By Charlene Gatt
SEEING a full-sized coffin sitting on the kitchen table isn’t the sort of thing you’d normally expect to see when you visit someone’s house.
But at Asha Martin’s West Footscray residence, coffins prefer to sit above ground rather than six feet under.
Ms Martin designs and sells coffins and caskets direct to customers around Australia through her online, home-based business Caskets Direct.
The 33-year-old has just notched up a year in the business and said despite the morbid line of work, she revelled in learning all she could about the funeral industry.
“Although it’s quite an unusual thing to be doing and I did think twice initially if I could do this, I pursued it and the more I learned about the industry and the product the more I got into it and got excited by it. It’s intriguing,” she said.
Ms Martin was running her own upholstery and furniture design business in Richmond when she heard an interview with Funeral Rights author Robert Larkins that piqued her interest.
“One of the things he was talking about in the interview is that consumers don’t have any choice when it comes to buying a traditional-style coffin. And I immediately thought ‘why can’t I start a business selling them direct to the public and offering more choice and a much more affordable price?’”
The idea came at the perfect time. Ms Martin and her husband were keen to start a family and wanted to set up a home-based business that would let her be a stay-at-home mum.
She sold the Richmond business in 2008 when she fell pregnant with her son Miles.
Her coffins sell from $680 for a basic flat lid coffin with timber and metal handles to $1299 for a deluxe casket. At funeral parlours, most coffins retail upwards of $3000.
“I also felt really strongly that Australian consumers should have choice in this area. With everything else we buy, we have choice – when you’re organising a wedding, you can choose a cake from different places or you could choose your dress from lots of different places – but with coffins, you could only get one from a funeral home.”
Ms Martin said she had fielded several unusual requests, including people buying coffins for coffee tables, a man who was restoring a hearse and wanted a model coffin to put in it, and lots of interest from the gothic community which uses them for costume props.
