Cremation Ash Memorial continued..

I started marketing this to funeral homes and the reception was great.  Not one of the 45 funeral homes I talked to had ever seen anything like it. All of them immediately asked for samples (without cremains of course.) and brochures.

A couple of them asked if I could help make something from their cremated pets.  I did a little research and found that I could.  

At this point I now have an assortment of memorials for people including the cross, police, fire, and US military.  I also have a complete line of memorials for pets where I take the cremains and make a memorial in the likeness of their pet.  Then with the help of a photo from the customer, I hand paint the memorial to resemble their pet.

The challenge I now face is a tough one.  While finding distributors like funeral homes, crematoriums, cemetery owners, and pet grieving specialists is somewhat easy although time consuming, and making and shipping samples is expensive.  I've found that their modus operandi is more like a wait and see game. They put my memorial sample and brochure on the wall in their memorial room and wait for customers to ask about it.  While the distributors are a good way to reach one market, the primary market for my memorials is the people who have cremated a loved one or pet and have their cremains sitting on a shelf somewhere.  Believe me when I tell you that the number is huge.    Especially with pet owners.  The challenge is finding those people and as far as I can tell the best way is TV, radio and newspaper, but each of these mediums is expensive if your intention is to reach millions of people. 

I've been somewhat successful getting the word out on things like Facebook, Linkedin, my own web site, email, fax, mailings, and cross-linking URLs, but more needs to be done.

This is a unique and heart-warming way to commemorate a departed loved one. 

It’s kind of strange but in a way, the job layoff, the terrible job market, and my father’s death have all somewhat contributed to me creating a business that not only will help me financially down the road, but will probably help many people deal with the loss of their loved ones, and provide a great way to remember those who contributed to our lives in so many ways.

www.windsong-memorials.com

Cremation Ash Memorial

The business I just started is very exciting... okay, it's pretty bizarre, weird, strange, or even creepy, but usually when I tell people I get the same response... ew!  Then 15 seconds later they nod their heads and say," Actually, that's pretty cool."

It started about 18 months ago when everything in my world seemed to be falling apart.  I lost my high tech marketing job, I lost my Florida vacation home to foreclosure, had creditors constantly calling me, and on top of that my father had recently died and my mother, who he’d been married to for 53 years needed my help to get through the grieving process.  With two young children, a stay-at-home wife, and many, many bills to pay, things were not looking to good.

Finally I decided to act on an idea I had over ten years ago but like most people, were too busy to do anything but say “Wouldn’t it be cool if…”.  The idea came to me after my wife and I attended a funeral and the deceased was cremated.  And now I was in a similar situation where my mother had my father cremated, and the idea surfaced again.  For months following my father’s death my mother had his cremains (Death business lingo for cremation ashes.) sitting on her kitchen table.  Several times I asked her what she planned on doing with them and each time she said "I don't know.  It doesn't feel right scattering or burying them after being married for 53 years. It almost feels like I'd be throwing him away."  This went on for many months when I finally got the nerve to approach the subject.  I asked her to give me the ashes because I had an idea to make something with them.  Well, after three or four months I had perfected a process for turning them from ash and crushed bone into a 13"x8" cross.  I engraved his name, date of birth, and date of death on the back and presented it to my mother.  It came out so beautiful you have to see it. My mother cried and cried clinging to the cross as though it were my father. Well, I guess it really was him, just looking a little different.

Anyway, she loved it and hung it on her wall above her bed.  She told me of how she talks to it every night because it brings her peace and joy to have her beloved husband so close to her.

One day my sister was visiting from California and saw the cross.  She immediately said she wanted one.  Fortunately I didn't use all the cremains in making my mother's so I went to work making another one.  The day I was making it my son's soccer coach came by and asked what I was doing.  After hearing my story he asked if I could make one for him.  He had recently lost his father and wanted to gather some of the sand from the beach where he scattered his cremains. While using beach sand isn’t something I can do, I did promise to make one for him after his mother passed. (He had informed me of her ill condition.)

It wasn't long after that I decided to start looking at marketing this as a product. My 23 years of marketing kicked in and I started doing research.  What I found after an exhaustive search of the death market and global internet was that no one was doing what I did.  Sure there were many products for storing cremains but no one was making memorials out of the ashes.  There are people who make jewelry, diamonds, tattoos, and even some who will paint a picture with cremains mixed with paint, but no one making a cross or anything else like it to serve as a memorial from the cremains themselves. 

Stay tuned for more on this...

www.windsong-memorials.com