Titan Casket is wooing customers away from the funeral industry’s top players with affordability, convenience—and pop culture branding.
(Bloomberg) — In 2018, Joshua Siegel was working in logistics at Amazon.com Inc. when he received a phone call from one of the company’s vendors, who had a business proposition for him: direct-to-consumer caskets.
Scott Ginsberg, a 20-year veteran of the funeral industry, had been selling caskets through Amazon since 2016. But he knew the business could grow—and it would need to compete with the industry’s twin gatekeepers, Hillenbrand’s Batesville Casket and Matthews International, which together control about 80% of a $20 billion market.
These manufacturers sell their wares to funeral homes that then mark up prices for a profit, a reality that means grief-ridden shoppers often have no idea how much they are overpaying. The funeral industry had a markup bubble problem, Ginsberg told Siegel, and it was ripe for bursting.
By early 2020, Siegel had quit his Amazon job and recruited his wife, Elizabeth, who’d already founded two other direct-to-consumer companies, as a third partner, and together they launched Titan Casket. Almost three years and a pandemic later, the timing has proven the value of Titan’s business model—an online service that offers a more accessible, cost-transparent approach to death.
“Funeral homes enjoy a 200% to 400% markup,” on casket sales, says Ginsberg. “This industry hasn’t changed in over 100 years. It’s been slow, lumbering, and I thought to myself, ‘There’s got to be a better way.’”
That “better way,” pioneered by Costco Wholesale Corp. in the early aughts, resembles any other direct-to-consumer marketplace peddling groceries or clothes, without the added pressure of a funeral director’s scrutinizing gaze. There’s a filter tool (price, color, material, etc.), a model comparison chart, and a Casket Finder quiz. A customization engine lets you design your own steel casket, while the regular stock includes over 1,000 models, including more eco-friendly wicker and cloth builds, specialty caskets for military veterans, and even ones custom-wrapped like high-end autos in American and LGBTQ rainbow pride flags.
Prices for the Boston-based company are stated outright, from $500 for a biodegradable cardboard box to $4,000 for a steel one with all the bells and whistles. Delivery is included, with one-day shipping within 700 miles of its five warehouses. In addition to its own website and Amazon, where Titan’s products consistently rank as bestsellers, the company sells through several retail partners that include Costco, Walmart Inc., and Sam’s Club.
The pandemic, says Siegel, with its lockdowns and related supply chain issues, “led to more consumers looking online, because they couldn’t find what they wanted at the funeral home.” On top of 400% year-over-year sales growth in 2021, Titan closed a $3.5 million seed funding round led by Reformation Partners LP in June.
Taylor Swift, TV Shows
Yet unlike the direct-to-consumer paragons that Titan has tried to emulate, even calling itself the “Warby Parker of caskets,” the business of death has a unique problem: No one wants to talk about it, much less window-shop it. The challenge is to advertise in such a way that caskets are “top-of-mind when the need arises,” says David Nixon, a Chatham, Ill.-based consultant to funeral homes.
To that end, Titan has produced them as props for TV shows such as Hulu LLC’s Castle Rock and Starz Entertainment LLC’s P-Valley. And as part of its marketing push to promote the new TV series Interview With the Vampire, AMC Networks Inc. commissioned a one-of-a-kind design to be sold with other novelty goods and collectibles in its Night Market. The casket, priced at $4,000, sold within five hours of the store’s grand opening on Oct. 2, says Kim Granito, an executive vice president of integrated marketing for AMC Networks.
Most recently, a Titan casket was centerstage in Taylor Swift’s new music video “Anti-Hero,” which has racked up more than 34 million views in six days. An eagle-eyed fashion blogger made note of the cameo in an Instagram post. The product placement was a happy accident instead of a deliberate marketing push; a production company bought the casket in July for an unnamed musician’s music video, Siegel said in an email. But Titan issued a press release as soon as they confirmed the casket was actually the company’s.
Siegel says attention like this is crucial for educating consumers about the death-care industry. (As diehard as Swifties are known to be—one comment read, “thank you i will be requesting this for my funeral ????”—sales aren’t yet booming from the casket’s five minutes of fame.)
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“Our entire mission is education and awareness about the Federal Trade Commission’s Funeral Rule,” says Siegel, citing a little-known 1984 regulation that requires funeral homes to provide clear pricing information and accept third-party caskets, a key component of Titan’s business model. “We’re excited about the Taylor Swift video, as suddenly tens of thousands of her fans are now aware about their rights. Over time, we’d expect that increased awareness leads to more families choosing to purchase outside the funeral home.”
The Dying Industry
The death-care business at large is facing a reckoning as tech-savvy upstarts try to pry away market share from “Big Funeral” via price transparency and convenience—qualities traditional funeral services infamously lack.
There are more than a dozen other direct-to-consumer casket companies, such as Overnight Caskets and Casket Emporium. In 2019 former Nike Inc. designers launched Solace Cremation with flat-fee services. Death-planning sites such as Cake and Lantern help people set up wills and life insurance and make other end-of-life decisions. Some companies will turn your loved one’s ashes into diamonds, coral reefs, and even sex toys.
Still, Titan’s stiffest competition comes from long-established industry players that also saw pandemic-related windfalls. Batesville and Matthews both reported record annual revenue last year, citing in their earnings releases increased casket sales because of Covid-19. Meanwhile, Service Corp. International, a conglomerate that owns roughly 1,300 mortuary homes and 500 cemeteries in the US, more than doubled its earnings per share from 2019 to 2021, according to a recent investor presentation.
Funeral homes charged a median of $7,848 for a burial, casket, and viewing last year in the US, according to the National Funeral Directors Association. That doesn’t include other services such as headstones, flowers, and a cemetery plot, which can add thousands of dollars more in costs.
Death is big money, even if traditional industry players are reluctant to qualify what they do in such terms. “We’re not in the casket-selling business,” says NFDA spokesperson Kurt Soffe, a fourth-generation funeral home operator.
Related: Long Burdened by Costly Funerals, Japan Embraces Simple Goodbyes
A recent survey by the Funeral Consumers Association found that only 18% of 1,046 funeral homes in 35 states posted their prices online. Critics say this lack of transparency is a problem because most consumers nowadays look up products and compare costs before making a purchase, especially for big-ticket items, and because those who’ve lost a loved one are shopping under emotional stress.
“It’s an industry that’s steeped in tradition,” says Chris Cruger, chief executive officer of Foresight Cos., a financial management firm in Phoenix that provides consultation services to funeral homes and cemeteries. For most people, funeral planning means going in-person to their community funeral parlor for a “face-to-face interaction” with the mortuary director.
That personal touch is one reason the death-care industry has been slow to innovate and remains able to avoid pricing transparency. Cruger says amending the Funeral Rule to mandate online pricing, a proposal the FTC has been reviewing for the past two years, may wind up confusing the general consumer who’s not familiar with niche industry terminology.
The same line was repeated by an Service Corp. International spokesperson in an emailed statement: “Prices alone do not provide consumers enough information to plan something as customizable as a funeral, leading to customer confusion that could result in uninformed decisions.”
Cremation, Competition
It’s unclear just how much traditional funeral businesses view disruptors like Titan as existential threats to their businesses. (Batesville and Matthews declined to comment.) The arrival of the internet, says funeral home consultant Nixon, initially sparked fears over increased online competition, but the direct-to-consumer casket business “never really took off.”
According to an estimate cited in Hillenbrand’s annual report, nontraditional funeral-care services such as Titan’s are estimated to represent less than 10% of casket sales, though the document warned investors that competition from alternative casket companies “could grow” and negatively impact cash flow.
Service Corp. International called direct-to-consumer casket businesses “immaterial” to its operations. At Soffe’s Utah-based funeral home, where he facilitated about 500 funerals last year, only 10 of the caskets that were used were from third-party vendors, he says.
The rise of cremation is the bigger concern, says Nixon.
Cremation has outpaced burial as the most common method of disposition since 2015. According to the NFDA, the cremation rate was 57.5% in 2021, and that’s projected to reach 64.1% by 2025, due in part to factors such as environmental concerns and affordability.
That doesn’t have the team behind Titan worried, however, since almost 38% of consumers still want their ashes buried or interred in a cemetery. Last year, the company expanded its services to include urns and preplanning policies, a move that pushes it beyond merely direct-to-consumer caskets and into digital funeral services at large.
Regardless of where the industry goes, Melissa Meadow, the funeral director behind the popular TikTok personality The Modern Mortician, is all for the competition these internet upstarts provide—and she’s a big fan of Titan, in particular. With 20 years of experience in the industry, Meadow went into business for herself after becoming disillusioned with the upselling culture at traditional mortuaries, a practice she described as “gross.”
“The online casket game was Costco’s, and now Titan has a recognizable brand in the industry,” says Meadow. “People are able to find them by Googling how to buy a casket online, and now people know they have choices.”
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