Michelle Samartino, Special to The Michigan Catholic
Published March 23, 2007

Michelle Samartino ClintMytych,CEO of EternalImage, Inc., in Farmington Hills, stands with theVatican-licensed L'Italiano Classico urn, which weighs approximately 10 pounds. FYI For more information on caskets and urns licensed by the Vatican Library, call Eternal Image, Inc., at 888-6CASKET, or visit the Web site at www.eternalimage.net.

Farmington Hills — When someone dies, who's to say that person can't go out in something other than a traditional fashion?

And we're not talking about clothing.

Eternal Image of Farmington Hills makes a line of caskets and urns from the Vatican Library Collection, the first ever to be licensed by the Vatican Library.

While the idea may seem odd to some, Clint Mytych, CEO of Eternal Image, says the reaction from many has been promising.

"The response has been incredible," he says. Although they have yet to advertise their Vatican line of caskets and urns on a full scale, his company receives between a half dozen to a dozen phone inquiries a day.

The license is worldwide, and the urns and caskets are available to anyone who desires them. In addition, a portion of every product goes back to Vatican Library, Mytych says.

Not only does Eternal Image offer funeral products licensed by the Vatican Library, but they also offer products from Major League Baseball and Precious Moments. Pet urns are also available using licensed images from the American Kennel Club and Cat Fanciers' Association.

The company began in 2002 with the idea that consumers should have a choice when it comes to their funeral, whether they're planning their own, or whether someone makes the arrangements for them afterward. "When we started, we had a target list of brands that we wanted to offer to people, such as Major League Baseball.

"But we wanted to get involved with something religious," Mytych says. "We wished to incorporate any piece of the (Vatican) Library into our products."

Eventually Precious Moments signed on, as did the Vatican Library Collection, the branch that is home to the Vatican's extensive collection of art and architecture, Once the approval was granted, Eternal Image's design team immediately worked on the designs.

With a worldwide population of one Catholic for every six people, there's a great potential in Vatican Library funeral products, Mytych says. He says selling the caskets and urns gives the consumer an option.

"Attaching a license to it doesn't make it eerie. This is celebrating the life of an individual and not focusing on the death," he adds.

The L'Italiano Classico urn, made mostly of copper, is $599, which is currently available. The Une Parte di Cielo (meaning "piece of heaven") will sell for $1,299 and will feature goldplating and liquid gold. It will be available in about a month.

The caskets, offered in either ebony or pearl, will sell for $3,400 and will be available later this summer.

Michael Bernacchi, Ph.D., marketing professor at University of Detroit Mercy, said products in the funeral industry are some of the last vestiges in terms of marketing.

He admits when he brings the concept up to his class, "it generates mostly laughs."

"This is a category that we can spin in terms of branding and turn a few extra bucks in terms of licensed merchandising," Bernacchi says.

"The 78 million baby boomers are still enjoying, for the most part, happy life spans and not falling over dead yet. Baby boomers, as we well know, are much different than any other consumers or demographies because baby boomers want to have the quality of life they had similar in their 60s and 70s to the ones they had in their 50s, 40s and 30s, in essence."

He says a special casket or urn would "commemorate them and give them an edge," using the idea of conspicuous consumption.

"It's a notion that's been around for hundreds of years that if one can be inconspicuously consuming, it's not for oneself but for the pleasure of others," Bernacchi says. "It makes a statement."

Bernacchi says it sounds as though baby boomers "want to go out spending and spend all the way to the grave and past the grave. This is their opportunity to doing that."

He adds the idea of Vatican Library-licensed caskets and urns is not so unusual.

"Any other time, this would have been an idea that would have been downgraded or denigrated. It would have been laughed at and it would not have made any sense, but we have a generation of people — those folks between the ages of 46-64 – who want to go out riding motorcycles, sailing boats … going yahoo all the way out."

Bernacchi adds and laughs, "Instead of the idea of cowboys riding out into the sunset, now it's the baby boomers who are the bronco riders into the sunset!"