When Jordan Lindberg’s grandmother passed away, his father went into a funeral parlor to buy an urn for a woman who had always been frugal.
“She was 18 years old when the stock market crashed,” Lindberg said. “So, she was one of these people for whom a lavish expenses would have seemed to her to be inappropriate.”
Sticker Shock Launches Idea
Lindberg’s father got sticker shock from the prices of the funeral products. So, he went online to buy a cremation urn. That’s when Lindberg got the idea for the online business. He set out to start Stardust Memorials in November 2010. It sells funeral products and cremation urns.
“I liked the idea of selling products that you couldn’t buy in Walmart, couldn’t buy on Amazon.com, at least not easily,” says Lindberg, the executive vice president of eFullfillment Service. “I wasn’t interested in selling any kind of normal product, anything that you’re likely to find when you go into Target. I just thought that was not wise, partially because if you want that product, you’d go into Target.”
Actually Amazon and Walmart.com do sell cremation urns, and at comparable prices. Stardust Memorials sets itself apart with personalization.
“We do a lot of engraving, laser engraving, direct engraving on products because people want funeral products personalized,” Lindberg says. “Those are not services offered by Walmart or Amazon.”
The vast majority of people buy urns from funeral homes. Stardust Memorials didn’t make a single sale their first six months. They did $38,000 in sales the first year.
“That's a whole year of work for $38,000 of sales,” he says. “The next year we did over $380,000 in sales. So it was a tenfold growth and the next year after that. This year, we may push 2 million. That's pretty good growth.”
Cremation On The Rise
That’s partially because more people are choosing cremation as an option. More than 43 percent of people in the U.S. were cremated in 2012, according to the Cremation Association of North America. Phil Douma, executive director of the Michigan Funeral Director’s Association, says cremation is growing in the Wolverine State: “We’re projecting the number in Michigan will meet or exceed the number of burials next year in 2015.”
Stardust Memorials’ biggest sales are in the Sunbelt retirement states like: California, Florida, Texas, Arizona and New York.
Mourning Customers
To keep customers happy, Lindberg maintains a culture of customer service.
“In our business, we’re dealing with people who are frequently in a highly emotional state as you would imagine. They're very sad. They’re frustrated or they’re angry or they’re experiencing a range of emotions,” he says. “It’s not a high-pressure selling environment. We’re not trying to push somebody into making a decision that they don’t want to make.”
Lindberg has a PhD in philosophy and taught the subject at several universities for 10 years. He says the name for his company, Stardust Memorials, came from a dream and something Carl Sagan said on his TV show, “Cosmos.”
“He made that point that most of the heavy elements in your body really came out of the center of stars, cooked stars. That in effect, we’re stardust. So, the name came from the idea of cremation and returning to dust, but stardust, which all of us are.”