Getting tired of dusting off Grandpa’s stuffy old urn? One startup has the solution for you.
It’s called Parting Stone, a company based in San Francisco which offers to turn your loved ones’ ashes into a pile of smooth, white rocks. Justin Crowe, the entrepreneur behind the business, says he got the inspiration for the business when his grandfather died in 2014.
Showing up at the funeral home to join with his family in grief, he told the Wall Street Journal, “felt really old.” It was time to disrupt the funeral market.
Through his grief, Crowe began exploring ways to combine his interest in pottery with the impact of the loss of his grandfather. Though Parting Stones primarily peddles in human rocks, some of his early experiments were even more peculiar.
Specifically, Crowe started off blending cremated ashes into his pottery works. His first item, he told the paper, was a mug, made with human bones from retired medical cadavers. Holding the coffee cup for the first time wasn’t a dramatic experience, he recalls; instead, “it was just normal.” That’s when he knew he had tapped into something special.
Crowe soon began crafting an entire dinnerware series, which blew up on social media.
“I started to get emails from all kinds of people asking if I could glaze pieces of pottery with their loved ones’ remains,” he told the WSJ.
Unfortunately, dealing with the flood of requests helped Crowe realize that pottery wasn’t a great avenue for scaling a business, as it only uses a fraction of a person’s dusty leftovers. He ended up revamping his enterprise, coming up with Parting Stones’ “solidification service,” which begins at $1,195 for pets and $2,495 for humans. (You can even get your fish petrified, though that only returns a measly one or two stones.)
“Our solidification service for an adult [human] returns the full amount of remains as an average of 40-80+ ‘stones,’” the Parting Stone website vows. “The number of stones varies based on the volume of remains provided. The appearance of the solidified remains varies naturally from person to person in shape, color, and texture, making each collection uniquely beautiful.”
For those who may have outstanding questions — is there a shelf life for ashes? Will they dissolve in water? Is there a minimum amount of cremated remains that I need to send to get my stones? — Parting Stone has an unintentionally hilarious “knowledgebase” for customers to peruse.
It’s a classic tale of entrepreneurial spirit: an enterprising young man identified a market need — you should be able to make pottery with your dead Grandma’s body — and provided a scalable solution. At the end of the day, it’s just good business.
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