Taylor Swift’s favorite casket company says Black Friday is the perfect time to think about death

The funeral home industry is worth $18 billion and hasn’t changed much in the past 100 years. Consumers tend not to shop around for the best deals on coffins or flowers when they are grieving the loss of a loved one. But the cofounders of Titan Casket, a direct-to-consumer casket maker that sells coffins online and through Costco and Amazon, wants that to change.

The company, which raised $3.5 million in a June funding round, recently introduced a plan for customers to purchase a casket in advance and lock in its price for future use—even if that might be decades off. The Boston-based business has even decided to have a Black Friday sale, with $50 in savings for people who want to pre-purchase a casket, to help encourage people to think about their burial needs early.

Beyond the marketing stunts, Titan got a high-profile placement last month from Taylor Swift, whose “Anti-Hero” music video includes an extended scene of the pop star’s imagined funeral—with her eventually emerging from a Titan casket. Fast Company talked to Titan cofounder and Amazon alum Joshua Siegel about his business and marketing strategy, the company’s busiest time of year, and why he thinks Titan can upend a business that hasn’t been disrupted in decades.

You have often described Titan as “the Warby Parker of caskets.” Why is that?

We were founded in 2016. [My cofounder] Scott started the company as an Amazon brand. He had been in the casket industry for 20 years, and he saw the markups that consumers face in funeral homes. I had been at Amazon for many years working on shipping bulky items and building out their logistics network. While I was there, I saw the rise of many direct-to-consumer companies like Warby Parker and Casper. When Scott described the casket industry structure, where there was one primary channel of distribution—funeral homes—I thought we could do something analogous to what [Warby Parker and other direct-to-consumer] companies had done.

You recently completed your first fundraising round—what are you hoping you can achieve with the infusion of cash?

We bootstrapped at the beginning because we were cash-flow positive. We would sell an item and build it the next day and ship it out. We raised because two things happened: one is we needed to expand our inventory levels into the local warehouses because obviously this is a product that needs to arrive right away. So the closer we can store inventory to our clients, the better. And two, we want it to grow faster. We think we can build a brand in the funeral space, where there just aren’t any brands. 

We’ll continue to open warehouses and add new product categories like urns and vaults. And we’re going to get into services. If you look at wedding planning company Zola, for example, and what they have done for the wedding category, I think we see that as an inspiration for where we could go over time.

Talking to loved ones after someone’s death about casket pricing seems like a sensitive topic. How have you adapted your marketing language to suit the occasion?

If anyone is looking for a casket, we want to make sure we’re there for them. So we invest heavily in SEO and and paid search and those bottom-of-the-funnel terms. When you start to raise awareness further up the funnel, you need to be really careful. You don’t wanna be putting a casket in front of somebody who isn’t ready to engage in that conversation. We also have opportunities like this Black Friday promotion where we’re using pop culture moments [like the Taylor Swift video] to raise awareness about pre-planning.

The day after the video came out, we were in front of the Federal Trade Commission presenting on the modernization of the funeral rule, which states that consumers have the right to get a general price list from a funeral provider when they ask about funeral arrangements.

What is your busiest time of year?

Typically Q1 is the busiest time of year: January, February, March. Being  new to the business, I hadn’t expected there to be seasonality in it, but actually there is. In those months, you see a higher death rate.

What demographic do most of your customers come from?

Our customers are largely Americans between [ages] 40 and 60 who are planning for the generation before them. They’ve grown up expecting to transact online and do their research online, especially for large purchases. When they are planning a funeral, they come online, and when they do, they find us.

With COVID-19, we saw more people searching online and expecting to transact online in all categories. Families during COVID were planning funerals and maybe couldn’t go into the funeral home, and were doing more of their planning online, so they found us. 

And I mean, who doesn’t want to save on the same exact casket they can get anywhere else? Our goal is ultimately to help our clients not take the emotional loss and turn it into a financial loss.