A Q&A with the man behind direct-to-consumer caskets

If you’re anything like me — a late-stage millennial from the Midwest with a fine-arts degree — you’ve been thinking about death every night since the fourth grade. But have you obsessed over the container in which you’ll be buried?

A rustic oak box with a satin head-panel embroidery of a country idyll to memorialize your weekends spent in rural Airbnbs doing ’shrooms with the girlies? Eh, too common. An eco-chic cardboard casket to commemorate your lifelong commitment to pulling the plastic thingy off the paper box of nut milk before chucking it in the recycling bin? No, no, no — virtue signaling never got anyone into heaven. Personally, I just want the most expensive thing out there, one with sculpted locking hardware, a high-gloss finish, and an adjustable bed. It’s not like I’ll be around to pay for it.

But what if I could make my dream casket a reality, and for a fraction of the price? Meet Josh Siegel, the chief operating officer and cofounder of Titan Casket, a direct-to-consumer funeral-planning company with a sense of humor (and dignity and whimsy — check out Titan’s tiny sarcophagi for wine bottles!) that’s been called the “Warby Parker of caskets.” 

Titan was founded in Boston in 2016 by Scott Ginsberg, who’d been in casket manufacturing and distribution for decades. Ginsberg felt uncomfortable with the way funeral homes would mark up the caskets he’d sold to them. He knew there had to be a better way to conduct this business online. So he started selling caskets on Amazon. That’s right. Amazon.

Ginsberg reached out to Siegel, who’d been at Amazon for eight years, first as a lead in the television department (actual physical TVs, that is) and then running technology for the app that Amazon drivers use when delivering heavy, bulky products like mattresses. Ginsberg told Siegel that in the casket business there were only two large manufacturers, and they only sold to funeral homes. Typically, the occasion of death makes it so that customers shop at just one funeral home, creating a duopoly on the manufacturing side and a single channel of distribution, causing prices to go unchecked.

Siegel started as an adviser for the company in 2019 and joined full time after they raised $3.5M in a funding round three years later. Caskets are somewhat of a family business now; Siegel’s wife, Elizabeth, leads the company’s customer service and operations, and they keep a sporty little red number in their garage in Bellevue, Washington. They use it as the set piece of their Instagram, which strikes a pleasing balance between informative (they make left-handed caskets) and truly stupid (their caskets “come with WiFi”). 

Titan Caskets prices typically range between $1,400 for their most popular classic steel “Orion Series” and $1,800 for their sumptuous “Reflections Series.” There are cheaper options, like the $500 Titan Virtue bleach-free cardboard edition (it comes with assembly instructions that seem less complicated than the Ikea Malm bed) or the $1K Eco Pinebox. The Majesty Gold Casket and Titan’s new Clear Top Casket (Barbie box core!) both retail for just under $3K. You can always design your own casket, and shipping is free. Any of Titan’s crematory urns, which run in the ballpark of $600, would look chic on a mantelpiece too.

Titan doesn’t share sales numbers, but dying is a recession-proof business, and Seigel acknowledges they sell thousands of caskets a year and have more than doubled in size in the past two years. Their caskets have become somewhat of a cultural phenomenon — you can peep Taylor Swift in an Orion in her video for “Anti-Hero.”

I recently spoke with Siegel about predatory pricing plans at funeral homes, secret FTC shoppers, and whether Titan will ever collaborate with Supreme.

This interview has been condensed and edited for clarity, because life is precious and you shouldn’t be spending so much time on your phone. 

What’s the spiel for people who, like me, are nervously giggling about the concept of a direct-to-consumer casket company?

Most American families, when they suffer a loss, go to their local funeral home and they haven't typically thought about what they want or what things cost. Time and time again they end up with a funeral that costs way too much money, and it’s not the goodbye they’d envision for their loved one if they’d really thought about it. The most expensive part of that process, especially for a burial, is often the casket, which on average is $3K in the US, but can vary from $2K to $10K, depending on which funeral home you walk into. Unlike every other major purchase in one’s life, you’re not shopping around at that point. What these families don’t know is they have the federal right in the FTC Funeral Rule to buy their casket outside of the funeral home and have it shipped there. 

So funeral homes have been swindling consumers for a long time. 

Because of the funeral-industry dynamic in which you have no transparency, little competition, and an emotionally charged consumer, in 1984 the FTC put in regulation, unlike they do in most industries. That law gives you the right to walk into a funeral home and get a price list handed to you. It enables you to buy your casket or other merchandise outside of the funeral home, and it requires that the funeral home only sell you what you need. For 40 years those laws have been in place, and they are enforced and monitored by the FTC at a very small scale.

We have customers every day who call us and still have issues. For two years we’ve been working with the FTC because, for the first time in 40 years, they are revamping those rules. Any day now we expect the FTC to announce a new set of rules that will require funeral homes to put pricing online so that everything is much more transparent. And the new rules will require that funeral homes put the right to buy a casket outside of the funeral home online as well.

Have funeral homes been combative with Titan Casket?

Most funeral homes we work with are wonderful. They’re in the business for the same reason we are, which is to serve the client. However, there is clearly a set of bad actors in this business. Typically, when the FTC does some secret shopping, 20% of funeral homes fail.

Wait — the FTC has secret shoppers at funeral homes?

That’s right. They’ll send in secret shoppers to make sure that price lists are being handed over and that prices are accurate. The FTC sent out a warning to 39 funeral homes in January after a phone sweep [about transparent casket and service pricing] that a lot of funeral homes failed. 

Karmically, though. The FTC secret shopper is pretending they have a dead relative?

They don’t have to come in crying. They can say they are thinking years in advance about an aging parent. The thing that frustrates me about the industry is that there are so many phenomenal client servants in it. Because people get so frustrated by the cost of funerals, the whole industry gets defensive. So when [something like an FTC warning is issued], the industry says everything is fine and denies any misconduct.

I’ve ordered cheaper eyeglasses than Warby Parker from companies using the same model shipped from China. Do you have overseas competition or anyone in the direct-to-consumer coffin space coming for you? 

Not today. This is an incredibly hard business. There are only so many manufacturers, and the level of care and service you need is a high bar. I don’t think a casket exists that is of low quality. If you start to get into lower-quality caskets, you’re in trouble, right? There are no coffin flops that can happen in real life. Sure, I could go on to Alibaba and order 500 pairs of glasses from the same factory and start selling them, right? But at Titan, if you read our reviews, they’re often about the service and the people, and not just the product.

How does your casket supply chain work? 

We have supply in five warehouses for our top models around the country that can be delivered anywhere super fast. We can hit any major metropolitan area in two days — most in one day — which is obviously very important for funerals. And then we have an on-demand facility, which is where we do our custom work out of, and that facility is making caskets every day. If a custom order comes in today, it will get built and shipped out tomorrow. The only slowdown is that our custom caskets come from one point in the country, not from five, and so depending on where you are may take an extra day.

Where is that custom facility?

If you don’t mind, Claire, I’d love to keep that private because it’s an interesting industry, and people are always trying to figure that out. 

If I died in Salt Lake City, where I live, could I get a custom casket in two days? 

Probably three days. 

Does a loved one have to submit a death certificate to get a Titan Casket? 

No. We work with nearly every family that purchases from us, and we talk to the funeral home, and we make sure we have every detail right. Funeral homes have certain delivery hours and processes that we have to get right. I don’t know if you’ve ordered a refrigerator or a couch in the last few years, but it doesn’t always go great. What we’re really good at as a company is operations and customer service. We have a team of 20. Everyone can fit on a Zoom call. So it’s really important that when somebody calls us for a casket they can get the sense that they are talking to a person. 

Tell me about the option of pre-buying a casket for $20/month for 60 months with 0% APR financing.

Pre-planning a funeral is not a new concept. You could walk into any funeral home and do so. Some will guarantee the price, and others will just put your wishes aside. What we do is let you pre-plan the casket design. You buy it, you lock in today’s price, you pay over time. We put those funds into a trust independent of our operations. And we provide a contract to the customer that they can redeem at the time of need for that product. We don’t build or store the product because it can be years or decades before the product is needed, of course. But we fulfill those orders out of our rotating stock of goods. We launched that program at the beginning of 2023. It’s a large part of our business — we hope the largest part of our business eventually — because anyone can be a customer. 

What the customer pays for is not a fee. It’s not a premium. They’re just paying for today’s casket price divided by how many months they want to pay over time. It’s a layaway program. 

Ha. 

If the person were to pass away halfway through, the balance would need to be paid for us to ship. 

Do you use financing options like Klarna or Afterpay?

We use Affirm. Because Affirm is loaning you the money, they charge an interest rate.

I’m assuming headstones or grave markers are likely less of a monopoly. There’s no need for Titan to disrupt the headstone industry?

No. There are different dynamics with the cemetery. It’s much less regulated. And so cemeteries can have their own requirements and fee structure. The counterbalance there is families are more often thinking in advance for cemeteries. And so you may shop around for a cemetery, right? But if you don’t, the same things happen as they do in funeral homes. You’re charged fees and get a bill you don’t expect because you just don’t know what to ask for or what things cost.

Do you notice cyclical or seasonal consumer trends when it comes to what people are picking out for their loved ones or for themselves and their pre-planning?

What families pick out doesn’t change over the course of the year. Generally, we tend to sell a higher percentage of colorful caskets just because we have those options available. We sell a lot of military caskets because we have very nice ones, and if they’re available in funeral homes, they’re three times the price of what we sell them for. We sell oversized caskets.

The cyclical nature of this business is that there are times of year when there are a high number of deaths that really impact the sales numbers, even for a company as small as we are. And so December, January, and February, you’ll see a meaningful increase in sales versus the summer months because more people are passing away. And if you look at the CDC numbers, they’re right there. It’s not a phantom. More people do die in the winter. Then, during Covid, in the CDC numbers, you could see there was a 20% swing year over year in the number of deaths in the US.

Yikes. 

Sorry for freaking you out.

No, it’s OK. Coffin versus casket: Are the words interchangeable?

They are not. Most consumers use them to mean the same thing, but a casket refers to a rectangular product. A coffin is six-sided with a “toe pincher” where the toe is narrower than the shoulders. In the US, the casket is nearly the only option, although we’re about to launch a coffin. In Europe coffins are more common.

Do you have a dream collab for Titan Casket? A Supreme coffin? Any wild franchising ideas? 

There’s a lot of product development for us to do. Our pre-planning product today is sort of fintech where we’re letting our customers finalize this part of their financial plan. But it doesn’t solve the whole problem. You can plan your casket, but that’s not planning. That’s not the same as planning a funeral. And it’s not the same as preparing for the end of life. There are a lot of product pieces that we can add, so we can bring a better solution. At minimum, you can put funds aside so that your loved ones can afford the rest of the funeral. And put your wishes aside. So where do you want the funeral to take place? You know, what is the event like, who will be there, what music do you want played? What do you want to be wearing?

So this would be a form that a customer could update with their preferences that Titan would archive and share with their family after they die?

We could even have a network of funeral homes or funeral directors we work with that can guarantee the price of things. We think about what you would do 30 years ago for a wedding —  you’d walk into a venue and sort of pick what you wanted out of a book. Today, couples start with, “What do I envision, and how can I put that together through a much broader set of options?” I think that’s what will happen in funerals over time. And so, to the extent, we can help facilitate those connections and eventually transact them. We’ll just keep adding as people ask for them. 

Then the hardest part of this business is always awareness. There’s some real nervousness about and engaging in these conversations. So I think we need to continue to put our brand out there as a way to start those conversations. It’ll be somewhat through ads and with caskets in them, but I think it’s through cultural moments and through collaborations. And there are a lot of other brands out there. You mentioned Supreme who, of course, we’ve thought about many times. 

I want a Sanrio Casket. 

That’s one direction. But we think about it the other way too: brands with Titan Casket on them. Yeti coolers with Titan branding on them. Apparel. Other ways not in the shape of a casket. We have a new mascot named Mort. He has an Instagram account, and we’re soon to make plushies. We have several seasons of content written out and a whole Mort extended universe in the works. Part of my dream is getting Mort in many products and places. He’s got a LinkedIn profile with some very powerful connections.

Claire Carusillo is a writer in Salt Lake City. She is working on opening a skate shop-slash-bookstore in Utah's Wasatch Mountains.