NICE!!
While the old adage “you can’t take it with you” remains the ultimate truism, Clint Mytych is betting that more and more people – especially rapidly aging “Me Generation” Baby Boomers - will want to leave a little more of their legacy behind. With 62% of Americans saying they expect to prefer personalization of their funerals when their time comes (according to a National Funeral Directors Association [NFDA] study), Mytych, age 26, is the unlikely young pioneer of a dramatic new industry approach: licensed brand funeral products. Mytych’s idea was to design an entirely new line of urns and caskets from the ground up. They would feature popular and meaningful licensed brand logos, applied in a similar way to how they are employed on autos, home furnishings and sporting equipment. The approach is revolutionizing the funeral
industry. At the 2006 NFDA Expo in Philadelphia last October, Mytych and his management team showcased the first, licensed-image funeral products. To many a surprised attendee, these included urns and caskets featuring Major League Baseball®, Precious Moments™ and the Vatican Library Collection™, as well as pet urns featuring the American Kennel
Club™.
The attention was instantaneous. From reporters calling Mytych on the show floor for interviews to distributors and funeral homes fi lling the voicemail in the Michigan office requesting materials, it seemed that he had struck a nerve. “It may not be PC to say in a funeral publication, but my goal was not to change the funeral industry, per se, but rather to find an industry where licensing had yet to be applied,” said Mytych. “After a ton of research, we isolated the funeral industry as one of the last frontiers for marketing innovation – a business virtually unchanged for centuries.” According to Beth Cooper, vice president of P&J Cooper Supply of Barrington, NJ, Mytych had tapped into a mother load of potential...........
