Transcript
Speaker: Super interesting interview with Keith from Solace Cremations.
Speaker: Would you go direct cremation?
Speaker: Would you go for your loved one?
Speaker: Would you tune in online?
Speaker: Welcome to the Glam Reaper podcast.
Speaker: The Glam Reaper podcast is where we talk about life, love and loss.
Speaker: There is, yes, massive input from the funeral industry because that is the world that I live in.
Speaker: And so we do have a guest today, Keith, who is also in that industry.
Speaker: So we will get into that later, but welcome.
Speaker: And yeah, this is the Glam Reaper podcast.
Speaker: And please tell us, Keith, who are you, where are you from and what you do?
Speaker: Yeah, thanks so much, Jennifer.
Speaker: It's great to meet you finally.
Speaker: Face-to-face almost.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: In real.
Speaker: Yeah, my name is Steve Crawford.
Speaker: I live in Portland, Oregon.
Speaker: Sun is out here, which is pretty remarkable, but we have pretty nice summers in Portland.
Speaker: I am a co-founder and CEO of a company called Solace.
Speaker: We are a cremation business, brand new cremation business.
Speaker: We launched about two years ago here in Portland.
Speaker: And I can get into my backstory if that's interesting.
Speaker: But yeah, we are a startup trying to reimagine things
Speaker: based on some personal experience that we went through, losing a parent, the co-founder David and I each lost a parent, went through a fairly traditional formal funeral
Speaker: home experience and felt like there's got to be a better way, a simpler way to handle this for folks.
Speaker: So that's our goal.
Speaker: With Solace, we launched in Portland, as I said, in 2019, we expanded up to Washington State in Seattle.
Speaker: And then we're now in California as well, in Los Angeles.
Speaker: Amazing.
Speaker: So we are a classic startup, hair on fire, constant roller coaster of emotions.
Speaker: And it's been a lot of work, but it's been really great to see what we thought would help families actually end up happening and helping families, which is great.
Speaker: That was our goal all along.
Speaker: And tell us, Keith, what exactly is Solace Cremation?
Speaker: So what's different from what you experienced or what sort of what I call Joe blogs on the street, what they might be experiencing now?
Speaker: Yeah, part of that answer is based in the kind of genesis of Solace, which is
Speaker: David and I both were at Nike, which is here in Portland.
Speaker: We were creative directors and designers there at Nike for a long time and old friends.
Speaker: We left Nike in 2017 to set up our own little creative agency.
Speaker: We had grand ambitions of working very little and making a lot of money and having great clients.
Speaker: We didn't have any clients at the beginning.
Speaker: So we started thinking about business ideas of our own or opportunities for impact in areas of our own that we thought of.
Speaker: And I mentioned to him the experience I had with losing my dad and going through that experience.
Speaker: And I felt like the funeral home itself could use a makeover.
Speaker: I felt like our first idea was to reimagine the funeral home of the future much more
Speaker: Less gloomy, less old fashioned, tech enabled, et cetera.
Speaker: And he had lost his mom, he's from England.
Speaker: David had lost his mom and gone through a similar experience.
Speaker: So we set out to re-imagine the funeral home, was our first inclination.
Speaker: And then we quickly realized that by and large, people are choosing cremation over burial, especially in the West Coast.
Speaker: It's north of 70, 75% of people are choosing cremation.
Speaker: and less people looking for a full all-in kind of funeral home experience, which is casket, cemetery plot, marker, service, et cetera, for a lot of money.
Speaker: So we said, okay, there's still an opportunity here to kind of reimagine the experience for the family.
Speaker: And based on all of our training and experience at Nike, we felt like there's an opportunity here to reorient in our minds, reorient the whole experience towards the family.
Speaker: and just trying to eliminate most of the pain points for them along the way.
Speaker: You know, if you've not been through, if you've not lost anyone, you've not been through this before, it's pretty daunting.
Speaker: We hear this all the time with families we're serving.
Speaker: They don't know what to do.
Speaker: They're sort of thrown a curve ball.
Speaker: Can be very emotional.
Speaker: You know, it's a tough time and tough emotional time for a lot of folks.
Speaker: So we said, okay, we can still, if cremation is the prevailing choice here,
Speaker: And people want a simple, easy way to handle that.
Speaker: Let's just do that.
Speaker: So we basically put together a very simple website, which manages the experience in just a handful of minutes.
Speaker: People can sort of do it all online or call us or do a combination of both online and on the phone and plan and pay for and book a cremation through Solace.
Speaker: So that's sort of the nuts and bolts of the business.
Speaker: It's just a very simple, we have one product, one service, direct cremation only.
Speaker: We are one flat price.
Speaker: Another thing that we felt like was very strange about the industry by and large, and not, of course, not everyone, of course, is in the same boat, but lots of just, you know, sort of crazy pricing and in some cases, predatory upselling of families to things they may not want or need.
Speaker: And so we said, let's eliminate all of that.
Speaker: Again, our goal is just to simplify the process for people.
Speaker: So we just made it super easy.
Speaker: So we offer cremation.
Speaker: The way it works is we have the funeral director and a care team on our staff.
Speaker: So we have an amazing group of people who answer the phones 24-7.
Speaker: And they handle the family to answer all the questions as they come in.
Speaker: We like to think of it as a concierge level service for families to help them through this moment and this time.
Speaker: And then we work with a cremation center partner in each of our markets that does the cremation for us as a white label partnerships on behalf of Solace.
Speaker: So it's a really nice model because we can spend our time and energy and focus on the family and family comfort and ease of the process and educating them on how this works and what they should expect and how long it should take, et cetera.
Speaker: And the rest is just amazing service on the back end.
Speaker: So it's a very simple model.
Speaker: And we feel like it's catching on.
Speaker: People are looking for different alternatives here.
Speaker: Certainly, if you've chosen burial as your choice, we're not a service for you.
Speaker: And if you want a bigger dental service or memorial or something like a traditional funeral home would offer, we're not that either.
Speaker: But we are an alternative for folks who are just looking for a simple solution here.
Speaker: And we realized early on, and we continue to remind ourselves this,
Speaker: We cannot make the loss any easier and take away grief.
Speaker: That is not our goal.
Speaker: Our goal is to make this part of the loss a lot easier.
Speaker: It's less confusing.
Speaker: And one of the best compliments we hear from families all the time is you gave me a lot of time back to be with my family, to grieve, to work through my grief, because you made this part of the process super simple.
Speaker: You don't have to go into a funeral home.
Speaker: Paperwork is all digitized, can be done really quickly.
Speaker: And again, great service on the back end.
Speaker: So we have very proud of our all five star reviews on Google and all the markets we're in so far.
Speaker: So yeah, our goal is it was a lofty one and we still are aiming towards it.
Speaker: But it's just trying to help people kind of demystify this world because I think a lot of people go into a funeral experience thinking this is going to be confusing, complicated, expensive.
Speaker: And we're just trying to not have it be that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Does that make sense?
Speaker: Yeah, no, 100%.
Speaker: Absolutely.
Speaker: I completely understand it.
Speaker: I mean, it's part of how I came into it, although we came into it at slightly different angles, but I do.
Speaker: And actually I did a podcast earlier this year with, I guess, somebody similar to you guys, but in Canada.
Speaker: And I'm sure you probably, Irene was the name.
Speaker: Yes.
Speaker: Very similar to Solace.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Lovely, lovely one.
Speaker: So,
Speaker: Yeah, I definitely think it's the way of the future.
Speaker: And I mean, the same questions I asked her is essentially what you've done is you've taken it out of the funeral home and put it online.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: Do the family ever get to physically meet a person?
Speaker: Well, obviously, when depending on where the person passes away.
Speaker: So if someone passes away at home, right.
Speaker: We have a first call team, which is what that's called when we go to retrieve the loved one and take them into our care is called the first call.
Speaker: So we have a first call team that does that.
Speaker: Of course, there's physical interaction with humans at that point.
Speaker: If your loved one has passed away at a hospital, maybe slightly different or at a hospice, you know, each facility is slightly different.
Speaker: But certainly we have human connection in that way.
Speaker: What we don't have is a traditional brick and mortar funeral home that you would go to to do an arrangement.
Speaker: pick out a gasket and pick out an urn and do the paperwork by hand, that sort of thing.
Speaker: We just felt like, again, back to the beginning, we just felt like that's not necessary.
Speaker: If you've chosen cremation and you don't want all the bells and whistles, you don't need to go to a funeral home.
Speaker: And in our experience, when we did go to the funeral home, we were sitting through a sales pitch of a lot of things we didn't necessarily want or need.
Speaker: And you're kind of in a funky spot anyway, typically.
Speaker: So we just felt like, I mean, not put it harshly, but some of these experiences we hear from folks are more like buying a used car than dealing with a loved one.
Speaker: And we just wanted to eliminate all of that.
Speaker: So we, yeah, there is what I would say though, because we get this question a lot is about, this is not, the goal was never to make a cold digital kind of Amazon of death.
Speaker: This is not a one-click algorithm driven business.
Speaker: We have an amazing team on the backend of
Speaker: funeral directors and care team members that work with the family.
Speaker: It's just not done in person.
Speaker: So we do it on the phone, text, chat, all those things, email, if people prefer that, whatever the family chooses, we go where they want to go.
Speaker: And it's just a much simpler choice.
Speaker: So for example, in my dad's case, he passed away in 2013, trip to the funeral home to sort of set up the arrangements.
Speaker: He'd already prepaid and preplanned everything, but we still had to go through this sort of kind of weird sales pitch and lots of paperwork.
Speaker: And then a second visit to the funeral home to pick up his ashes, his remains.
Speaker: So it was two kind of long, painful trips to the funeral home.
Speaker: In our model, neither of those are necessary.
Speaker: We hand deliver the remains to you in our service area, or we can ship them to you if you're outside of one of our service cities.
Speaker: So yeah, it's just, we just tried to simplify the whole thing, take out all the nonsense.
Speaker: And you're in six states?
Speaker: No, we're in three states now.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, yeah, it's a classic startup, as I said.
Speaker: And it's, you know, it's one of the things that we wanted to do this really carefully and we want to grow, but we want to grow at the right pace.
Speaker: And by that, I mean, we want to make sure that every family that comes to us is obsessed and treated as good as possible.
Speaker: And so we are not out to just take over, you know, a land grab of state after state after state and gobble up cities.
Speaker: We want to make sure that each family that comes to Solace is treated really well at a very high level, which means we're growing slower than probably a lot of people would think we might.
Speaker: But that's okay because we know if done right.
Speaker: At the end of the day, our service is our product.
Speaker: So our service levels are very high.
Speaker: We want to maintain those.
Speaker: And we think if done right, this business can grow and be around for a long time if done right.
Speaker: And people start to recognize that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And also what some people, some of our listeners might not realize as well as in America, state by state is very different.
Speaker: So you have to have a legal funeral director in each state and the paperwork might be slightly different as well.
Speaker: And there's, so there's different regulations.
Speaker: So it's not like you can just say, right, we're starting in Oregon and we're taking over the world.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We have to be licensed in each state.
Speaker: We have to have a funeral director license in that state.
Speaker: Obviously paperwork is different by state.
Speaker: So it's, it's, that part is pretty complicated, but we're getting, we're into our third state now.
Speaker: California is the biggest cremation market in the country by far.
Speaker: No surprise there.
Speaker: So we thought, okay, let's, let's start in Portland, which is kind of small and in our backyard.
Speaker: Let's make sure this idea will work, which we think it is.
Speaker: Let's go to Seattle, which is a bigger city and, but very similar to Portland in a lot of ways.
Speaker: And then let's go to California because it's on the same time zone.
Speaker: It's a giant market.
Speaker: We felt like if we can kind of get a foothold down there and get people to understand what we're trying to do, we might have a business there.
Speaker: And that's working really well.
Speaker: But you're right.
Speaker: It is a state by state sort of kind of slow growth, which makes it difficult, but that's okay.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: As I call it, the non-United States of America.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: Yeah, exactly.
Speaker: What is Unite?
Speaker: It's funny too, because it's a very old fashioned business, and it's not really evolved over the decades.
Speaker: So we're dealing with county clerk offices that are still working on fax machines and telephone and paper billing and paper checks and that sort of thing.
Speaker: So
Speaker: We're navigating a quite old industry that we're trying to modernize in our own little way.
Speaker: It's a quite antiquated industry.
Speaker: And it's interesting that you have come from Nike.
Speaker: But I just want to touch on what you're talking about there, the antiquation of the industry, because it is really old fashioned.
Speaker: And what you're doing is new and obviously bringing the experience from the funeral home online, which is where everybody is these days.
Speaker: And, you know, unfortunately, you can't grow online.
Speaker: exponentially because of this state by state BS nearly, I call it.
Speaker: Like there's lots of things that haven't changed in the industry.
Speaker: Like for example, cremation in and of itself, right?
Speaker: So you've got, you had burial.
Speaker: Burial is kind of on the way out as far as I'm concerned.
Speaker: It's like the typewriter, you know, and cremation.
Speaker: Even, you know, the EPA, like, are saying cremation is one of the top 50 pollutants, you know, in the world.
Speaker: And yet, like, what did we do?
Speaker: We just brought in new abatement.
Speaker: Like, we just changed it slightly.
Speaker: So, like, what's...
Speaker: to me, cremation itself has to change a bit more.
Speaker: I mean, and I know there's all these green burials and the composting and alkaline hydrolysis and stuff like that.
Speaker: But yeah, I don't know.
Speaker: What about that part of it as well?
Speaker: Because isn't that huge?
Speaker: And nobody's made a movement on that yet.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a great question.
Speaker: We talk about this and hear this a lot.
Speaker: So our philosophy from the beginning was we will offer whatever families want from us in terms of disposition choice.
Speaker: So if they said to us all of a sudden they wanted body composition or alkaline hydrolysis, we would add that or shift to that model.
Speaker: Right now, the prevailing choice is natural gas cremation, which is, as you said, not great for the environment.
Speaker: We buy carbon offsets for all of our cremations, which I know doesn't completely counteract the negative impact, but it's something.
Speaker: We're also talking to a couple of our partners about containment or carbon emission containment of cremation, which I think is not even happening yet, but it's done in some manufacturing industrial capacity.
Speaker: So there's an idea there as well, which would be better.
Speaker: But we're in this transition mode.
Speaker: I think in the US, for sure, most people are choosing cremation.
Speaker: That number is going up every year across every single state.
Speaker: But it's still not completely focused on cremation.
Speaker: So I just think it will take a while for people to get comfortable with some of these newer ideas out there.
Speaker: But if people start, like I said, if people said to us, we want to do an alternative to cremation, which is this, and enough people came to us and said that, we would offer that.
Speaker: Because our goal, again, all along is just to help people.
Speaker: And if people want that, we will offer that.
Speaker: So we have no bias towards cremation.
Speaker: It currently is the sort of default choice for folks.
Speaker: And we do what we can to minimize the impact of that.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But we're keeping a close eye.
Speaker: Yeah, we've talked to Katrina Spade at Recomposed in Seattle several times.
Speaker: We have alkaline hydrolysis connections.
Speaker: We're talking to those folks.
Speaker: We're keeping a close eye on those things and we'll follow their lead.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: So your company, Solace Cremations, doesn't actually own any crematoriums.
Speaker: It's just more of the service.
Speaker: That's right.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We would probably ultimately love to have our own
Speaker: cremation facility so we could control the entire sort of experience for the family would be far easier than having partners in each place.
Speaker: But we felt like, you know, one of the early meetings we had here in Portland was a gentleman who runs a cremation center here.
Speaker: There's two in Portland.
Speaker: And, you know, he said, I'm an expert at cremation, but what I'm not good at or I don't want to do is handle the family marketing, paperwork, funeral directing, funeral arranging,
Speaker: So we said, okay, there's a possible marriage here where they're experts at that.
Speaker: We can be experts in the family and together these things will work really well.
Speaker: And it's proven to be a really good model.
Speaker: These partners are really highly vetted by our team.
Speaker: They have very high service level agreements with us.
Speaker: So we close eye on what they're doing, obviously, and they're not part of our business necessarily, literally, but they are a white label partner and we see them as that.
Speaker: So
Speaker: When a first call team shows up at a family's house, they say they're representing Solace, which was part of our goal.
Speaker: So it's not our direct team, but sort of an extended part of our team.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And obviously, this is quite topical amongst industry.
Speaker: But are those partners, and you don't have to divulge who anybody is or anything unless you want to, but are those partners mom and pops?
Speaker: Are they the SCIs of the world?
Speaker: Or would that be the level you'd be seeking to get to?
Speaker: Because obviously, they're in every state.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Another good question.
Speaker: They're all mom and pops, independent businesses.
Speaker: That's not to say we wouldn't, you know, partner with someone bigger than that.
Speaker: I think it's interesting.
Speaker: We talk about this all the time because one of the things that we hear from families is that the local funeral home that I used to know and trust and go to and my grandparents went there or whatever is now part of a big corporate enterprise.
Speaker: It was bought up years ago or recently, and it's not the same.
Speaker: It's different ownership, different management, different pricing, et cetera.
Speaker: And so we're obviously, you know, we're aware of that shift, you know, as independent funeral homes become acquired and aggregated into bigger enterprises and owned by other people.
Speaker: But we ourselves want to grow and become a bigger business.
Speaker: companies.
Speaker: So we have to make sure that we are, like I said earlier, we want to make sure that the service we provide is at the highest level possible, even though we can potentially be in 15, 20, 30, 40, all 50 states at some point.
Speaker: So we don't want to feel like a big corporate soulless brand or company that's come into your neighborhood to scoop up business from the local businesses there.
Speaker: So it's an interesting dynamic.
Speaker: We're
Speaker: So far we're doing okay because we're pretty small and we're just growing really carefully and strategically, but we do think about that quite a lot.
Speaker: Yeah, it's a journey.
Speaker: Doing a startup is a journey.
Speaker: Things change, things come your way.
Speaker: We did not expect at all when we built, as an example, we didn't expect COVID or a pandemic to be happening.
Speaker: But when the model shifted from people not wanting to go anywhere in person to a funeral home, that's for sure.
Speaker: And sadly, quite a few more people died, especially in places like Los Angeles.
Speaker: We felt very happy and proud and, you know, there was pride on the team to be able to serve families and help them in a tough time with a solution like Solace that we kept going, even though the situation down there was pretty dire in LA earlier this year.
Speaker: So it's a, partnerships is a big deal for us.
Speaker: Growth is a big deal for us, but we just want to make sure we do it really carefully.
Speaker: We've got a great team, leadership team that's handling all of that.
Speaker: So we feel really good about where we're headed.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Well, the, I mean, unless you've got spare pocket change of, I don't even know how much a cremation machine is going for these days.
Speaker: I'd say it's not short of a million dollars.
Speaker: So, you know, as a star, I'm sure you don't have that cash just lying around, but it probably would be either a next best step for you or, you know,
Speaker: partnering with somebody that's in every other state I guess but just in terms of what you guys provide so and just to kind of talk everybody through it so when you arrive at say a home we'll just say for example the person passed away at home your team arrives does the body get put into a casket at all
Speaker: any sort of a container?
Speaker: If you can take us through the exact steps and do you offer, which I don't think you do, but just do you offer any form of service option at all?
Speaker: Yeah, there's a few questions in there.
Speaker: So the process is really very simple and it's kind of standard across the board, which is depending on where the person passes away, if it's at home,
Speaker: There's two people that come from the team to handle the removal, the first, we call it the first call, dealing with the family and making sure that the loved one is taken care of carefully as possible, and then transported immediately to the facility, the holding facility.
Speaker: We don't offer currently what's called a watched placement, which is people viewed cremation or a viewing ahead of cremation, which is a more complicated option.
Speaker: Some people ask us for that.
Speaker: We probably have, you know, five or 10% of the people who call us are looking for that.
Speaker: So it's not a huge number, but really our, you know, and your, your comment about services is something we think about and talk about all the time.
Speaker: And I think we'll ultimately get to a place where we either partner with someone who does great memorials and services and bespoke events for people as part of what we offer to families.
Speaker: But we're not doing that now.
Speaker: We wanted to focus on the core business.
Speaker: Our goal was to
Speaker: If you think about the sort of moment of someone passing, there's the before, which is preparation, having a tough conversation, making some decisions, getting your ducks in a row, planning, et cetera, paperwork.
Speaker: The cremation itself, which we call the during, which we're handling now.
Speaker: And then the after, which is obviously after.
Speaker: And we are launching a line of urns that we've designed ourselves in a couple of weeks.
Speaker: They're going to be up on the website.
Speaker: And so we're starting to think about
Speaker: both before and after the passing, what we can offer to families.
Speaker: What we don't want to do is kind of replicate the funeral home model, which is out there, which is quite a lot of stuff to navigate through.
Speaker: There's jewelry, there's urns, there's thumbprints, there's all kinds of things that you're kind of shown as things that are options.
Speaker: And we just want to make sure that if the families are asking for that, we'll curate a small list of partners that we think might be worth working with.
Speaker: For the most part, we just want to focus on the main part of the cremation and then we'll go both before and after.
Speaker: So we're talking to partners in the world of preparation and prearrangement and even pre-funding.
Speaker: Not a pre-need contract per se, but a different version of that.
Speaker: And then after in terms of earns, we think there's an opportunity for earns.
Speaker: memorials in some way, shape, or fashion, which is virtual or in person or some incredible bespoke events that people think about and want to do for their loved one, and obituaries.
Speaker: And there's a lot of room for us to grow.
Speaker: We just want to stay focused on the core business and the families and then build from there, if that makes sense.
Speaker: So we're not quite there yet, but I can imagine a solace in a year from now where we have things ahead of
Speaker: More robust planning tools and preparation tools available.
Speaker: Great cremation service that we're offering now.
Speaker: And then a few things after the passing that we can offer people.
Speaker: For sure.
Speaker: And I know you're in that business.
Speaker: You're in the after business.
Speaker: So we should talk.
Speaker: I am definitely the after.
Speaker: That was actually one of my questions was, do you know of the clientele you've had so far?
Speaker: Do you know
Speaker: have they gone off to do something themselves, whether it was in a church or in a venue or something, or do they, and I know we're obviously coming out of probably the worst year to be asking a question like this, and you are a staff member, but so, you know, maybe a year from now, we'll have a more solid answer, but, you know, I even know myself that I'm getting a lot of
Speaker: families coming back and on the anniversary they want to do something because they couldn't do it so I'm just you know curious do you experience people sort of saying on the phone thank you so much for this this is brilliant you know now I'm going to do something else or maybe they don't even tell you I don't know like I just just wondering
Speaker: Yeah, we do hear from some people.
Speaker: I think COVID, as you said, kind of derailed the norm.
Speaker: So I think once hopefully this passes and people get back to being able to do things in person, it will change again, probably back to some sort of new normal, right?
Speaker: But I think what we do hear from people is that they really want to do something different, not traditional.
Speaker: We've heard things happening like a pub crawl for one of the families, one of the guys that passed away, his mates got together and did a pub crawl.
Speaker: We've heard of hikes with families and picnics.
Speaker: And so there's a lot of really interesting things happening that people are just doing on their own that may or may not be COVID related.
Speaker: I sort of feel like that that's probably the new normal, which is, and we talk about it at Solace all the time.
Speaker: Do we need to think about helping families after the passing more like an event planner or a wedding planner and help them put together an amazing bespoke luncheon, dinner, trip, hike, whatever it is, and help them plan that because they feel at a loss.
Speaker: We're not doing that now.
Speaker: The other thing that people ask us about, which we don't offer, but we're working on a solution is just a simple obituary because people don't really know what to do with that.
Speaker: And the idea of getting a newspaper, an obit in a newspaper is a little old fashioned.
Speaker: So we think, okay, there's some people out there doing online obituaries that are pretty good that we're speaking to about potentially partnering and offering that for folks.
Speaker: So
Speaker: You know, we're going where people are asking us to go and we're helping them.
Speaker: We're helping them solve those needs as we go.
Speaker: And I think we'll get there.
Speaker: But I'm really inspired and encouraged by the creativity that people are showing in non-traditional memorials and celebrations of life.
Speaker: I have another friend who is he's young.
Speaker: He's in his 40s and he he's already set aside a separate bank account for his kids.
Speaker: He's got three kids.
Speaker: And he wants them to travel.
Speaker: When he passes away, he wants them to take this money and travel to some of his favorite places in the world as a celebration of him and his life.
Speaker: And I thought, well, that's such a great idea and very nontraditional and unique.
Speaker: And is there more out there that we're not even aware of that we think we can help people either find or point someone to or partner with someone to help us deliver that?
Speaker: So yeah, I think it's wide open.
Speaker: And I think COVID kind of blew the doors off any kind of norm
Speaker: We don't hear many people asking us, hey, I'd love to go to a funeral home and have a service.
Speaker: I think that feels, not to knock those, of course, I have to be careful about it.
Speaker: I won't do that.
Speaker: But I just think fewer people looking for that, and I think COVID probably didn't help.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It's funny that you say that because there's Getty Images photographer who did exactly that.
Speaker: He got cremated and he asked his friends and family to travel to certain places and to deposit some of his ashes in those places so he would stay all over the world.
Speaker: And like there is there's so many innovative ways.
Speaker: I mean, I know when I sit down with the family and I mean, I started this, it's over 10 years ago now.
Speaker: this concept of it doesn't have to be this way.
Speaker: It's more about holding somebody's hand to help them through what's right for them.
Speaker: So like a lot of the time I'll sit there in front of a family and they'll be like, well, what should I do?
Speaker: What's the average?
Speaker: What does the service look like?
Speaker: What does, you know, they h ave a hundred questions, but essentially when you ask the right questions, you'll find that the family can answer what it is that they want themselves for themselves, whether it's
Speaker: traveling all over the world which you know for my if you like bread and butter job especially here in New York that would do me out of the job but I'd be happier to see them put that together and decide that's what they want to do than you know to have them because then if I'm just going to advertise that oh now you have to do a memorial in a venue and we're going to do this and this and this then I'm almost just replacing the funeral home and while like you touched on there it's not that what you and I and
Speaker: all these other innovative death care people are trying to do, I don't think anyway, is to replace the funeral home.
Speaker: It's that that's not for everybody anymore.
Speaker: We've evolved as human beings, you know, and we've evolved from the horse and cars to Tesla cars.
Speaker: And
Speaker: you know, every other industry is getting affected by tech and by innovation.
Speaker: And so it was only a matter of time by the funeral industry went online, became more tech focused, got more options.
Speaker: The only fear I have, Keith, is that, as I said, I've been doing this for 10 years.
Speaker: And it started off sort of with me becoming a wedding planner for funerals, and then writing my book and
Speaker: spoken on various different radio and TV shows, but I have a certain wealth of knowledge that Joe Public on the street doesn't have, right?
Speaker: And so do you.
Speaker: That's what we've become experts in what we do.
Speaker: But I've also been approached by so many different companies to either be a brand ambassador or a part of their company, et cetera, et cetera.
Speaker: And I see them come and I see them go.
Speaker: That is one of the things I have a fear of is that like even you just kind of mentioned it there, the obituary website.
Speaker: I know so many of those and it just so many new startups.
Speaker: And it's like it's not to deter a startup, but it's like.
Speaker: It just breaks my heart that, especially with the industry in for that, you know, any startup.
Speaker: And I'm not saying this is yours because it sounds like it's doing credible.
Speaker: But for the online, those websites, it's that like, say, for example, my dad, my poor parents have been killed over a hundred times with the way I talk about them.
Speaker: But say my dad died and I wanted to do an obituary or for him online.
Speaker: And I do that.
Speaker: And in 10 years time, that company that was a startup is now gone.
Speaker: Like, what happens to that?
Speaker: Like, we are a lot more transient as a society.
Speaker: And there's so many new apps and there's something new every day.
Speaker: And as I said, like, I've been approached about so many of them myself.
Speaker: And so I do worry that because we're moving away from that brick and mortar funeral home, that we are almost dispersing
Speaker: too much that it's a fear I have that things will get lost and we won't have those you know like we'd always have a box of old photos up in the attic and that was physically where they were only ever going to be now you know if I die when I die you know you've Instagram your Facebook I'm all over the place and so how does my family ever collect all of that and
Speaker: It's constantly evolving.
Speaker: I mean, I've done talks and blog pieces and spoken to people about our digital legacy.
Speaker: And, you know, I know I'm talking about a million different things right now.
Speaker: It's so wide.
Speaker: When we die, it's so wide.
Speaker: We've got physical, we've got digital.
Speaker: It's just.
Speaker: Spiritual, it's just, there's so much that, yeah, it's just one of my fears for the industry.
Speaker: And I just hope it finds its way back again, in a sense, you know, and whether that is through a service like yours and a service like mine and a service like pre-planning online, and it becomes more concrete, this is where we go to.
Speaker: No, you bring up a great point.
Speaker: We talk about that a lot.
Speaker: And in fact, one of the reasons we've not done any kind of formal partnerships with anyone really is we have the same concern you do.
Speaker: That is, they're small, they're a startup, great idea, but this could not be around in a year.
Speaker: And we'd hate to have our families be stuck with either a dead end of something or something that's gone away.
Speaker: So we share your concern.
Speaker: I'm not sure the solution there.
Speaker: I do think the survival of the fittest and best and brightest ideas will rise to the top and succeed here, but it's going to take a while for that to kind of work its way through.
Speaker: One of the things that we, when we started Solace was this idea of, and we're a long ways from this, by the way, but we felt like there's not a brand in end of life that people can relate to.
Speaker: Of course, SEI is out there and FPG and some of these big guys, but even those aren't really consumer brands.
Speaker: And so the idea of creating a brand, whether it's Solace or somebody else,
Speaker: that becomes a resource for all these things that people feel like they can rely on and they can trust.
Speaker: And it's a great educational tool for them and a great service potentially if that's what they're looking for.
Speaker: So we would love to be that solution for people in a few years that people know about who we are and what we offer.
Speaker: And we can do everything from before, during, and after.
Speaker: At least curate a list of partners that are vetted and substantial and know what they're doing and will be around for the long haul.
Speaker: So we think that way too.
Speaker: We're also a little skittish and hesitant to do that, but we need to keep pushing.
Speaker: Like we both said, this is such an old fashioned industry that every corner we come around, we encounter some kind of archaic rule or law or regulatory issue that we need to get past and push on because the families are asking for different things and they're looking for different things.
Speaker: So
Speaker: I think it's exciting.
Speaker: It's it doesn't make it easy, but it's an exciting time to be working in this space because there is so much interest.
Speaker: There's a large group of people trying to attack different parts of end of life and innovate on behalf of families.
Speaker: So that's really encouraging.
Speaker: But yeah, it's going to take some work to get all these all these things connected.
Speaker: And in our mind, the perfect solution would be the family doesn't have to do a lot.
Speaker: They don't have to jump from business A to business B to business C to take care of something like we're talking about.
Speaker: So there's probably an idea out there where it's more connected for families and it becomes an ecosystem that's basically one stop and they can kind of do a lot in one place.
Speaker: Yeah, we need the McDonald's or the Starbucks or the Nike of the funerals.
Speaker: Yeah, it's true because, you know, as you said, the big players we know are really behind the scenes.
Speaker: And so there's no iconic brand as of yet in the funeral business.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We're working to become that brand, but it's going to take some more time.
Speaker: It's going to take some time.
Speaker: Well, it is interesting actually because I don't know if you're going to the NFDA this year in Nashville in October, but another gentleman that I interviewed on my podcast, Justin...
Speaker: Oh yeah, I know Justin from Santa Fe.
Speaker: Yeah, so he's a parting stone.
Speaker: And I think I'm after making up his last name.
Speaker: But anyway, Justin, who's lovely, and we actually met.
Speaker: And, you know, we kind of, he's one of probably 50 that I could definitely say that are at that stage where we're kind of the new generation in the funeral industry.
Speaker: And we're wanting to make changes.
Speaker: And in some ways, I feel like
Speaker: no one of us can do this alone.
Speaker: And I do sometimes kind of think that it'd be if all of us came together, that's how we might actually be able to make a change and stand up to the bigger players and actually be able to create that brand.
Speaker: Because I think solo as a startup, it's just, you know, it's just so hard.
Speaker: And so, yeah, it's definitely interesting.
Speaker: And I guess we watch this space.
Speaker: But listen, I better wrap it up.
Speaker: Watch this space.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, like I said, it's
Speaker: It's super exciting that there's so much new thinking in this space.
Speaker: And we are proud to be part of that as well as you and some others out there who are doing some really interesting, innovative things.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And it's great.
Speaker: And we connect and talk to a lot of those people regularly to see what they're up to and see if there's ways for us to work together.
Speaker: Good.
Speaker: So that's exciting.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: Well, thank you so much for chatting with me, Keith.
Speaker: And we will watch this space.
Speaker: So Solace Cremations, we're going to leave all the links in our podcast.
Speaker: So people will be able to check it out.
Speaker: You're not at the pre-planning stage yet, but if they still want to check it out and just see ahead of time, or if they're in the industry and they might want to check you out and in one of those states,
Speaker: So you're in California, Portland.
Speaker: Yep.
Speaker: Southern California, Oregon and Washington.
Speaker: Oregon and Washington.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: We're going to launch San Diego County next week.
Speaker: End of next week we'll be in San Diego.
Speaker: So it's exciting, exciting times.
Speaker: Well, the best of luck with everything and I'll keep me posted.
Speaker: Yeah, you too.
Speaker: Well, that was a super interesting interview with Keith from Solace Cremations.
Speaker: Would you go direct cremation?
Speaker: Would you go for your loved one?
Speaker: Would you tune in online and fill out all your paperwork as opposed to a funeral home?
Speaker: We'd love to hear from you.
Speaker: So just let us know, glamreaperpodcast at gmail.com.
Speaker: If you've got a story yourself of how direct cremation either worked or did not work for you, we'd love to hear from you.
Speaker: So please get in touch and otherwise stay tuned because next week we will have another exciting guest.
Speaker: So we look forward to talking to you again soon.
Speaker: Ciao for now.
