Talking about death, people are a bit superstitious sometimes because of their religious beliefs, sometimes because of cultural customs or the territory in which they live. Not everyone thinks so. Now, there are some funeral Start-ups. In fact, entrepreneurial initiatives in the funeral sector have been increasing in recent years. The wave of innovation seems destined to fall also in this sector. It’s just a matter of time. The funeral industry will soon become high-tech.
Around the world there are about 100 funerary start-ups, different from each other in services: some offering obituaries, other cremation services, others still services for family members in cemeteries and so on.
Some of them are born even in Italy. The first and the most important is “Wirebook”, formally founded in 2015, informally invented three years before. Wirebook is the only digital platform which brings together the best companies of the funeral industry and customers that can do an online consulting of their products (eg. Booking).
Wirebook aims to connect people who are suffering from the mourning of every part of the world on a web portal.
Wirebook has a commercial part called “Wirebooking” addressed to the companies that have been working in the field for long. Right now, on Wirebook there are already seventy clients companies. Our mission is to create a professional networking companies. In this way, Wirebook can give visibility to our customers who will increase their income and, at the same time, we can help support needy people.
In fact, Wirebook supports some associations that provide comfort and care for end of life and for long-term rehabilitation after a road traffic crash (eg. Ant e Vittime della strada)
Another Italian app is My Book. A virtual diary where you can collect photos, videos of the best moments of each day, enriched with phrases and thoughts. My Book is composed of two text areas, in the first one you can describe the three most beautiful things done in the day and in the other area you can write if something didn’t go the right way or how you could improve in order not to make the same mistake again. The user has the possibility to leave “My Book” as a virtual legacy to his loved ones after his death. Another way to use it is to bind a book of practical tips within his own experiences. The aim of it will be helping other people on common topics.
As we have already said before, even in Italy the number of initiatives on the web is growing rapidly, after all, even if it is not as widespread as in the technologically developed nations, it is not to underestimate the fact that the estimated deaths in our nation are about 650,000 units and develop a turnover of around four and a half billion Euro a year.
Sometimes it may seem strange for people to listen or think about facing the funeral theme in the same way and with the same serenity as a website for wedding planners. It seems unlikely that people who are suffering grief can choose to rely on the cold screen of a computer rather than the reassuring and expert hands of a director of a funeral business.
This trend is expanding all over the world: from Poland to India, from Italy to the United States. Start-ups seem to have found a promising sector. Newspapers like the Guardian, Forbes and the New York Times wrote several articles about it, emphasizing the importance and expansion of a phenomenon that attracts the attention of many.
In fact, if you look for funerary trends on Google, you will see a progressive surge in the search for keywords like “funeral home”.
Even if people want to inform themselves, the funerary field doesn’t seem to be oriented to online communication.
There are different types of funeral start-ups that offer different services. Some Start-ups take care of the last wishes of people or the provisions on the end of life. Other Start-ups work for cremation or ash management. From the burial in green areas where it is possible to use the ashes for the growth of a tree, to their partial dispersion at sea or in space.
The most widespread tendency is to organize in a portal (like Wirebook) all the information about a funeral agency of a region or a state.
The idea of Wirebook is linked to the difficult stories of people who have suffered family grief. They encountered the difficulty and exorbitant costs of organizing a funeral in a hurry and without any lucidity. This is the idea behind Wirebook: making information available on the Internet so prudent people can find a professional agency. Wirebook is created to look after needy people, to give online transparency about costs and more respect to the suffering.
In Italy seems strange to go online for these things, maybe it will come later compared to other states. I am sure the tendency to use the internet for any aspect of life, sooner or later will increase.