?
Speaker: Do you do jewelry as well?
Speaker: Yeah, we do do jewelry.
Speaker: We have a pretty, I said, limited line right now, but we have started, you know, to really start to build that out, especially with plans for this year.
Speaker: Jewelry is interesting because it's not always a memorial product that needs to be so intention-based.
Speaker: We're right at the, like the purchasing doesn't always happen right at the time of death.
Speaker: And it can happen.
Speaker: It can be even used as a gift during the holidays to gift someone a piece of jewelry.
Speaker: that they can either put, you know, in case they lose a loved one, some ashes in, they could even do a piece of hair or, you know, for obviously in the case of a pet as well.
Speaker: So there's, there's, there's a lot of optionality and a lot of room for creativity and like innovation when it comes to jewelry products.
Speaker: And then, so we're really exploring that, building that our lines out for jewelry this year in particular, because, you know, we're, we're seeing a lot of families display a lot of interest in it as well.
Speaker: And,
Speaker: There really are very traditional pieces out there right now.
Speaker: So finding ways, just like with our urns, we want to make urns that don't look like urns per se.
Speaker: We'd love to continue to, to provide jewelry pieces that you would want to wear every day.
Speaker: It's something that necessarily, and a family, a friend wouldn't, wouldn't think it's a piece of cremation jewelry.
Speaker: Or just like your family or friend walks in, they're not going to be like, you know, oh, who's in that urn?
Speaker: They're going to be like, oh, what is that beautiful piece on your kitchen, you know, on your coffee table and living room?
Speaker: So that's really the intention behind it is also to give the individual the kind of ownership to tell the story the way they want.
Speaker: And it's not has, you know, death still has a lot of different kinds of stigmas and just like people don't want to talk about it.
Speaker: So
Speaker: You know, when it's a little bit more under the radar and it gives you the opportunity to kind of tell the story the way you want to.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And so obviously this is all ringing very true to me.
Speaker: And anybody, I guess, who's followed me for a while knows of I have two cremation jewellery lines, one Feral Celtic Ashes and one Rainbow Bridge Memorial.
Speaker: And exactly to what you just said, it's I designed them when my grandmother had sort of given me a holy medal when I was young.
Speaker: moving to America to keep me whole and keep me pure.
Speaker: And then when she passed away, I wore it as my sort of way to remember her.
Speaker: But then I had sort of every guy suggesting I was the Virgin Mary and sort of, you know, making smart remarks.
Speaker: And so I felt like I had to hide it.
Speaker: Whereas, you know, now my grandmother wasn't cremated, but it just, it gave me that
Speaker: You know, your jewelry is a statement jewelry, but equally cremation jewelry is so personal that, you know, some of the people who buy mine, they have they get the chain so long that it's actually under the breastbone and hidden.
Speaker: And, you know, it's not for anybody else to sort of see.
Speaker: It's just so that you feel the person close to you and beside your heart and stuff.
Speaker: So definitely all rings true to me.
Speaker: I have a fun question that I often bring up when I'm interviewed about this.
Speaker: And I find the answer to be entertaining and enlightening.
Speaker: So for me, my two companies, Rainbow Bridge Memorials is the pet.
Speaker: Farewell Celtic Ashes is the Irish-American diaspora, really.
Speaker: So we take a little bit of the ashes, we fuse it with glass.
Speaker: It's all done in Ireland and then they get the piece back.
Speaker: So it very much speaks to Irish diaspora around the world.
Speaker: But, so obviously that's sort of our human website, you know, as you said.
Speaker: And then, but if I was to ask, in Ireland...
Speaker: Ireland, the country of Ireland, the pet business is booming way more than my human.
Speaker: Now, what does that say to the Irish people?
Speaker: We don't give a shit about our humans, but our dogs and our cats don't even, you know.
Speaker: So my question to you is, which of yours is doing the best and in which countries maybe even?
Speaker: I mean, probably the US is where you're mostly based, but yeah, which is doing better?
Speaker: Yeah, you know, overall, I know the numbers overall a lot better.
Speaker: So overall, we are about 80% on the human side, 20% on the pet side.
Speaker: But obviously, our urns are a lot more expensive.
Speaker: So in terms of revenue, it skews the jewelry a lot more.
Speaker: I honestly don't know the answer.
Speaker: That's why I was hoping Max, you would take it on the jewelry.
Speaker: I don't know what sells better specifically for jewelry.
Speaker: Well, clearly the US is human-focused.
Speaker: It's just Ireland is pet-focused.
Speaker: The human part of my, you know, for all Celtic Ashes, does well in the States.
Speaker: It's just...
Speaker: It's so weird that it's just packed.
Speaker: Interesting.
Speaker: Wow.
Speaker: That's funny.
Speaker: I was just going to add on the jewelry.
Speaker: I mean, I don't know if it's because Max and I are both guys, although we do wear some jewelry, but it wasn't really something we thought about when we thought about kind of our planning of like, what do we want our company to be?
Speaker: And...
Speaker: you know, what kind of products are most important to families in terms of memorialization.
Speaker: It was always really on the earned side.
Speaker: And so often when we would talk to our customers, they would often, you know, we would ask, you know, like, is there anything else we can help you with?
Speaker: And they said, oh, yes, you know, I want to get something small for, and it really, a lot of the stories that I remember initially were starting with people wanting to get something for a daughter or for,
Speaker: Someone that wasn't necessarily going to have an urn, but they wanted to give a small part of the ashes too.
Speaker: And especially for pets.
Speaker: I mean, we definitely heard a lot of stories about people wanting to get a daughter or siblings, like a piece of jewelry to put pet ashes in.
Speaker: And so that kind of got us thinking like, well, what, what jewelry is out there?
Speaker: And right now we work with a couple of different designers and we're just, we're just working with their jewelry, but it's really kind of caused us to pivot some of our design time to really wanting to focus this year a lot on jewelry, because we've, we've found that so many families
Speaker: for both pets and humans are super, super interested in jewelry.
Speaker: And a lot of families that are going to scatter their loved ones ashes and so don't necessarily want an urn at all have ordered jewelry through us.
Speaker: And I'm guessing maybe you've seen something similar with your brands is, you know, not everyone wants an urn and that's understandable, but a lot of people want to keep some ashes in some way.
Speaker: And so jewelry is, I think, a really phenomenal answer to that.
Speaker: Yeah, for sure.
Speaker: Yeah, we don't, I don't do urns at all.
Speaker: I didn't, you know, go down that.
Speaker: It's a hard road.
Speaker: Well, it's an interesting, I have found since I started this journey, if you like, this funeral journey, as you kind of touched on, Max, about how, you know, you have your personal experience.
Speaker: And then, you know, I started this and I always started with what I really predominantly do, which is the memorial.
Speaker: and not having them in a chapel and a funeral home but while I have deviated along the way into speaking and podcasting and the jewellery you know people often say would you not do this like your own brand of urns and stuff I mean you can't do everything and the more scattered you get the kind of the less I always feel like the brand dilutes you know I watch these characters and they they put their name to everything and while I do want to put my name to other things you know you can't do everything and
Speaker: For me, yeah, it's great to hear you guys are doing this and you're young and you have these great ideas and you're working with great designers because it is, the earn market is so stale out there.
Speaker: I mean, it's crazy.
Speaker: And I mean, looking at your website, you've got a rainbow of colors and gorgeous woods and things like that.
Speaker: And I think that's more of what people want.
Speaker: I mean, there's another guy who I adore
Speaker: I can never remember the name.
Speaker: I'm terrible with names at all.
Speaker: I'll put the link below.
Speaker: But he handcrafts all of his urns from gorgeous wood, but they're not sort of your stereotypical shape.
Speaker: It's like a piece that you put on a wall.
Speaker: What is it called?
Speaker: Cremation urns?
Speaker: I don't know.
Speaker: I'll let you guys know anyway.
Speaker: But he's always at the funeral conventions, and he's a lovely, lovely guy as well.
Speaker: He was at the last one there in Nashville.
Speaker: But yeah, he does these huge pieces that you put on a wall.
Speaker: But there is no way you would think that they were in art.
Speaker: Absolutely no way.
Speaker: And yeah, so I do definitely think it's a market that's only going to get bigger and better and more and more personalized, which is great.
Speaker: What is next for you guys?
Speaker: Are we just building on the jewelry?
Speaker: Are we kind of looking for more artists to link up with?
Speaker: Or what does 2022 have for Miles and Max in the cards?
Speaker: 2020 and 2021 really, which was our first year, full year in business.
Speaker: We're obviously focused on having incredible product.
Speaker: We want, you know, people to be really paying for quality.
Speaker: But then we were really 95% of our business was also all direct to consumer online.
Speaker: So we were during the pandemic.
Speaker: Everyone is going even increasingly so now online to shop.
Speaker: Families, whether they wanted to or not, were also having virtual funeral services and everything was being done in the digital space.
Speaker: So we wanted to really make sure that we were focusing on the customer experience as well.
Speaker: So that's been a big onus of ours is to continue to do that.
Speaker: And while we scale and get bigger and to serve more people, we want to make sure that the customer experience is just as good as or better than the product they're actually getting.
Speaker: So that's really almost like a concierge service.
Speaker: We see it as like handholding if they want, you know, from the first kind of inquiry to the final step of having the piece in their home and really want to make sure we focus on that.
Speaker: And I think it's a big differentiator for someone who maybe naturally would go to get an earn on Amazon or a Walmart or one of those more big box retailers.
Speaker: We want to make this more, we want to really build a trust.
Speaker: And that's what really we see as the kind of core of our
Speaker: kind of long-term longevity as a brand too, is to really build a trust and hopefully, you know, we'll be able to help families, whether that's through multiple losses of their pets or through other losses of family members, and they'll come back to us and we can still help them and, you know, give them that excellent service.
Speaker: So I think that's something that we're continuing to focus on now when we're building out our customer success team and really making sure that our online kind of presence is also strong.
Speaker: But we're also now focusing really on working how we can work best with with funeral homes, as well as veterinarians and pet crematories and and seeing how we can still because as I'm sure you know, the process is still for the most part, you go to your funeral home, you go to your pet crematory and you are oftentimes I'd say probably 80 to 90 percent of the people who are looking for urns will go through that kind of venue through that path first, at least before going online to find other options.
Speaker: So we'd love to
Speaker: to work with, you know, funeral homes and the more kind of traditional, let's say B2B players who really own that kind of experience to help them provide families also with our products and also have, so families are going just to them for the whole experience sometimes versus having to do, you know, find other things online in many different places.
Speaker: So that's something we're focusing on too.
Speaker: Obviously product development is a huge, huge focus of ours for this year and to make sure that we
Speaker: are working with new materials, different kinds of designs, specifically jewelry.
Speaker: We, there's a lot of really cool ways.
Speaker: One, one thing we're looking into that you, you kind of mentioned that you do is, is how you can integrate ashes within the actual materials and find that super fascinating to continue, just to kind of redefine, right.
Speaker: The way you can, what you can do with that and going forward.
Speaker: So I'll, I'll stop there.
Speaker: See miles, do you have anything you want to add there for
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, that pretty much covers it.
Speaker: One thing I think is interesting to go back to on Max mentioning that we've started working directly with Funeral Homes is initially we were, I mean, really when we started the company, we were pretty hesitant to do this.
Speaker: And we kind of always thought we're going to be a direct consumer brand.
Speaker: And we didn't like a lot of the, as we've mentioned, a lot of the urns that are offered in Funeral Homes today.
Speaker: And we were really finding that a lot of people would reach out to us and say, you know, I only stumbled upon one of your ads recently and I'd already bought an urn from a funeral home.
Speaker: You know, I want to hear more about your urns, but I'm hesitant to pay for something new when I already have an urn.
Speaker: And talking to more people and just also our friends that had gone through the losses of some of their parents and just understanding their experiences,
Speaker: A lot of them, even knowing us, had said, you know, my first thought still wouldn't necessarily have been to go online to buy an urn when you're kind of in the moment at the funeral home, you want to get things done quickly.
Speaker: And so we were finding that we
Speaker: weren't necessarily like cannibalizing our own customer base from our direct consumer websites by going to funeral homes because so often it can be a different clientele.
Speaker: And then also where I think on the funeral side or for the industry as a whole, I think we're still like in the middle or even at the beginning of this shift where people are realizing there's a lot more that they can shop for directly online.
Speaker: versus buying everything through the funeral home.
Speaker: And I bet, I would imagine you probably even see this with services, because I know you do some of that, or it's a decent chunk of your work.
Speaker: And so often too, we hear people that have had a service at a funeral home and not fully realize there are a lot of other ways to do that at a restaurant or church or wherever they wanna do more of a celebration of life.
Speaker: So, yeah, so that's kind of how we how we came to the conclusion of that we needed to be in funeral homes, or at least in select funeral homes that kind of understood what we were doing.
Speaker: And that also weren't going to, you know, just mark things up crazy amounts, because that's something that we were
Speaker: very aware of as well.
Speaker: On the product side, I mean, Max covered it really well.
Speaker: We already actually have three urn designs that are completely finished or close to being finished.
Speaker: And so we will start producing those this year.
Speaker: And then really in terms of like our biggest focus, areas of focus, it really is the jewelry is one of the biggest ones.
Speaker: I mean, we...
Speaker: We just know it's something that's so important to so many people and also looking at men's jewelry as well.
Speaker: And for men's jewelry too, I mean, as Max mentioned, like finding ways that we can integrate it more directly into the jewelry so that it's really as inconspicuous as possible.
Speaker: And we're trying to keep things pretty low profile.
Speaker: I mean, I thought it was super interesting what you said about having a longer chain to kind of conceal the actual
Speaker: chamber for the cremated remains.
Speaker: I think that's super interesting and it really tells you, I mean, people want to keep their loved ones, whether it be humans or pets, near their heart, but at the same time, you don't always want people asking about it and having to share if you're not comfortable.
Speaker: I mean, for all of that, jewelry is definitely a big part of what we're looking at this year.
Speaker: And we wanted to offer something that is slightly different than what others on the market are offering.
Speaker: And then also we've been really thinking hard about how we can do men's jewelry well, since we think there's not a lot of cremation jewelry out there that is targeted towards men.
Speaker: And so we're pretty interested in how we can do that too.
Speaker: Well, no better guys to be able to do it considering you're both men.
Speaker: And yeah, it's definitely a tough one.
Speaker: My dad, that was one of the things that we used to always talk about because he's a manly man.
Speaker: And so he would never be wearing one of my pieces around his neck.
Speaker: We do have one piece that quite a few men love, but my dad always sort of said that he liked a widget or something that you could feel.
Speaker: And so the interesting thing about that was then when I met Justin,
Speaker: from parting stone and you know that the ashes could be in rocks i thought that was an interesting potential solution for the men out there to have something in their pocket but yeah that's very cool well thank you very much guys for joining us i guess if there's since 2022 is the year of jewelry and approaching the funeral homes out there if there's any funeral homes listening and you want to broaden your horizons and broaden your collection of urns and things maybe get in touch with the guys it's oaktreememorials.com right
Speaker: Yep, that's it.
Speaker: Perfect.
Speaker: So we'll put all the information in the links below and stuff like that and how to get in touch with the guys and stuff.
Speaker: But yeah, well, thank you so much for sharing with us.
Speaker: Perfect.
Speaker: Thank you so much for the time, Jennifer.
Speaker: Thank you, Jennifer.
Speaker: I really appreciate it.
Speaker: And that concludes today's episode.
Speaker: Are you going to be hitting up the guys' website?
Speaker: I hope so.
Speaker: I actually already know of a couple of their great products that they sell in a couple of different funeral homes.
Speaker: So whether you're a funeral home or somebody, unfortunately, in the market for an urn, but something that's a little bit different, then definitely check the guys out.
Speaker: We'll talk to you next week.
Speaker: Bye-bye.
