October 19, 2000

New furniture line departs from the norm

Deep in the Kootenay Mountains in the little town of Nelson, eight hours east of Vancouver, B.C., Mark Zeabin operates what he claims is a profitable dot.com.

He sells furniture over the Web -- made out of coffins.

Not used coffins. And not occupied ones.

When it's time to go, this bookshelf will accommodate the deceased.

Rather, Zeabin sells the economic efficiency of reaping use from what is an expensive investment before putting it in its final resting place.

Why not a home entertainment center in the den made of three beautiful, hand-crafted wood caskets standing on their end? Open the lid of the large coffin in the center to find the TV and stereo.

Talk about a conversation piece.

When your final day comes, a third of the entertainment center goes with you.

An angular, six-sided wood coffin -- hand-crafted, of course, and standing on its end -- makes a wonderful book case, great for those favorite Edgar Allen Poe classics.

The same shape, placed horizontally, its finely varnished lid closed, makes an excellent coffee table.

The coffin sofa might be ideal for lazy Saturday afternoon reading. When your final book is read, so to speak, remove the cushions and the backrest comes down as the lid.

"It's better than paying $5,000 to use it for a day and then bury it," says Zeabin.

Speaking by phone, Zeabin said he's not a goth. He's, ah, dead serious, though in a breezy, fun, if morbid, sort of way.

"I'm so normal," he said in a chirpy Kootenay inflection. "I'm just a regular guy. You would never think I build coffins if you saw me." He sounded affable. Very approachable.

What's more, the idea for casket furniture started with a certain grace.

Zeabin's grandmother died in 1997. With his father, who works as a carpenter building houses, they built her a wooden coffin, a simple pine one. They felt better than if they had just bought one.

"It felt like a bit of closure by doing it yourself for grandma," he said. "We got to take part a little bit."

Zeabin, age 25 and left-handed, had worked as a cabinet maker but stopped when he cut the fingers off his left hand. So, he enrolled in the Kootenay School of the Arts to study jewelry design. That's when his wife got pregnant, he received an insurance payment from a car accident and grandma died.

"We're a Russian sect here, and at Russian funerals, 200 to 300 people take part," he said. Word went out quickly from that much exposure that grandma's had been quite the admirable casket.

Zeabin left the school and put up the insurance money for tools to start a casket-making business with his father and brother called MHP Enterprises Ltd. MHP is short for Mark, Harry (the father) and Pat (brother).

"I'm the designer," as well as president, he said. MHP's "bread and butter product" has become "coffin kits." With these, MHP ships the kit to the customer who assembles it themselves, potentially achieving that closure the Zeabins got with grandma's coffin, although many kit buyers are casket shops purchasing wholesale.

The Zeabins also make fine wooden furniture bearing no connection to caskets.

It stuck in the Zeabins' collective craw that their coffins had such short useful spans. "There had to be a more practical solution," he said. "We were really bothered by how funeral homes do charge quite a bit."

Entertainment center or casket? It's both.

The proverbial light bulb finally went on when Zeabin was planning to attend a value-added wood forum in the East Kootenays, at which he'd display a coffin. A friend who intended to drive him over only had a small truck, too small to safely carry the coffin.

To resolve this, Zeabin decided to make a coffin that "snapped in half" to fit in the truck. He made one piece into a coffee table and the other an end table.

By now it was 1998. Nelson, the town, has fewer than 15,000 residents and the Kootenays total about 60,000 people. MHP sells one to two coffins a month to locals -- and not all that many Kootenay folks hunger for entertainment center coffins.

But e-commerce was taking off.

Zeabin designed a Web site, a friend coded it and, in July 1998 they posted it on a local server.

MHP's product line also includes animal-shaped, wooden "pet urns" for holding the ashes of pets, and casket-shaped pet beds. These "pet products" have really taken off.

"Pets take about 50 percent of our work," Zeabin said. "The pet thing is just growing exponentially in the states. I've sold $1,600 coffins for dogs. They're just a really big dog coffin, just a regular coffin shape without pall-bearing handles.

"We probably ship a product a day," he said. "That's everything: urns, casket kits, pet products." The company's "regal caskets," made of hand-crafted fine woods and the highest-quality fabrics, according to the Web site, sell for up to $5,000 each.

Revenues have reached about $250,000 Canadian for this year, Zeabin said.

The casket furniture, he said, is mostly an attention getter.

Web surfers, as it turns out, love to search on maudlin phrases like coffin and casket, so Zeabin said his www.casketfurniture.com ranks among numerous search engines' highly visited sites.

"I've heard a lot of people don't think much of e-commerce, but it's worked well for us," he said.

Zeabin said he has refined his balance of being light-hearted and humorous with some people, and grimly serious with others, when talking about casket furniture.

"You start off cautious and go from there," he said. "For me, it's fairly light. For me, death is just another stage of life."

Zeabin tried marketing to goths, meaning a trend of people who dress in black clothing, white face make-up and other Addams Family affectations.

"I had about 60 e-mails from them in the first two weeks," he said. "But they're mostly dysfunctional and don't have any money," so he's given up on that.

Zeabin didn't fill his house with casket furniture, until recently. The "Ripley's Believe It or Not" TV show shot a segment on his company, to air in January, and the show wanted to get him with the furniture in his home. He's grown to like it so much, he plans to keep it there.

The items in his home include one that he hasn't posted on the Web yet, a casket phone booth. But it's coming.

Previous columns:

• Green shingles may be no match for gray weather, 10-12-2000
• Builders, counties partner for green homes, 10-05-2000
• Modular construction goes to new heights, 09-28-2000
• Affordable housing to be studied at conference, 09-21-2000
• County trying to curb construction waste, 09-14-2000
• Nuprecon expanding its services and markets, 09-07-2000
• KJM rides transit boom, 08-24-2000
• Seattle Iron & Metal streamlines its operations, 08-17-2000