Grave Marker Maker

I’m in the business of making stuff out of resin. So businesses like this come to me all the time.

Visit your local funeral homes and strike up a deal with them to make grave markers for their customers. What you’ll be doing is providing/making grave markers for the lower income families the funeral home may be talking to. Markers can cost well over $500. You can make one for about $10-$15 in materials out of a plaster type substance called Hydrastone. It’s like plaster but very, very hard after setting. The end product won’t be fancy with the brass inlaid text… etc. But it’ll be quite nice and most importantly, cheap.

All you need is some space like a backyard to do your molding. Build your mold out of some counter top formica from Home Depot. Make sure the edges are nice and neat. The mold has to be able to come apart after you pour the Hydrastone into it. (I’m not going to get into forms and molds in this post. You have to do SOME research on your own… come on, man! Ha)

You can see what Hydrastone can look like here. It’s a page of clocks that are made from Hydrastone.

You’ll need to contact an engraver (trophy shop should do fine) or invest in an engraving machine. You can then pour a lot of blank markers and when you sell one, just have it engraved with the message the family of the deceased wants. You sell it to the funeral home and they mark it up and sell it to the family.

If you can’t get any funeral homes to bite, place ads in the obit section of your paper and sell them directly to the public. You might want to “mention” to all the funeral homes you are contacting that you don’t want to sell directly to the public through the paper. This will scare them a bit since they don’t want you to be selling a much cheaper option to their $800 markers.

You could probably sell these things for $100 to the funeral homes (try for more, but settle on $100 at the very least.) If you have 4 or 5 funeral homes in your area that you’re working with, I will venture to guess you can make well over $60K a year from making graves markers.

You can make other stuff too, but that’ll come to you after you start making stuff with Hydrastone.

As usual… I’ll expect a nice check in the mail if you start doing this. 🙂