Solace Cremation opens East Coast HQ in Jacksonville (Courtesy of the Jacksonville Business Journal) — Solace Cremation, an online-only direct cremation company, opened an office and began offering services in Jacksonville two weeks ago.
With locations and services offered across Portland, Seattle and areas across southern California, the Jacksonville office will now serve as the East Coast headquarters for the Portland, Oregon-based company.
“Jacksonville, from an opportunity and market-need perspective, is similar to other markets in which Solace’s offering has seen success,” said Solace Chief Operating Officer Jeremy Frank, a Jacksonville resident.
Since former Nike executive creative directors Keith Crawford and David Odusanya launched Solace in 2019, the company has been in growth mode, looking to disrupt the funeral industry, in which the national median cost of direct cremation is over $2,000 a year, per the National Funeral Directors Association.
Solace looks to outcompete by offering a one-time fee of $895, for covers 24/7 customer service, assistance with paperwork, transportation of the deceased, in-person return of cremated remains via USPS priority mail, and all necessary permits and fees.
Last year, the company raised $1.75 million in seed funding to fuel expansion.
Beyond its low price tag, Solace believes it’s offering customers an experience closer to what they actually want while grieving — a simplified, fully digitized experience without paperwork or having to leave their families’ sides to spend time in a funeral home making arrangements.
Plus, there is the question of growing demand for a service Solace has been rapidly bringing online. This has to do with the cremation rate, which was only 32.3% as recently as 2005, with the burial rate at 61.4% at the time, according to NFDA data. By 2021, the rates had nearly reversed, with the burial rate having fallen to 36.6% while the cremation rate rose to 57.5%.
In Florida — which is the nation’s second-largest cremation market, after California — the cremation rate is over 70%, which is one of the highest in the nation. This was one of the attractions of Jacksonville, Frank said, but not the only one.
Beyond Jacksonville’s sheer size and rapid population growth, Frank emphasized the city’s “solid, service-oriented labor market,” which he said was ideal for the company’s East Coast headquarters.
“If we think about Portland, or parts of southern California, those are very, very tech-, engineering-, web development-based [economies], so you have a really strong technology [sector], but from a service perspective, it’s a little bit different,” he said.
Solace could tell Jacksonville had an advantage for them in its labor market from the companies that had located there before them, Frank said.
“It’s got a strong profile because our team is service,” he said.
In terms of their growth going forward, CEO Keith Crawford said they see Solace growing bigger than the four states they’re currently operating in, but they don’t want to expand too quickly for fear of losing sight of their original mission — to streamline an already-painful experience for grieving communities — or being unable to continue to provide high-quality services to a growing customer base.
“We want to build the teams to make sure we handle the families well, and make sure the service and the process is really great,” Crawford said.