By Thomas A. Parmalee
When Chris McDowell’s older sister died of an aneurism at age 45, his entire family was crushed.
“As part of the process, I was the one who raised their hand and said I’d put together a slideshow for her service,” said the 38-year-old McDowell (pictured at top), who grew up on Long Island and lives in Connecticut.
So, despite his heartache, McDowell began collecting photos from Facebook, and family members asked everyone to “email photos to Chris,” so they could celebrate the life of Laura. Soon, it seemed as though he was drowning in pictures.
“I spent three or four hours at night before the service from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. putting it all together,” he said. “I was curating photos, editing, cropping and removing duplicates – only to put it all onto Google Drive for the funeral home, which burned it onto a DVD for the day of the service.”
At the time, McDowell was only doing what the funeral home asked and wasn’t necessarily in the frame of mind to consider how to do it more efficiently – and it was stressful.
“A few months later, I realized that if I spent three or four hours the night before the service gathering photos – and I am a reasonably tech-savvy person – then there had to be other people facing a similar if not more challenging problem if they are not tech savvy,” he said. “I felt there had to be a better way.”
And so, he began researching the various options available to funeral homes and families, and when he was not impressed with what he saw, he created a solution of his own – Quilt.
The name for the company came to him without effort.
“I thought about a family as a quilt with all these memories sewn together and handed down,” he explained. “And what we have built allows memories to come together from different family members and friends from all across the world – and we pull it together digitally.”
What Is Quilt?
Quilt was founded in July 2023 but only began introducing itself to funeral homes on a large scale last month. It’s everything McDowell wished he had when he was gathering photos for a tribute video honoring the life of his sister.
He “bootstrapped it” with a former colleague that he worked with at a previous technology company. “It’s been sweat equity up to this point, and we’ve called in some favors,” he said. “That forces us to work scrappy … it gets us right in front of the funeral homes, so we can understand their pain points. And as we’ve talked to more funeral homes, we see a lot of opportunities to build more products. At the end of the day, we want to help funeral homes deliver the best experience possible for families. And we want to free up their time, so they can spend time with families and not in front of a computer editing videos.”
He added, “The funeral home’s expertise is taking care of families during their most difficult time. We want to take the technology burden off of them and allow them to do what they do best – and hopefully give them a way to generate more revenue for themselves.”
Other solutions exist that are great at creating standard videos, but he wanted to design something that provided a more robust solution.
Through the Quilt platform, users can log in, add photos and comment on photos. And they can keep doing so even after a funeral or memorial service. “You spend all this time creating a memorial service that lasts two to four hours, but this lives beyond the service,” he said. “It makes it more interactive and turns it into an ongoing memorial versus a point-in-time DVD.”
With Quilt, McDowell said he’s striving to add functionality and usability for both funeral homes and families.
“The way we interact with photos today and with social media is just very different than when some of these other companies started,” he observed.
As someone who has worked with early-stage technology companies for about 15 years, McDowell knew he was up to the task of trying to shake up the space. He’s hoping to duplicate some of the incredible successes he’s enjoyed elsewhere.
“It has been exciting seeing a lot of companies grow from nothing to $100 million companies – and all the experience that comes along with that,” said McDowell, who is focusing strictly on Quilt, other than a little consulting work on the side. “A lot of mistakes can be made along the way, and I’ve gotten to learn from that – and I’ve also seen some great execution, which I’ve been able to learn from as well.”
With some other vendors that specialize in photos and videos, the end product is usually a video file that is streamed.
“With Quilt, think of a Facebook page, where a family can go and scroll through all the photos and see what is available, and then turn it into a slideshow,” McDowell said. “The difference is in the way we present it to the family – you can go in and click on what photos you want to appear in the video, you can print photos at home. You can’t do that with a video file.”
In a nutshell, with Quilt, families get the ability to create a slideshow on demand.
“When researching this, I heard about families that would come in the morning of a service with a USB drive with 20 more photos they wanted to be put into the slideshow that would be played at the service,” McDowell said.
That, however, typically poses a problem for funeral homes. By that time, they would have had a vendor edit the video, the photos would have been cropped and already burned to a DVD. “So, it makes it nearly impossible to add those 20 photos a family wants,” McDowell said.
But with Quilt, a family can upload those pictures directly to the Quilt platform from their phone five minutes before the service – and those pictures can be included in the slideshow when it’s time for the service.
Moreover, with Quilt, you can also include a QR code that is at the bottom of a tribute video as it plays at the service, which attendees can scan. That way, depending on the privacy settings the family selects, they can scroll through the photos on their phone, download them and even print them at home if they wish.
Even more exciting is this: Attendees or anyone who is given access to log in to Quilt can share photos of the deceased with the family. “An attendee can upload photos from their phone to Quilt on the spot – and depending on the privacy settings the family has selected, that picture could be automatically inserted into the slideshow on the next loop or it could be put into what I call ‘purgatory’ – where a family has to approve it, as we all may have that crazy relative we do not want sharing photos directly to the slideshow.”
Asked how the video gets from the Quilt platform to play on the screens that may be on a funeral home’s wall at a service, McDowell said there are two ways that happens.
“Either the funeral home plugs a computer into one of those televisions with an HDMI cord and they log into Quilt and press play – or we have similar devices that we have set up that they can plug right into the back of the TV, which is effectively a mini-PC that allows it to play directly into the TV.”
Of course, he has also thought about different scenarios, such as what happens if the power or internet goes out.
So, you have the ability to put it onto a USB drive as a backup, he said.
Families can easily share the memorial video on social media – directly from the platform, McDowell said. “That is encouraged in many cases, because you may share it and say, ‘Here is our Quilt for our sister, if you have photos, please log in and add them.’ That broadens the group of folks who can upload and contribute.”
One feature that a lot of funeral homes may appreciate is the ability to place a link to the Quilt memorial on the obituary page for the deceased, McDowell said. “So, when folks visit the funeral home and read the obituary, they can also go the Quilt memorial and add additional photos from right there,” he said.
Of course, there are ways to password protect a Quilt memorial so it cannot be shared via social media, he said
A Preneed and Marketing Engine
What may be the most intriguing aspect of Quilt for funeral homes, however, is that it can be leveraged as a way to boost preneed efforts – and to generate positive reviews that may pull weight when families are searching for a firm to work with in an at-need situation.
That’s because the platform collects the email addresses of anyone who logs in to look at photos, review them, or to add photos of their own.
“So, in conjunction with the funeral home, we can use that information to generate surveys and send them to people who have attended the service,” he said. And based on what is learned via those survey responses, attendees can then be invited to share their feedback in the form of a Google review.
Or, the contact information of those who have attended a service that has been gathered by Quilt can simply be passed on to the funeral home, McDowell said. “That can be incredibly valuable to the funeral home,” he said.
Quilt can handle that process of reaching out to families, McDowell said. But it would craft the email in conjunction with the funeral home, making sure it could approve whatever is sent out. “It is a sensitive time to reach out to the family,” McDowell said. “We want to be sure we are being compassionate and representing the funeral home well in the email.”
The email would consist of a survey, and a follow up email would thank families for taking the time to provide their feedback. If positive feedback were received, the family would be invited to share their thoughts on Google Reviews. Emails could be branded with the funeral home logo in tandem with the Quilt logo, based on a firm’s preference.
“If the feedback is neutral to negative, we would share that with the funeral home, so they can take it and process it and adapt as necessary,” McDowell said.
Pricing
Funeral homes pay Quilt $99 per service in which the platform is used, McDowell said, which includes the Google review component.
“If you can effectively take all the time and effort off your plate to produce the video and if you can generate four of five Google reviews from a funeral service, we feel that is good outcome,” he said.
Funeral homes can charge families whatever they wish for the service, keeping the difference as profit. Most funeral homes working with Quilt who go this route are charging in the $200 to $400 range, McDowell said. Others are providing it to families at no charge, and simply building it into the service fee and using it as a way to differentiate themselves from competitors, McDowell said.
As far as what amount of time the funeral home will spend using Quilt, McDowell said it’s “15 minutes max” compared with what may be four or five hours of work if they were doing it themselves with tools such as Apple Photo or Google Drive.
“You can add a little extra margin, but you can also save hours per service on the backend – and if you think of that over the course of a week, it may save you six to 10 hours,” he said. “We see a lot of benefit to that. This saves so much time and is a much better process for the family.”
It’s also a process with lasting benefits – as Quilt introduces itself to the marketplace, it plans to give its early customers access to its platform forever, meaning they’ll always be able to log in, add photos to a slideshow or look at photos that others have added. “We may fine tune that in the future, but right now, we do not want to do anything punitive to the family,” McDowell said.
While the general public would no doubt find Quilt useful – and not just for funeral services but think of weddings, graduations and other occasions – McDowell’s intent is to only offer the solution through funeral homes and to focus on the end of life.
So far, McDowell is pleased with the feedback he’s been getting on Quilt from funeral homes.
“We are happy in the sense that the feedback we are getting is this is going to be really valuable for funeral homes – and therefore really valuable for families,” he said. “Once we start talking to funeral homes, they become very excited about what we have to offer. This also allows the traditional, family-owned business compete with larger firms on an affordable level – and we are excited about that, too.”
McDowell also has a sense of satisfaction that he was able to take something tragic – the death of his sister – and turn it into something positive.
“I want to help other families, so they don’t have to experience what we went through … at the end of the day, this creates a beautiful legacy for my sister.”
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