By Thomas A. Parmalee
When Darren Crouch, 53, co-founded a company 25 years ago, he was thinking big.
If you have any doubts, simply look at the second word in its name: Passages International.
“My upbringing influenced that,” Crouch said. “Being that I am from and have lived in many countries, I knew from the very start I wanted our company to have a global footprint.”
The company’s mission was clear from the beginning: to offer funeral homes environmentally friendly products that would appeal to a public that wanted greener options while prearranging or planning a funeral at the time of need – all while helping funeral homes earn additional revenue.
“When we looked at it, there was no one out there doing this,” Crouch said.
He was never deterred by the idea that he was an unlikely character to bring an option that was tucked into the far corner of the selection room and bring it to the forefront.
“I am really proud of what we have created at Passages,” he said. “When we started the company, and even today there is no one doing what Passages does. Yes, there are several companies that have eco-friendly products, but their core business is more along the lines of embalming fluids, wood or metal caskets or brass urns. We are and always have been the only company in the U.S. that specializes in sustainable, renewable, biodegradable and even fair-trade funeral products. We are in-step with the modern consumer that values more sustainable options and wants to spend their funeral dollars on affordable and meaningful experiences that celebrate the person and tell their story.”
A Man Going Places
Born in England, Crouch moved with his family to the West Indies as a toddler.
“My dad was in the hotel business and worked in Tobago,” he explained, which is the smaller of the two Caribbean islands comprising the nation of Trinidad and Tobago. “And a couple of years after that, we moved to Africa.
He lived in Swaziland and Botswana before spending his middle and high school years at a boarding school in Johannesburg, South Africa’s biggest city. When he graduated in 1988, he could have joined the South African Army to fight in Angola or Mozambique.
“There was a lot of change happening in South Africa,” he said. “It was a good time to move back to the U.K.”
So, he packed his bags and went to the Manchester Metropolitan University, following in his father’s footsteps to blaze a trail in the family business: hotel management.
To earn his hotel management degree, however, he needed to spend a year working in the hotel industry, which made him think of a friend who had done his internship in Taos, New Mexico. “The hotel liked him and wanted more interns, and so I applied with three of my friends,” he said.
Traveling clearly has never bothered Crouch, and so when his application was approved, he jumped at the opportunity and headed to the Quail Ridge Inn.
“It’s about an hour and a half north of Santa Fe,” he said of Taos. “It is a funky place in the middle of nowhere with artsy people.”
And it was at the inn where he met Patricia, the daughter of Rivera Funeral Home owner Amos Rivera, who was also getting some early work experience.
“She was smart, fun to be around and her work ethic, interaction with customers and confidence stood out to me,” Crouch said, who added that she also has a great smile.
“I then went to work at some hotels in Los Angeles, but I got burned out,” he said.
Thinking they would regroup, the couple returned to New Mexico – back to where the funeral home is located. That was when Crouch began talking more with his brother-in-law, Tim Rivera, who was managing the business and had seen a troublesome change.
“He had families with plenty of disposable income, but they were not buying urns,” Crouch said. “It didn’t matter how he merchandized or priced them … they were leaving with a cardboard box – just a temporary container.”
Both of them thought it was a poor business practice and not the best thing for families. “Affluent people were spending $2,000 or $3,000 on a cremation, and we both thought the last thing they should get is a cardboard box with their loved one’s remains,” Crouch said.
So, 25 years ago – in the summer of 1999 – the two formed Passages International.
“Our original concept was to provide families with dignified ecofriendly and affordable containers with which to hold their loved one’s remains, but also allow funeral homes to earn some more revenue versus providing a cardboard box,” Crouch said.
Asked how he could so bravely leave the only field he ever knew – hotel management – to start a venture in funeral service, Crouch said he simply needed a change.
“I was working really long 12-to-14-hour days, often late at night,” he said, noting his last post was at a luxury hotel in Beverly Hills where some rooms cost $3,000 per night.
It was not uncommon to have superstars such as director Ron Howard or actor Sylvester Stallone staying the hotel as it was adjacent to an agency where top Hollywood agents worked. “It became very stressful to navigate and manage that,” he said.
If you made a mistake and a big star stopped staying at the hotel, the venue could lose substantial amounts of money. Likewise, it was disillusioning to see some co-workers earning hundreds of thousands of dollars per year in tips when he was working for substantially less.
Crouch and his brother-in-law introduced their company to the profession at the National Funeral Directors Association convention in Kansas City, and the response was not what they had hoped.
“They did not quite get the concept of what we were talking about,” Crouch admitted.
But over the years, as consumers have become more interested in green and biodegradable options, the interest from funeral directors has followed, he said.
“It has become our space – we own it,” he said.
Crouch’s wife, although she grew up in funeral service, went down a different path – to a career as an attorney.
“She does her thing, and I do mine,” Crouch said, noting they have two great children: a 24-year-old daughter who graduated from New York University with a degree in psychology and is going on to study for her masters in Global Affairs at NYU, and another daughter who lives in L.A. pursuing a career in acting and modeling. “We are empty nesters and enjoying it,” Crouch said.
Today, Crouch has dual British and U.S. citizenship, and while he never set out to live in America, ending up here hasn’t taken him by surprise.
“I have traveled and grown up in many areas,” he explained. “For me, I never felt like I was going to settle down in England. I felt like I would be on the move, whether it was Europe, Asia or Africa. I knew I wanted to get out and see the world.”
And Passages has sure allowed him to do that – Crouch is indeed always moving.
“I do a lot of traveling to trade shows and making customer visits – and I travel internationally to work with our overseas manufacturing facilities and partners,” he said.
During those visits, he inspects designs and conducts quality control, making regular visits to Thailand, Bangladesh, China and other countries.
He’s always been too busy keeping his nose to the ground to learn languages other than English, he said. That is something he regrets, but it has not held him back.
“I have always felt like I am pretty comfortable in a lot of situations – whether it’s speaking with someone who barely has an education or someone who has a Ph.D. or is the CEO of a company,” he said. “I feel like I can hold my own in any of those situations, and it comes from my upbringing.”
Moving around has enabled him to fluidly adapt to his surroundings regardless of what language is being spoken, he said. “That has really helped for business,” he said.
As the years have gone by, Crouch has gone from a minority owner of the business to majority owner to full owner. Today, he’s the one that runs the entire show at Passages.
“When we started the business, my brother-in-law had the controlling interest, but that flipped three to five years in, and I acquired the controlling interest. He was still involved – and then about 15 years ago, I bought him out. I am the sole owner now,” he said.
His brother-in-law, he noted, turned Rivera Funeral Home from a company with one funeral home to one that operated three funeral homes, a crematory and cemetery before recently selling the business to a Salt Lake City based firm.
Lessons Learned
Unlike some others who have started businesses with family members, Crouch only has great things to say about his brother-in-law.
“Obviously, there were some challenges, but he brought a lot of the history and industry knowledge to the arrangement,” Crouch said. “He knew the business, he knew the players – and that was really helpful to have that perspective. He is also a shrewd and smart businessperson.”
While the pair did not agree on everything, Crouch said, “I don’t recall ever having any major blowups. We still enjoy each other’s company, and it worked out well for all parties. I have a lot of respect for him.”
The way the two men approached their partnership, however, is instructive.
“We tried to document stuff,” Crouch said. “It wasn’t just a handshake … we also had something in writing.”
When working with a business partner, the value of good communication simply cannot be overstated, Crouch said. “One person says, ‘I thought this,” and the other says, ‘You said that,’” he said. “And it’s good to say, ‘This is what we agreed to, and it is written down here.’ With Tim and I, we had everything written down. I feel we did it by the book without being overly rigid – and it helped us stay on track.”
As far as the time he spent in hotel management, he has no regrets, noting that he’s taken lessons he learned in that field and has applied them to what he does now – particularly a relentless focus on serving customers.
“The quality and attention to detail at a luxury hotel was pretty amazing,” he said. “We did things from a service perspective that would exceed expectations.”
For instance, when someone went to lunch, the host not only validated their parking but unknown to the customer would call valet parking so after their bill was paid, their car would be waiting for them at the exact right moment. “Little things like that made a huge difference … and planning ahead, knowing who is coming in and what are their likes and dislikes,” he said.
Sometimes, customers may seem unwilling to pay, but that’s only because they see little value in the product or service, Crouch said. By grasping that truth, he’s forged more meaningful relationships with funeral home owners while focusing on how Passages can deliver value people will pay for, he said.
“Especially on the cremation side where people see little tangible value, that is why there has been a race to the bottom,” Crouch said.
Always Innovating
One of the calling cards of Passages is that it is always innovating.
“At Passages, we talk about how our products can help a family create a memorable and meaningful – and sustainable – experience to honor and remember their loved one,” Crouch said.
Too many times, though, the stance of funeral homes is to simply give families a cardboard box and tell them they’ll need to figure it out.
“Our products allow families to do unique things and to create memorable and powerful experiences,” Crouch said.
Ironically, however, the products themselves do not have much value, Crouch said. They are not made of bronze or marble or some other grandiose material.
“Where the value comes in is the experiences our products enable families to have,” he said. “If you can provide that, people will pay for it.”
Even better, it’s a rising tide that lifts all boats – the experience of the family, the bottom line for Passages as well as the bottom line for funeral homes are all improved.
As one example, Crouch noted a local funeral home in Albuquerque that has grown its cremation revenue by 30% since it began offering Passages products.
It’s done so simply by changing the minimum container for cremation families – it used to be a cardboard box that cost $195. Now, it’s a bamboo container that costs $625, or families can opt for an upgraded bamboo container for $1,025.
Even families that prefer something basic have no complaints about the bamboo option, Crouch said. “The nice thing about the bamboo container is it’s simple,” he said. “There are no handles or linings. It has a simple quilt in the bottom.”
It’s not a particularly affluent market, but the owner of the Albuquerque funeral home has made a commendable choice: “He decided he does not want his brand associated with cardboard boxes,” Crouch said.
Another exciting innovation that Passages is rolling out is Etern.life, which is a memorial map displaying the location of cremated remains that have been scattered.
According to the Etern.live website, “Our innovative platform allows you to honor and celebrate the lives of your loved ones through exactly locating where they were scattered and creating an online memorial. With Etern.Life you can place a pin on our interactive map to mark where you’re loved one rests, thereby registering the scattering and preserving their digital legacy for generations to come.”
Crouch is bullish about the new offering, observing that about 40% of families continue to scatter cremated remains – and that number shows no indication of going down. “And another 20% may be uncertain what they are going to do with the cremated remains, but will likely end up scattering them,” he said. “We felt there was an opportunity to provide an additional service with our urns. So, with every urn we sell, families will have the ability to geolocate, taking note of the longitude and latitude of where they scattered their loved one’s remains.”
They will then be able to place a pin on a digital map and upload a memorial, which may include several photos and some information on the deceased. “It’s about creating a community of people who have been scattered,” Crouch said — just like a cemetery is a community of people who have been buried.
He envisions Etern.life becoming a dynamic memorial site, where people can share what they did to remember their loved one, who that person was, and the product they used in scattering their loved one’s remains.
“And using the map, they can go back to that exact spot within a few feet and pay their respects,” Crouch said.
It’s just another way Passages is seeking to differentiate itself.
“I am aware of lots of products on the market, but I don’t know of any other company that includes this feature with every urn,” he said. “We see it as a huge growth opportunity in terms of growing market share – and maybe there will be some revenue opportunities as its own entity. For example, if someone scattered the remains of their loved on in the past, they could actually go on the website and buy the ability to put a pin on the map.”
The company will begin to promote the option toward the end of the year, Crouch said.
The Quest for Green
As someone who grew up all over Africa, Crouch has always had an affinity for the land and protecting natural resources – something he continues to advocate for today as president of the Green Burial Council.
“I became very aware of conservation by seeing the poaching of rhinos and elephants,” he said. “I also became aware of turning the water on and getting water out of the tap is a luxury. We literally had 55-gallon drums that the bath water would go into – and that water would go to water the grass.”
So, while Passages sells green products, it also makes a concerted effort to be green, and so does Crouch, who drives a Tesla. His wife does, too. “We have solar panels on our roof,” he added.
But he’s also practical, meaning that he often flies to conventions and for business. “But wherever I can, I minimize my carbon footprint,” he said.
He also hates waste, and while he rarely argues with his wife, he’s been known to give her a hard time when she buys too much food. “There are only two of us in the house,” he said. “Maybe we just buy less?”
Still, he’s aware of the contradictions that arise in selling green products, but he tries not to let them weigh on him. For instance, it’s not unheard of for a family to desperately want an environmentally friendly casket that a funeral home does not have in stock.
In those instances, the casket is sometimes sent via airplane to get to the funeral home in time. “We’ve also had families drive roundtrip from San Antonio to pick up a casket in Albuquerque – a 14-hour drive!” he exclaimed. “This speaks to how important it is and to what lengths people will go to get these products.”
But, he’s fully aware that driving 14 hours each way to pick up a casket or shipping one by airplane may not align with what’s best for our planet.
But at the end of the day, he said, families choose what is important to them and select the shade of green that best fits their needs.
These types of examples also allow him to make the case to funeral homes that believe in his message that it’s all the more important to keep his products in stock.
A Changing Marketplace
For the first several years Passages was in business, it did not offer caskets – it mainly offered biodegradable urns.
“It was an uphill battle,” Crouch said, noting that even though Walmart has long been offering concentrated laundry detergent, funeral homes at first simply did not grasp the need to offer families environmentally conscious options.
“We were saying consumers expected greener options, but at that point, green burial really wasn’t readily available,” Crouch said.
For years, Passages spent time and energy essentially creating the space, Crouch said. Finally, about 15 years ago, its efforts paid off, with the marketplace finally adopting green products on a mass scale.
“Most funeral homes acknowledged they needed some biodegradable options, but with mass adoption, we got competitors,” Crouch said.
Passages has tried to combat that by constantly innovating. About 15 years ago, it introduced caskets.
At first, the response from funeral homes was that they didn’t need to offer green caskets because there was no green cemetery near them, Crouch said.
Eventually, however, as more consumers asked for greener options, reality took hold and more funeral homes began buying products from Passages, Crouch said.
“The data today is really overwhelming,” he said. “Consumer preference reports from the NFDA show many would be interested in a greener option if it were presented to them. You can’t ignore what these nonbiased surveys are finding.”
The data is being borne out as casket sales at Passages continue to go up, Crouch said.
Still, the company sells many more urns than caskets, which contributes the lion’s share of revenue. “For scatter tubes alone, we are selling over 50,000 per year in the United States,” Crouch said. “The challenge is that most of our urns wholesale for under $200 and some of them are as low as $25. But our caskets wholesale anywhere from $500 to $1,200.”
When a funeral home buys a casket, there is a lot to navigate. “We are not a Batesville or Matthews, we do not have our own trucks,” Crouch explained.
Sending urns is pretty straightforward and inexpensive – that can be done via FedEx or UPS, Crouch said. “But with caskets, you are at the mercy of trucking companies,” he said. “Finding the right providers to deliver caskets is a big deal for us. We are not white glove service like Batesville, which will bring it in and store it, but we work extremely hard to make it as seamless and easy for funeral professionals.”
When funeral homes buy a casket from Passages, standard shipping is built into the price, Crouch said. “If it needs to be expedited, there is an additional charge, so we encourage them to get it and stock it,” he said.
From humble beginnings, Passages has grown into a formidable business with 22 full-time employees and two warehouses in the United States – one in Albuquerque and one in Somerset, New Jersey.
It also operates a sister company – Passages International UK, which supplies the European market. It doesn’t just ship throughout the U.K. but also into France, Denmark, Italy, Portugal and the surrounding region, Crouch said.
Although it does substantial business throughout the world, about 75% of its business originates in the United States and Canada, Crouch said. “But we do pretty good business in Australia and New Zealand. We have customers in Japan and Uruguay. And we had an inquiry yesterday from a customer in Korea,” Crouch said.
While Crouch’s ability to navigate different cultures has been an asset, there are some things that attribute has not been able to help with, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, which caught everyone off guard.
“We had discussions in my CEO peer group as to what it would mean, and some people were thinking it would be over in a month or two, but I was thinking it would be more serious,” he said. “It was not great for our business.”
Part of that is because of timing: It coincided with the rollout of a new initiative that sought to persuade funeral homes to cremate bamboo instead of cardboard.
“We had everything in place, and then the pandemic breaks out and all hell breaks loose,” he said. “At that point, no one was thinking about tweaking their business – and the launch really suffered.”
While the company was well positioned to have much of its staff work from home, interruptions to the supply chain made it difficult to replenish products – or if they could be replenished, made it much more expensive to do so.
“We were getting items from overseas that took three or four times longer to get to us and costing three or four times more,” he said.
For a time, a shipping container that once cost $5,000 to $8,000 was running the company $30,000, Crouch said. “It was a huge hit on profitability,” he said.
Also, by the time Passages took advantage of government incentives to minimize the pandemic’s impact, they began being discontinued.
“The other thing is I don’t know if there was much selling going on during the pandemic,” Crouch said. “Funeral homes needed to take care of trailer loads of bodies. If a tsunami or massive earthquake hits, even though there are lots of people dying, it is not necessarily great for the funeral business.”
Asked about artificial intelligence, Crouch said he’s keeping close tabs on what it may mean for him as a business owner. For instance, while everyone is fixated on where they rank on Google, there may very well come a time when most people simply ask ChatGPT for the best funeral homes in a certain area code, or make an inquiry about the best plumber, etc.
“You better be in the top three,” Crouch said. “And it is not only checking your website but also reviews.”
If you’re not ranking well in such AI results, you better find out why, Crouch said, observing that you may have positive reviews, but perhaps those reviews aren’t saying something specific, such as you respond quickly.
“I am watching how it will affect websites and SEO,” he said. “I may use it for some generic stuff, such as if I want a policy on sexual harassment. Or if I want a job description that may have taken me three or four hours to do in the past.”
As time marches on, Crouch is looking forward to breaking more barriers, serving new customers and keeping his dress shoes moving all over the globe, trying to leave it a little better than the way he found it.
“Passages is known as a company that provides sustainable and eco-friendly products,” he said “But we are so much more. We have created products and innovations that solve problems for funeral professionals that they don’t even know that they have or are looming on the horizon. It excites me to know that the products we have created are providing revenue opportunities for funeral homes and meaningful, healing experiences for families, all while leaving a lighter touch on the planet.”
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