MemoryBox is a B2B2C event-driven branding platform. We’re in the business of creating communities around major lifestages. Although the MemoryBox website and app is used to document and share many of life’s most important events—including births, school functions, weddings, holidays, major travel experiences et al—our primary point of entry into the marketplace is by enabling our users to memorialize and celebrate the lives of departed loved ones, both people and pets. By leveraging the latest technologies, we are not only exploiting a use case heretofore largely unaffected by tech disruption, but we are—on a fundamental level—attempting to rebrand death itself.
People are not made up of one giant circle or social graph of family and friends, as promoted by Facebook and other traditional social networks. People are made up of a wide variety of different circles of connections, generally generated and reinforced through events. Our various circles of work friends—and the work-related events where we connect—are not the same as our diverse circles of personal friends, and they’re not the same as the distinctive circles of our immediate or extended family. Each event and each community, while overlapping at times, is discrete—something acutely understood by those who value their privacy. MemoryBox was built for people to nurture these communities of loved ones, and to reveal and share who they are through collections of multimedia elements (e.g. photos), what we call “Memories”. They’re far more than just pictures of the deceased. They’re pics of the people and places and things that were most important to them, and of the individuals whose lives they most impacted.
While one traditional metaphor for an individual’s family relations can be pictured as a tree, we at MemoryBox like to think of a person’s life as a lake during a warm summer rain, where each concentric circle generated by the falling raindrops is a significant life event, and each ripple extending from those life events are the people central to them who made them truly resonate.
In the beloved Frank Capra movie “It’s a wonderful life”, George Bailey only learns to appreciate all the lives he has touched when Clarence the angel removes him from existence. Only then does George truly understand the positive impact his life has made on all the people his life has touched because he sees how it would have been if he had never been born. None of us knows all the ripples, all the circles our lives create (or did create, if we’ve transitioned). But, through MemoryBox, we hope individuals can visualize and nurture the multifarious circles of connections, the often overlapping yet discrete communities created as a result of each significant life experience.
By focusing on end-of-life events and the creation of life celebration “event” Memories—such as a post-funeral reception or a scattering of ashes—we go beyond simply empowering people to create more traditional crowd-sourced photo albums of lost loved ones, or memorial “people” Memories. Unlike what’s offered by other digital memorialization services, we view our mission as growing and supporting the communities that that person engendered throughout his or her life. At MemoryBox, we believe there is no better way to honor a person’s life than by strengthening these communities. In essence, rather than viewing death as a looking back, as a mourning of someone who has passed, we look at this terminal milestone as a celebration of life—not just of the deceased but, equally importantly, of the lives of all those who have been positively touched by the deceased.
This is what significantly distinguishes us from other digital services providers catering to the funeral industry, which include:
- Off-the-shelf solutions like Wix and WordPress for funeral homes that want to create their own web presence.
- Local web production shops and digital agencies which build funeral home websites for $3-$5K+.
- To a much lesser degree, traditional social networks/apps like Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. However, as MemoryBox is designed to help you mindfully preserve those special memories you never want to forget, our offering is actually the exact opposite of Snapchat, where your images just vanish in only a few minutes, hours or days; or of Instagram, which is mostly about showcasing your life as an endless stream of filtered visual trivia. MemoryBox is an island of mindful tranquility in a sea of disposable media, a place to escape to when you’re tired of noisy places like Facebook.
- Primarily text-based obituary sites such as legacy.com.
- Enterprise memorialization website solutions provided by Legacy (tributes.com), Frontrunner (obittree.com), and Consolidated Funeral Services (CFS), which offer low-cost or free websites to funeral homes in exchange for sharing in the sale of ancillary services, such as flowers. But while our economic model is similar to this last group, we look at ourselves as complementary more than competitive. We’re not in the business of producing funeral homes websites; nearly all funeral homes already have a web presence. Although we do provide funeral homes with a digital identity as informationally comprehensive as most full-blown websites—delivering core information about a funeral home’s location(s), contact info, hours, services offered, etc.—our focus is on Memory creation and the nurturing of the communities they represent.
Other key distinguishing factors include:
- Between 50-60% of consumers access the Internet (Web) via mobile devices today, and yet MemoryBox is the only memorialization utility with an app. Indeed, we offer Partners the ability to field a white label, Partner-branded version of the MemoryBox app and website, featuring the Partner’s logo on every screen, simply “powered by” MemoryBox.
- As a result of costs and our increasingly less religious society, funerals and other end-of-life events have become simpler and less formal than those of the past, wherein those who attend them will often use smartphones and other mobile devices to document their experiences with photographs and video, and those who can’t make it to those events in person can, and often do contribute media from afar. Ours is the only free app that lets everyone at the same end-of-life event take pics using multiple devices and they’re posted back to one centralized MemoryBox Memory automatically. You don’t even have to use our app; just take pics at the funeral, interment, post-funeral reception, and/or scattering of ashes the way you normally would, with your smartphone’s photo utility, and our app does the rest. You can even display Memories and/or Shows made up of specific photos in said Memories at such events in near real time via tablet or personal computer, often coupled with some projection device.
- Nearly every funeral home today already has a web or Facebook presence, but most only feature text-based obituaries. If they do let mourners upload photos of the deceased, they don’t feature captions or the ability to comment on those photos, which stimulates community involvement. We do.
- Each MemoryBox Memory features a unique QR code designed to link users to them online for easy joining. Thus, in addition to offering funeral homes revenue-sharing opportunities via the sale of flowers and “virtual” candles and such, they can vend 1.5” square metal QRC plaques to be affixed to grave markers, and/or transparent QRC self-adhesive stickers for funeral urns, enabling those scanning them with their smartphones to link quickly to memorial Memories, plus QRC powered table tents linking attendees at post-funeral repasts back to MemoryBox event Memories (i.e. join this Memory behind the QR code and every pic you take will be shared with other family and friends attending this reception automatically).
- And funeral homes and cemeteries are not the only businesses to which we’re providing solutions. We’re also targeting numerous other end-of-life related businesses, including: hospices, assisted suicide and geriatric physicians (cardiologists, oncologists, etc.); celebrants, death guides and death “doulas”; nursing homes and other senior care facilities and services; religious organizations such as churches, synagogues and mosques; estate planners; travel services for seniors; and seniors associations like the AARP. [Note that MemoryBox Partners already include: funeral homes like Dupree and Flemuel Brown, Jr., two of Philadelphia’s oldest; seniors-focused media outlets like WURD radio; and advocacy groups like AIDS Walk and the American Foundation for Suicide Prevention (AFSP), among others.]
- Nor are we restricting ourselves to human lost loved ones. While there are approximately 19,000 funeral homes in the U.S., conducting more than 2 million funerals every year, generating $11B in annual revenue, there are more than 114,000 veterinarians in this country, servicing the approximately 65% of American households with a dog or a cat, upon which Americans spend more than $60B each year. And that’s just in this country!
Last but certainly not least, according to Board of Advisor Dr. Clay Routledge, the world’s preeminent authority on nostalgia and memory, digitally documenting and celebrating a person’s life and key end-of-life events through the creation of MemoryBox Memories produces demonstrable positive clinical benefits, promoting both healing in response to grief, as well as personal happiness, stimulated through social connections versus financial status or fame, as research has proven.
As far as we’re concerned, the best way to disrupt death is by living life. That’s what we celebrate. Thus, we are not only attempting to rebrand death. We are also, in essence, reinterpreting the meaning of life itself—as the sum total of all the positive impacts any one of us has on those communities we’ve touched throughout our lifetimes. And by nurturing those communities through MemoryBox, we can truly live on forever.