Transcript
Speaker: Hi and welcome to another episode of the Glam Reaper podcast.
Speaker: On today's episode we have a pretty interesting guy.
Speaker: I met Justin a long time ago at the NFDA, which is the funeral directors convention and he told me about turning people into stones.
Speaker: So let's get into it.
Speaker: Welcome to the Glam Reaper podcast.
Speaker: Thank you so much.
Speaker: So I haven't seen you, Justin, in over a year, just over a year.
Speaker: We met at the NFDA in Chicago last year, 2019.
Speaker: And little did we know what was going to be ahead of us.
Speaker: Anyway, we shall move swiftly along because we don't need to harbor on about that.
Speaker: First of all, there's a lot of us, a lot we can talk about, Justin.
Speaker: But how I met you was we got introduced by the fabulous Larry Stewart, I believe, right?
Speaker: who will also be on this podcast tell us parting stone that is your company as some of my listeners know i do cremation jewelry which is ashes with glass and so i was fascinated that you have similarly aligned but different concept talk about that tell me we developed a technology to offer families an alternative
Speaker: to cremated remains.
Speaker: So instead of receiving a bag of ashes following the cremation, you can now receive a collection of solids that look very much like stones and feel like stones.
Speaker: The reason this happened is because when my grandfather died, I started to talk to people about their experience and I kept hearing the same story, which almost became, you know, kind of comical, which is that they would talk really passionately about
Speaker: these loved ones and then tell me they were keeping their remains in a closet, a basement or garage as ashes.
Speaker: That was about four years ago that I kind of that I had that experience.
Speaker: And I just thought, like, surely there's a better solution than this and kind of had this crazy idea at the time, which was could we offer an alternative to ashes?
Speaker: So that's kind of the beginning of how Parting Stone and Solidified Remains started.
Speaker: So, parting stone, because one of the things I like to do on this podcast is break it down.
Speaker: Because you and I, at Funeral Speak, most of the people I have on this podcast have some sort of a dalliance with the funeral community or industry or business, whatever way you want to refer to it.
Speaker: So, I try and sort of break it down.
Speaker: So, essentially, you take somebody's ashes, and it can be a pet or a human, correct?
Speaker: Correct.
Speaker: Yeah, because it's the same thing.
Speaker: That was one of the first things I used to get all the time is, oh my God, could you do it to my pet dog or could you do it to my grandmother?
Speaker: You know, depending on which conversation we'd had previous.
Speaker: And what people don't realize is they're similar remains.
Speaker: And so you take the ashes, the remains, and you like condense it.
Speaker: I mean, what's the...
Speaker: into a stone, like a lovely, beautiful, smooth stone, which interestingly, when I first began my journey to cremation jewellery,
Speaker: My dad loved what I did, but in classic, my dad told me that he wouldn't have anything to do with any of it.
Speaker: Reason being is because he's a textual person, so he likes to hold something to something.
Speaker: And so he, one of the first things he said to me was, Jen, you need to come up with some sort of like a rock or a thing for the guys.
Speaker: You know, he was, the jewelry was a great for the girls, but he needed something for the guys.
Speaker: And while we did come up with something, I wasn't,
Speaker: thrilled about it and I have to be 150% about any of our products.
Speaker: So to me, what I lack, you brought in, which is amazing.
Speaker: So now dad, you know, shout out to you.
Speaker: I have some great regards for when you go, even though actually that's him that wants it.
Speaker: But anyway, it's just so people understand it is a smooth, are they always white, the rocks?
Speaker: So what's kind of unique about Hardingstone and the service that we offer is we will solidify the whole amount of remains.
Speaker: into these solids.
Speaker: So it's really the first ever, we're actually the only company in the world offering an alternative to cremated remains, which is kind of cool.
Speaker: And the way this is sold is you walk into a funeral home, choose cremation, the funeral director says, we have two options for receiving the remains.
Speaker: Would you like to receive them back as cremated remains or solidified remains?
Speaker: And they show the family the two options and they choose what they want.
Speaker: So most of the families we work with will actually never see the ashes.
Speaker: They receive them in the solidified form.
Speaker: And then the colors to touch on the colors and the kind of, and then also your point on like the similarities or differences between animal cremated remains and human cremated remains.
Speaker: One of the most interesting things that we've discovered while developing this process is that solidified animal remains and solidified human remains are actually very different and humans will come out all of these different colors.
Speaker: Which is so
Speaker: Which is so interesting.
Speaker: We've seen like deep, like kind of jade greens.
Speaker: We've seen honey yellows, lavenders, like chocolate browns, honeys, like we've seen everything.
Speaker: It's so interesting.
Speaker: Does somebody get to choose that or that's just they get their human?
Speaker: It's just natural to each person.
Speaker: Right, okay.
Speaker: And when you said, because for our process, human and pet remains are similar, but you were saying they're very different.
Speaker: So while humans are a rainbow of colors, are the pets not for your process?
Speaker: Pets are generally just come out very white.
Speaker: There is some variation in pets as well, but not nearly the amount that we see in the humans.
Speaker: And also, I can talk a little bit about our process and how it works too, which I didn't touch on.
Speaker: So when a family chooses solidified remains, the funeral director will send the remains to our lab here in Santa Fe.
Speaker: And we have a really beautiful 3,000 square foot lab facility here.
Speaker: And the first step is to refine the kind of granular remains into a powder.
Speaker: And then we will add a small amount of binder to kind of turn them into a clay-like material.
Speaker: The solids are formed from there.
Speaker: And then they'll go back into a kiln, kind of like a ceramic kiln.
Speaker: heated hotter than the temperature of that original cremation.
Speaker: This is where the solidification happens.
Speaker: And when they come out of there, they go into essentially a rock polishing process.
Speaker: And the final material is a lot like a normal rock or a lot like ceramic.
Speaker: You know, it's not going to scratch with your fingernail.
Speaker: It's not going to dissolve in water.
Speaker: It's going to outlast us on this planet.
Speaker: I have another question I want to ask you about, but that actually brings me to when I remember when I met you, generally when I meet people, I say whatever is on my head.
Speaker: So I think I got super excited about yours, you know, the concept of yours, because for me, I felt that rather than ashes,
Speaker: you know, getting buried under a tree, like a lot of people think, and they think the tree absorbs them and all that sort of stuff.
Speaker: I loved the idea of yours sort of being the bedrock for a plant out in a garden, or I think I even said this to you at the time, my crazy brain, or to be in a fishbowl, you know, I mean, why not?
Speaker: You know, they don't dissolve.
Speaker: So if granny loved her fish or if
Speaker: whatever.
Speaker: I just felt like the fact that you could use them with water, which is a beautiful feature in a home, very feng shui, which we are actually going to have a feng shui person on this podcast too.
Speaker: But, you know, very great, very great.
Speaker: That's not even the right phrase, but to have something that you can have that's pretty, that's water, that's not just, I don't want to sound, but that's not just dust in a urn.
Speaker: Because to be honest, I've never been a fan of any urn, really.
Speaker: I actually, I've seen one or two beautiful ones of the latter years, but up until recently, oh my god, they're just depressing looking.
Speaker: Well, they're tacky and outdated and I don't know, I feel the same way.
Speaker: And so it's interesting because I actually thought, honestly, your process was more similar to mine in that you take some of the ashes, but yours is actually a full on.
Speaker: So if somebody didn't want to get rid of all the ashes, they wanted just one or two rocks.
Speaker: How does that work?
Speaker: Do you call them rocks or stones?
Speaker: Well, I call them solidified remains, but they look like stones.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: That's possible, like a keepsake amount.
Speaker: We really don't see ourselves as a keepsake company.
Speaker: We see ourselves as a human remains company and an animal remains company.
Speaker: But it's the same price for the process, essentially.
Speaker: So you can, the minimum amount we need is a couple tablespoons.
Speaker: And as long as we have that, we can make a couple of small solids.
Speaker: But generally, we'll receive the full amount of remains to our lab and process that full amount back to the family.
Speaker: So there's no ashes left.
Speaker: You know, what I found when I was going through my grandfather's death is that it was the material of ashes themselves that was really kind of forming this, I don't know, a lot of times like an emotional barrier.
Speaker: We didn't really know what to do with them.
Speaker: We didn't really want to learn.
Speaker: We didn't want to
Speaker: see them or touch them because they're messy.
Speaker: We were afraid of filling them.
Speaker: We didn't want to see the bone fragments.
Speaker: We were embarrassed to have them out when people came over.
Speaker: And it just seemed like we don't accept that type of poor experience for anything else in modern life.
Speaker: You know, there had to be another solution to this.
Speaker: And cremated remains are one of our most treasured possessions.
Speaker: I guess this is back to your color situation, because I was just thinking, you know, what if I'm somebody who's lost, you know, mom, dad,
Speaker: granny, granddad, brother, sister, and I have all of these solidified remains, stones, rocks.
Speaker: You know, what if they all get intermingled?
Speaker: Will I be able to tell them apart?
Speaker: Oh, interesting.
Speaker: We'll often have people solidify, like, two parents or even, like, pets and people, and it depends on how similar the material comes out.
Speaker: So the answer is maybe you can tell them apart.
Speaker: You can definitely keep them separated.
Speaker: We're actually looking into...
Speaker: If there's a way for us to engrave on them very small initials or something so we can tell them apart.
Speaker: We don't currently offer that, but that's a real situation.
Speaker: And I'm sure, to be honest, I'm sure anybody that's grieving out there is probably thinking to me, you know, what a crazy question that is.
Speaker: Of course, you know the difference.
Speaker: You know, it's like, you know, the difference between twins and anything like that.
Speaker: When it's that precious to you, you know the difference.
Speaker: It's not a, I'm being a little bit flippant with asking that question, but I'm just imagining all these rocks and sort of thinking, oh my God, you know, they're classically held in an urn in one spot.
Speaker: So now if you've got this bundle of rocks and stones, you know, what do you do with them then?
Speaker: The next thing I'd really love to know is obviously 2020, the year of crazy, but we've had, as you and I talked about over a year ago,
Speaker: a lot of innovation in this industry.
Speaker: So you've got water cremation or bio cremation, so many words to it, different terms.
Speaker: You've got all of these different methods of body disposition that are coming out and more to come, I have no doubt.
Speaker: And I'm excited for some, not so excited for others.
Speaker: Have you tried to test your product in relation to them?
Speaker: Are you sticking with cremation for now?
Speaker: Are you open to it?
Speaker: What's your thoughts on that?
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, we're kind of in this
Speaker: funny golden age of funeral innovation, you know, which is just so interesting and really fun to be a part of.
Speaker: I think it's about time, to be honest.
Speaker: But yeah, we've seen the alkaline hydrolysis and the open air cremations and the organic body reduction.
Speaker: Really interesting.
Speaker: We definitely, I mean, Parting Stone, we see ourselves definitely in line with that movement.
Speaker: I mean, what all of this is doing and the reason it's happening is people got tired of having
Speaker: you know, two options or very few options.
Speaker: The reason these are working is because the public has been asking for it and because the public is supporting it.
Speaker: We have a tendency in the United States to push the topic of death under a rug and like not talk about it.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: Honestly, I think all the new technologies, what's been holding them back is maybe people's discomforts.
Speaker: But we're getting to this point where people are genuinely excited about organic body reduction and genuinely excited about alkaline hydrolysis because it's better for the environment and natural burial.
Speaker: And I think that in itself is really exciting.
Speaker: And that's really why we started this as well to empower families in their grief through a form of remains they can touch and hold and feel close with.
Speaker: And so I definitely think we're in line with that whole movement
Speaker: In terms of solidifying remains from alkaline hydrolysis, we have proven that we can do it and we have done it for a few customers at this point.
Speaker: We don't publicly offer it yet.
Speaker: We want to do some more research into it, but we expect to be offering it in the next six months to a year.
Speaker: And that's alkaline hydrolysis?
Speaker: Correct.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And so it would be something that if there is any up and coming tech companies or startups out there that are interested in maybe partnering with you or seeing if their product works, that maybe as part of their process, they could send you a sample and that way you guys could figure out whether it works.
Speaker: And that would move everything along a lot quicker, I guess, for the end consumer, which is what it's all about, really, for everybody in the funeral community.
Speaker: Or it should be, should I say.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Not always.
Speaker: That's amazing.
Speaker: Well, well done.
Speaker: And how's it going?
Speaker: I mean, in the last year, how has it been for you?
Speaker: I mean, COVID obviously has probably put a bit of dampener on it, or maybe it's increased.
Speaker: It seems to go either way for the first year.
Speaker: I mean, well, it's so interesting.
Speaker: You know, we've been now, we started in October 2019, and we have now been functioning as a company more
Speaker: in a pandemic than not in a pandemic, right?
Speaker: Someone's like, well, what's normal life like in the business?
Speaker: And I'm like, we don't actually know.
Speaker: Like, we have no idea what it is to run a business not in a recession, in a pandemic.
Speaker: How it's affecting us, I'm not totally, we're not totally sure.
Speaker: But, you know, in March, it's been a kind of a roller coaster for us.
Speaker: And we were just, we were getting some really great traction at the beginning of the year.
Speaker: March hit and COVID became a thing.
Speaker: and people started, you know, everyone was not was really unsure of what the future looked like and what the pandemic was going to be.
Speaker: And there was that two weeks where like the whole kind of world stopped in a lot of ways.
Speaker: And like nobody's buying anything.
Speaker: Nobody's going out.
Speaker: Nobody's doing anything.
Speaker: And our sales, like we were not doing well.
Speaker: And, you know, as a startup company, when your cash flow stops, like it was a really scary time, you know, not only in our everyone's personal life and health and
Speaker: emotional but also from a business standpoint like will we you know be how long can we sustain this and the answer at that time was not very long and really what we did at that time is we found that so after those two weeks our sales had picked up again but not totally back to where they were we actually found that funeral directors had a lot more time on their hands
Speaker: because of the stay at home orders, there was no services, there was no, and because of that, there was no embalming, there were no caskets, there were no viewings, there were no events.
Speaker: And so, although, you know, in a lot of urban areas, there were more deaths happening in some of these more suburban rural areas, there was actually a lot of time on a lot of their hands.
Speaker: So we doubled down on training more people to offer solidified remains as an option.
Speaker: And by the time the stay at home orders were lifted in June, we had actually doubled our sales
Speaker: You know, that week, you know, it was like two weeks that everyone kind of lifted and our sales just like skyrocketed, which was a really great sign because we were kind of blindly going into this.
Speaker: We were like, okay, like we think this is what's happening.
Speaker: Let's go for it.
Speaker: And it paid off, which is really nice.
Speaker: And now what we're seeing is an expanded cremation market.
Speaker: More people are choosing cremation.
Speaker: And we've received a few letters from families that we've worked with.
Speaker: that essentially have said, because of COVID, I wasn't able to see my mother in the last few weeks of her life.
Speaker: Thank you for providing an option for remains that allowed me to feel close with her, which is really sweet.
Speaker: And I feel really grateful that we can provide that type of experience for people.
Speaker: But it really kind of speaks to what everyone's going through right now.
Speaker: We've served multiple people who died of COVID-19, and we've talked to those families.
Speaker: We got one letter from a family that said my, well, yeah, it's the same one.
Speaker: It was that she wasn't able to see her mother.
Speaker: Tough time.
Speaker: I mean, being based in New York and being a memorial planner, it's been a very interesting year for me, I will say.
Speaker: I mean, I've gone to streaming.
Speaker: It's gone from 500, having in-person 500 events and memorials to streaming it to hundreds.
Speaker: I mean, it's just crazy.
Speaker: It really is.
Speaker: And whether it'll bounce back or what way it'll bounce back, I think will be very interesting for the next year.
Speaker: I do think 2021 is going to be a very, very interesting year for memorials.
Speaker: A lot of people will, whether it's with the remains, with an urn, with the solidified remains or whatever they have of their loan.
Speaker: I think they'll have some sort of services.
Speaker: And I hope they do.
Speaker: And not just from a, you know, to keep me busy point of view, but I hope they do because I really do think there is validity in the
Speaker: the funeral and in the memorial service as a blueprint, should I say, for grief.
Speaker: And it's sad to watch families not have that.
Speaker: You know, we're still doing smaller ones here, but it's few and far between.
Speaker: And, you know, they have 20 people at the service, but they want to have 200.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So it's just, you know, it's rough.
Speaker: Another question for you.
Speaker: Do you, are you just B2B?
Speaker: Do you do B2C?
Speaker: So are you just seeking out sort of veterinarians and funeral homes?
Speaker: Or can Joe Bloggs off the street come onto your website?
Speaker: And we'll leave all your information in the links below.
Speaker: But just for people who are listening, which will be funeral directors and Joe Bloggs, as I call them.
Speaker: Yeah, so we offer both B2B and B2C.
Speaker: Our almost entire focus is on the funeral industry right now.
Speaker: We don't really even focus on the pet industry, to be honest, although we do have a number of veterinarians who offer this.
Speaker: And if you are living with remains right now that you'd like turned into stones, you are welcome to go to our website.
Speaker: and you can start the process there.
Speaker: We'll send out a collection kit to retrieve those remains and get them shipped safely to our lab here in Santa Fe.
Speaker: But really our focus right now is with funeral homes and we're looking for more funeral home partners every day.
Speaker: And in the last year we've onboarded 200 in the United States and Canada, which has been so cool to see the industry have such a positive response to this and then actually see sales.
Speaker: And that's the reason we're growing is because
Speaker: the funeral homes will come on and be kind of skeptical and then families will start choosing this form of remains and they tell their friends and so that's really how we've grown over the last year.
Speaker: Now can I ask, won't sort of include all of these bits that I'll ask you, because I know I introduced your stuff, what you do to the funeral home that I work in.
Speaker: Did you hear anything from SEI?
Speaker: Are you with any SEI?
Speaker: Yeah, we're with a number of FCI funeral homes.
Speaker: They are doing really well with us.
Speaker: A lot of them in the kind of Western United States.
Speaker: So we've rolled out on an individual level with FCI funeral homes.
Speaker: We have not rolled out on a corporate level.
Speaker: We've definitely had conversations with corporate and yeah, we're seeing if it's a good fit for both of us for the future.
Speaker: Because I know, you know, once you're in with them and your paperwork and everything has gone through, you're pretty much, it's easier for you to go from one to the next funeral home.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Once they have all your paperwork and the pirates that be have all the paperwork and stuff like that.
Speaker: I remember the barrier with, are you still, what funeral home are you with right now?
Speaker: Campbell's.
Speaker: Frankie Campbell's.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: Frankie Campbell.
Speaker: The legendary Frankie Campbell.
Speaker: Is that where you're broadcasting from?
Speaker: That's where I'm broadcasting from today.
Speaker: Wow, very cool.
Speaker: I'm going to be like, oh, today is Frankie Campbell's.
Speaker: Yeah, and we would love to work with Frankie Campbell.
Speaker: You know, there's so many different types of funeral businesses.
Speaker: The two big sides of it are essentially like Frankie Campbell, which is like the premier, very high end, very high level of service on one end, and then the other end is
Speaker: direct cremation and essentially the business model is high volume cremation at the lowest price possible.
Speaker: And what's that?
Speaker: Yeah, totally.
Speaker: And, you know, and that's some people want that.
Speaker: And it's been interesting to enter this industry with this alternative to ashes and kind of fitting into kind of both business models and see where, see where we, how we can do that.
Speaker: And,
Speaker: We've found a path in both directions, which is cool.
Speaker: I have some new ideas for how it might work.
Speaker: We all have to help each other in this business.
Speaker: There's, especially all of us, new entrants into it.
Speaker: It's not as easy as it looks.
Speaker: I know I mentioned to you a goldfish bowl and potentially a
Speaker: rocks and stones in my garden.
Speaker: And that was just where my little brain went, the conversation we were having when I was holding the stone in my hand.
Speaker: But tell me what's your experiences or what's your feedback from your clients and your customers on what they're doing with the stones or how they're interacting with them or just to give our customers or our listeners here an idea themselves.
Speaker: So it's been really interesting seeing how living with a solid form of remains has kind of changed
Speaker: people's relationship with remains.
Speaker: And, you know, the biggest thing is they're not ending up in closets anymore, which is a big win, I think.
Speaker: I think one of the stories, so as an example that comes to mind, is a family wrote to us and told us about a remains reveal party that they held at their home.
Speaker: And so they got the box of solidified remains back.
Speaker: They invited the family over.
Speaker: They all poured champagne and they opened the box for the first time together.
Speaker: And just
Speaker: to see the color and the texture for the first time.
Speaker: And they all pass them around the kitchen table and everyone got to find the ones they like best and take them home.
Speaker: And, you know, that's not an interaction that you could have with with the ash form.
Speaker: And and we're finding that families are there's a lot of new rituals being dreamed up, I guess.
Speaker: People traveling and leaving leaving them in special places, people mailing them all over the country.
Speaker: It's been really cool to see the new ways that people are interacting with the remains.
Speaker: A quick question actually that just came out of that.
Speaker: Do the family get to choose how many stones they get or how does that work?
Speaker: It's a full amount of remains, so it's kind of just whatever comes out of the process.
Speaker: It's kind of a lot like cremation, you know, you get whatever volume goes in comes out.
Speaker: For instance, if we receive 10 cups of cremated remains, we'll return 10 cups of solidified remains to that family.
Speaker: Really, it's just the same material condensed into these solids.
Speaker: And what's the average, 10 to 14?
Speaker: The average for a person is probably 40 to 60, ranging from palm size down to kind of thumbnail size.
Speaker: But, you know, we did a similar thing.
Speaker: We shared them with everyone in the family who was around the country.
Speaker: We weren't able to gather.
Speaker: We had a Zoom memorial at the cemetery and they buried some of the stones.
Speaker: And yeah, it's, you know, death in the era of COVID.
Speaker: Yeah, right.
Speaker: And the stones, can they be easily mailed?
Speaker: How does that work?
Speaker: Do you have to identify them as remains or is it sort of a... You do, yep.
Speaker: When we introduced this new form of remains, USPS actually changed their rules to include it.
Speaker: And so you do have to identify it and label it.
Speaker: That was a fun time.
Speaker: I said, that sounds like it was a fun time.
Speaker: I'm gathering that that wasn't it.
Speaker: I'm like, congratulations.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I mean, what's really one of, we have a lot of business challenges because, you know, because it's such a new technology.
Speaker: And one of them is that there's never been a company that regularly ships the full amount of remains.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: You know, funeral homes will do it like once or twice a month usually, or if that,
Speaker: But we're shipping out, you know, a hundred remains a month right now.
Speaker: And the USPS pricing structure for that is challenging for us.
Speaker: And so, you know, we were hoping that to get it kind of reclassified, but we haven't had any luck so far with that.
Speaker: Well, I find the USPS...
Speaker: I mean a bit like banks, to be honest, in Ireland and here are the bane of my existence.
Speaker: I feel like every time I go in there,
Speaker: Not that I take Xanax, but I feel like that's something I would need afterwards.
Speaker: Like, I just feel like I never, there was one, th is is a total sidestep, but I wanted to send my best friend back home in Ireland a birthday present home.
Speaker: I went in with the product and I handed it to the post office lady and I said, can you weigh that so I have an idea?
Speaker: Because it can literally be $10 up to 70, right?
Speaker: To me, it's just bonkers how they do it.
Speaker: And I think she said it was...
Speaker: $15 so I brought it home and I thought the product itself was only $21 I think so I thought $15 to send it home am I crazy but I thought you know what it'd be nice it's a nice treat send it home so I packaged it up now when I say packaged it up I put it in an envelope couldn't have weighed more than a pen right I put it in the
Speaker: back in an envelope and I did my paperwork and this was why I wanted to do all the paperwork at home because I hate post offices and I hate being in them and when they ask me to do paperwork and then they don't have pens.
Speaker: They never have pens.
Speaker: Brought it back and thought, right, great.
Speaker: I've done everything.
Speaker: I've done my due diligence.
Speaker: I will be in and out.
Speaker: I go up, hand it to her.
Speaker: She's like $35.
Speaker: How did it increase in $20 by putting it in an envelope?
Speaker: How?
Speaker: I took it.
Speaker: I said, give that back to me.
Speaker: It's fine.
Speaker: And my best friend actually laughed because she said, it's fine.
Speaker: I'd rather you brought that $20 or now $35.
Speaker: She said, home and we have a few drinks when you get here.
Speaker: But I was just livid.
Speaker: And I should have really posted it because of the thought.
Speaker: But I was just so enraged.
Speaker: And of course, there's no other option.
Speaker: I mean, UPS and...
Speaker: But there's not like that's the frustrating thing actually about the postal system is you don't actually have a massive amount of options.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And in the US, there's one option.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: It's just the only way to ship cremated remains, animal or human, is USPS Priority Mail Express.
Speaker: It used to be registered mail.
Speaker: Did you know that?
Speaker: Do you remember this?
Speaker: It used to be it used to be registered mail.
Speaker: And then the Postal Service lost a congressman's remains.
Speaker: And then they shifted it to Priority Mail Express.
Speaker: And I get it.
Speaker: It is.
Speaker: And look, you run the risk every day.
Speaker: It's not an easy thing to ask any company to do, I guess.
Speaker: But part of me is like, if you could set up a funeral-only postal service and have that be the people, you know, I don't know.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Or, you know.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And what we'd like to do is just insure.
Speaker: It's an insurance question really for the folks because the remains don't have a set value.
Speaker: And so USPS won't touch them and FedEx won't touch them.
Speaker: But USPS will.
Speaker: But what we'd really like to do is just we'd like to provide the insurance ourselves and work with one of these other companies at some point.
Speaker: And I think as we grow and as we start to shift hundreds or thousands a month that hopefully we can
Speaker: we can work with another carrier.
Speaker: Yeah, absolutely.
Speaker: And I think the more options that are going to become available for people as well, I mean, you've got Christina Spade with her composting in Washington.
Speaker: I don't know if she's going to be shipping or if people would want them shipped.
Speaker: I mean, they may do after the 30 days or
Speaker: I'm actually I want to get her onto the podcast to discuss it in more detail but after the 30 day once the body's finished decomposing the families might not be in that state and so they may want them shipped I would imagine or who knows you know what but I'm sure the option should be there and so she's another person who it's not her remains it's right compost remains I guess I mean if she was to drop that and as you
Speaker: Priority Express it'd be like a $700 shipment or something yeah well thank you so much Justin for regaling us with all your stories Parting Stone is the company and we will leave all the information for all our listeners to check out and if you have somebody
Speaker: at home sitting in a wardrobe or on a shelf that you would maybe like to talk to Justin about I'm sure he'd be happy to answer some questions to people if they want to shoot you an email and just have any of their worries put aside so yeah thank you yeah absolutely thank you so much Jennifer
Speaker: That was a really interesting episode.
Speaker: Would you get turned into a stone?
Speaker: Would you want your loved ones turned into a stone?
Speaker: I kind of like the idea of being in a goldfish bowl, but I'm a little obsessed with water, so what do you think?
