There has probably not been a Death Care company that had as rapid an accension as British direct cremation provider Pure Cremation.  Founded in 2015 as a direct cremation company by the husband and wife team of Bryan and Catherine Powell history shows that the company conducted about 1,000 cremations in 2017 and about 2,000 cremations in 2018.

It was at that point in 2018 that they received a US $10 million investment by private equity firm Puma Investments.  At that time, according to this article from Funeral Director Daily, Puma Investment Director Elliot Kaye made these comments:

“. . (the) firm is putting money behind what he hopes is a winning combination of an experienced management team with a very disruptive business model within a very established market.”

 

While the cost of Pure Cremation’s services to a family start at about US $1600, Mr. Kaye believes that cost is not the driving factor of the company’s rapid growth.  “The country is getting less religious and also less traditional across the board”, he said.

It turns out that Mr. Kyle and his team at Puma Investments read the market correct.  This 2022 article from Sky News of Great Britain points out that the Powells were interested in exiting from their ownership in Pure Cremation and the figure put out there for the acquisition of their company was north of $US 500 million.

By that time Pure Cremation was not only a direct cremation provider but a major source of preneed funding as well.  The article states “The Powells’ new holding company, Cognicent, has established itself as a significant disruptor in the UK’s late-life planning sector, recently becoming the UK’s largest seller of funeral plans.”

While we don’t know, from the article, how many cremations Pure Cremation conducted in 2021, the article states that the preneed arm, Cognicent, “sold over 65,000 preneed policies garnering more than US$ 65 million in revenue” that year.

And in 2023, as you can read in this article, the Epiris Fund agreed to acquire Pure Cremation.

I have been very fortunate in that, almost from the beginning of Funeral Director Daily, Pure Cremation’s Bryan Powell has been a subscriber and would contact me from time to time via e-mail.  We became friendly enough colleagues that if I needed information on the Death Care profession in Great Britain I would contact Bryan and he even invited me to speak to European cremation operators at a convention in London back in about 2021 or 2022.

He’s told me no secrets about Pure Cremation’s operations and success, but I’ve got my own reasons why they became so successful.  Here they are — in my order of importance.

1. Creating the “No fuss” funeral brand through innovative mass media marketing.

2. Building future services through massive Preneed marketing

3. Building potential customer trust by knowing the value of “Star Ratings” with customer service.  They continuously note their ratings of 4.9-5.0 in their media placements.  It is my opinion that “Star Ratings”, which give some indication of experiential satisfaction, are very important to the next generation of consumers.

4. Incredible customer service that creates those star ratings in the first place.  They will pick up the deceased anywhere in Great Britain at no extra cost, they hand deliver the cremated remains to your door, and they provide the services that were promised with no additional costs.

5. Knowing and understanding the “changing consumer” of Death Care.

6. Price

According to a recent article that I read Pure Cremation’s direct cremation price as of today is about US$ 1,772.  This recent article from the Doncaster (Great Britain) Free Press makes note of a start-up in Doncaster that is going to challenge Pure Cremation by coming out with direct cremation pricing of about US$ 1,292 — about US$ 500 less than Pure Cremation.

It will be interesting to see if this company, in light of the fact that my opinion of low price is not necessarily why people choose Pure Cremation, takes away Pure Cremation market share to any great extent.  And, even if they do, with that less expensive price, will they have a margin to operate with?

Related Article — “My mum’s dying wish saved us US $ 4,500 on her funeral — and it was still magical”.  In reference to a Pure Cremation service.  The Daily Record (Great Britain)

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“A servant’s attitude guided by Christ leads to a significant life”

A few days ago I came across this article from  Great Britain’s newspaper, The Telegraph.  The headline was intriguing to a person like me who worked in Death Care, so I continued to read the article.

Turns out that the article was an obituary news article of sorts dealing with the life and death of Julian Litten.  And, if you are in North America like I am, I’m guessing that you have no idea who Julian Litten was.

Here’s what the headline said, “Julian Litten, historian who traced changing death and burial practices and loved a good funeral”.  As I delved into the article and went further it turns out that Litten wrote a book in 1991 that could probably be equated with the Jessica Mitford book, “The American Way of Death”, in the USA.    Litten’s book was titled, “The English Way of Death:  The Common Funeral Since 1450”.  

I have not read it, but from what I have tried to learn about Litten’s book is that, for the most part, he was an advocate of funerals and his book was not as critical of death and burial customs as was Mitford’s.  According to the article from The Telegraph,  Litten’s book was a “deft and amusing guide to the consumerism of death, in which Litten charted the history of the changing etiquette surrounding burial over the centuries”. 

Again, from reading the article, it appears that Litten was no fan of the British modern cremation ritual of which he is quoted as saying, “an unaccompanied funeral car glides noiselessly under the porte cochère, the coffin is transferred to a stainless steel ‘hors-d’oeuvre’ trolley and wheeled into the chapel, which looks more like a waiting room in a … hospital than a dignified setting for the disposal of the dead”. 

In any regard, my curiosity took me to reading the article and learning about somebody that I didn’t know had existed.  I think that any funeral home or cemetery practitioner would enjoy the newspaper article on his life and death which you can find here.

More from Europe —  I thought today might be an appropriate time to offer readers links to a couple of articles written about November 1 from foreign press sources and pertaining to All Saint’s Day and the ever-moving customs of cremation and burial in certain countries.  Here are those articles:

Finally, it is November 22 —  Today marks the 61st anniversary of the assasination and death of United States President John F. Kennedy.  One of the all-time most read articles of Funeral Director Daily deals with that situation, the funeral director that was called to prepare the President for the flight back to Washington, DC from his death in Dallas, Texas, and the history of the casket that was used for that transportation.

Here’s that article entitled “The Story of the Kennedy Casket”.

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“A servant’s attitude guided by Christ leads to a significant life”