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Decorated caskets allow families to honor their loved ones

Photo

Photo by Bill Olmsted

Darrell Holcomb shows off a customized casket lid that his Edgerton company created. The military-themed transfer has the look and feel of a painted surface, but with much more detail.

EDGERTON — When Darrell Holcomb's grandfather died, his grandmother wanted to give her husband a burial that paid homage to his military service.

But she couldn't afford a fancy, painted military casket, Holcomb said.

Holcomb didn't think that was right, and he set out to find an affordable way for families to honor their loved ones' personalities on their caskets.

Signature Series Caskets was the result.

Holcomb's business uses a "high-performance material that replicates paint" to personalize caskets using artwork, photos and text, he said.

"We tailor it to how the family wants it," Holcomb said. "There are no limits."

Holcomb has worked on the product for the last year, and now he's ready to offer it nationwide. He has formed a partnership with specialty printer Large Format Digital and works out of the company's headquarters in the Edgerton Business Park.

Locally, Whitcomb-Lynch-Albrecht Funeral Home offers the service from its Janesville, Milton and Edgerton locations.

Samples at Holcomb's headquarters show a wide variety of options. One casket lid bore a collage of family photos surrounded by seven roses, one for each of the deceased's seven children. It also included a poem the woman selected before she died.

A patriotic design showed military planes, an American flag and the shadow of a man saluting. A casket for a farmer showed an empty tractor against the sunset with the Lord's Prayer printed alongside.

The company also personalizes urns, vault lids and memorial markers, Holcomb said. It makes a matching candle for the family to take home.

Personalization is important to the baby boomer generation, and that extends to funerals, said Adam Albrecht, funeral director for Whitcomb-Lynch-Albrecht.

"Everyone wants their service to be different than the one before them," he said.

Other companies have tried to personalize caskets through stickers or other means, but Whitcomb-Lynch-Albrecht was never impressed with the quality, he said.

It took the funeral home "about five minutes" to decide to offer Holcomb's product, he said.

The funeral home offers a personalized casket lid for $550 and a half-lid for $450, not including the cost of the casket. That's far less than the cost of a painted casket, Albrecht said.

The funeral home has offered the service for a few weeks, but no one has bought it yet, Albrecht said. He thinks it's because families have trouble understanding how many options are available to them with the service.

Albrecht tells the families the caskets and urns are permanent memorials, even if they go in the ground.

"You can spend the money on flowers, but those only last a few days," he said.