Recompose, the Seattle-based company that wants to offer an alternative choice to conventional burial and cremation methods by turning human remains into soil, has raised $4.7 million and hired a new general manager.
With plans to open its first facility in Seattle’s SoDo neighborhood in 2021, Recompose was founded by Katrina Spade and is part of a movement toward disrupting the $21 billion death care industry. Washington became the first state to legalize human composting, and a law signed by Gov. Jay Islee goes into effect in May.
Recompose is looking to raise $6.75 million and support so far has come from angel investors, friends and family, and donor-advised funds. The company’s natural organic reduction technology works by converting remains over about a 30-day period. The body is placed in a receptacle with organic matter such as straw and wood chips and natural processes break everything down into about a cubic yard of soil which is returned to families.
New GM Kira Franz joins after more than a year as director of operations at Madrona Venture Labs in Seattle. She will be tasked with handling everything that has to do with Recompose Seattle, including the development of systems that could be in place if the idea expands to other states down the road.
Franz was especially drawn to the notion that death care is an essential part of life. Recent experiences in her own life, including the death of her father, highlighted the importance of understanding options and how Recompose approaches death as a profound human event rather than just a business.
“My parents never really talked about death,” Franz said of her father, who had a long terminal illness. “It just wasn’t a part of their internal culture to talk about the future and what was going to be happening. So when my father actually died, my mother didn’t have any idea what he wanted.”
When a friend’s mom died in hospice, she, too, was very poorly prepared. Franz said the death industry closed in; they were told to pick a mortuary immediately. Her friend was in shock and couldn’t do that.
“People didn’t talk about death like it was going to happen. Nobody knew what to do,” Franz said.
She returned to Seattle with a real desire to disrupt the funeral industry. She casually pitched ideas to co-workers at Madrona, but she found there’s really not enough money in the industry to attract venture capital interest. And when the job opened at Recompose, she decided, “this is exactly what I want to do.”
“Our intention is to grow Recompose organically, slowly, in a healthy way. We’re not interested in trying to scale up extremely rapidly,” she said.
Spade and Recompose are actively involved in moves to legalize the process in Colorado and California, and the company is watching New York, Vermont and Hawaii.
As it still discovers the market, it’s yet to be determined whether Recompose would license its technology or build stand-alone Recompose facilities or some combination of the two involving franchising.
While green alternatives to cremation and burials that feature embalming and caskets are the main driver behind the business, the demystification of death is a big part of the push — making death part of our lives, not being afraid of it and understanding that it is a natural part of life.
“I think we make better decisions when we think about death as something that is going to happen,” Franz said. “We make better decisions about our life and how we want to live it.”
Elsewhere in the Pacific Northwest, Portland-based Solace is making its move around cremation services, simplifying the process and pricing around that decision with a digital platform.
Recompose, which has three full-time employees now, hopes to break ground in June at a big warehouse in SoDo with “tons of promise,” so long as current events around the coronavirus outbreak don’t slow things.
The price for services will be $5,500, according to the company’s website FAQ.
