Season 2, Episode 6 - Game Changers and Transition Makers: When the norm is not normal, find a better way

Lorraine:

Hello and welcome to ESG Matters here at Ashurst. I'm Lorraine Johnston, a partner at Ashurst in London, specialising in ESG regulation. You're listening to the second season of Game Changers and Transition Makers. In this series, we meet global entrepreneurs who are embracing disruption to boost business performance and drive the sustainability agenda.

In today's episode, you'll hear my conversation with Poppy Mardall, founder and chair at Poppy's Funerals. As a B Corp-certified organisation, Poppy's enables clients to make greener choices while providing outstanding care in creating funerals that people want, need and can feel proud of. So without further ado, let's jump in and hear the discussion. Poppy, thank you so much for joining us today. Let's start. If you could tell us a little bit about yourself and about Poppy's Funerals.

Poppy:

So my name's Poppy Mardall, and I set up Poppy's 12 years ago. We are a funeral directors in Greater London, so like any other funeral director, we're here for people when somebody dies, to help care for the person who's died and organise the funeral and support them afterwards. The reason I set up Poppy's is because lots of people don't know, but the sector is not in very good shape. So there's no regulation in the funeral sector, which is quite surprising because I think there is a sense that people assume that the care of the dead would be regulated, and it's not. In about 2011, there were three different exposés on television showing really, really poor standards of care, both for the living and the dead. That, for me, came at a time in my life where I was looking to do something new. My background was in the arts, I worked in the auction houses, Christie's and Sotheby's, and had an unbelievably good time there. Lots of fun, but always had this feeling that I wanted to do something a bit more front line.

I grew up in a family where my mum was a social worker and my dad was a teacher, and we were sort of drilled on your job is to kind of get out there and help people. I was helping people at Sotheby's, but I was helping a very, very small subset of population, and I wanted to do something more front line. I think people often assume, "Oh, you've gone from a kind of auction house to undertaking, that that must have been a kind of cataclysmic life event." It actually wasn't. It was much more a sense of wanting to do something closer to my own values. What I did was I went and persuaded a bunch of funeral directors to let me come and spend some time behind the scenes with them because I don't come from a family of funeral directors. The sector is not regulated, but it is full of many, many sort of kind-hearted people, and that's what I did. I spent a month in a mortuary learning. Off the back of that, Poppy's was born, and we are all about bringing outstanding care for the living and the dead at a time in one's life when you need and deserve that.

Lorraine:

So interesting to hear around about kind of what motivated you and then also how you went around about that sort of transition. Can you tell me a little bit more about Poppy's itself? Because from having a look at around about your website, it's not the same as what you would expect, frankly, from a funeral service provider. It was beautiful and mindful and very aligned with a lot of values that we are seeing, both individually and in the industry coming through around about sustainability and a return to nature in some sense as well. Where did that come from?

Poppy:

So I think my perspective is very much that the way we are presenting things is the way things should be. I guess there are probably a lot of analogies with other industries too, that we've gone, I think, from a way of looking at businesses like ours, like Poppy's, and thinking this is a sort of alternative approach.

That's a word that would be used I think even 10 years ago, and we are absolutely adamant that we are not the alternative. We should be the mainstream. I don't mean necessarily in terms of like our business, but in terms of how we do things. We're not looking to do things in an alternative way. We're looking to do things in a way that is fitting with the times.

As you described, the way we understand that is very much about putting the client at the centre of the experience. The client might be one person, it might be a family, it might be an entire community with multiple different needs, but making sure that the way we're shaping things for them is led by their own priorities and needs, which sounds so obvious.

But for anyone who's organised a funeral, lots of people will be familiar with that feeling of kind of walking into a slightly odd shop on the high street with like blinds and stone masonry in the window that you probably wouldn't go in, unless you absolutely had to. Then hopefully there's someone kind behind the desk, but they hand you a sort of huge coffin catalogue and you think, "Well, I don't know. We never had this conversation, and I've never thought about whether I want wood or bamboo or..." So we are very much about imagining it from the grieving person's point of view and thinking what would we want if we were in that position? What we believe we'd want is someone really kind and practical to lay out our options and to listen to what we need.

I think there's an assumption that buying a funeral is kind of two limousines or one or the expensive coffin or the sort of middle-priced coffin. We believe that that process should be about listening. So I'm thinking of people we've supported in the last few weeks. For one person the priority might be budget, it might be keeping costs down. For another person, it might be some very specific cultural or religious needs. For another family, it might be mixed needs.

So there was an amazing funeral we did for someone who they had a mother who... So they died, their mother had advanced dementia and the funeral was going to be quite big and the family felt that that would be a really overwhelming experience for her. But rather than exclude her, we basically ran the funeral again, but just for her in a kind of small room. So it's things like that that just aren't happening as a norm. That kind of thoughtfulness isn't going into the process.

You talk as well about sustainability. We don't consider ourselves to be green funeral directors. We consider ourselves to be a modern business that is prioritising sustainability in all ways. We want our business to exist in 50 years' time. We want the plant to be in good shape in 50 years' time. It feels much more about just being responsible and being thoughtful, than it does about any gimmicky kind of branding.

Lorraine:

I think that leads me really nicely into to my next question, which is you've spoken about that ambition for the business to be around in 50 years' time because you're based in London. But this sounds as if it's something that there would be demand for in other areas and actually is the way that the industry as a whole needs to transition as well. So what does success look like for you, I guess?

Poppy:

Yeah. So I think being completely honest, one probably has one's own sense of what impact you want to have and that that as multiple ways of coming to be. I think for me, I feel very strongly that this is about transitioning the sector to something better, and that has been a guiding light for me from the very beginning. That there's a sense for me of a hollow victory would be for Poppy's to be everywhere and to look really beautiful, but on the inside to be operating the same practises that have been going on for decades that aren't working for people.

So we're careful about our growth. We have had opportunities to kind of splash ourselves around, and I think we're really mindful of wanting to make sure that this happens in a way that we can sustain the quality of the experience for the people we're supporting.

We currently have two sites across Greater London. So we've been in Tooting for over eight years, and we have opened a second shop in East Sheen in Southwest London in January. We'll be opening another shop next year, and we'll be opening another larger site the following year.

So we do have significant growth ambitions, and we do believe we can look after about 5% of people who die in Greater London. We look after currently just under 1%. So that would be a big growth arc, and it would be challenging and exciting and something we believe we can do.

We're not looking to be sort of Tesco's or The Co-op, mostly I think because we think our approach is quite naturally about innovation and progress and kind of pushing the conversation on. I think it can be challenging when you get to that kind of scale to stay in that place, but we think if we got to 5% in Greater London, we would.

We already have had a significant impact on the sector. So I'll give you two examples, one a kind of big one, one a small one. We started off with Poppy's offering this very, very simple service that was all about having a kind of affordable, simple cremation. This service is now known as direct cremation and is very widely offered. I'm not saying it was us that did that, but we were very much part of a movement to kind of push funeral directors to think more openly about providing services that their customers actually wanted and needed, as opposed to kind of packaging up a kind of gold, silver and bronze package and assuming that's going to work for everyone.

On a much smaller micro level, this makes me so happy. Our shop in East Sheen is on the corner on the Upper Richmond Road. It's all glass, it's full of light. We have our kind of daily branding on the outside. All of the language on the window is, "Come in. Come and have a chat. Come and ask us questions. We're here for you at any time," and people do that, and that's great. Someone popped in yesterday, who lives in Barnes just around the corner, and said that she'd noticed that her local funeral director that has had these sort of blinds up for sort of 35 years, in the last few months has taken the blinds down, and I'm like, "That is 100% a victory." Just that tiny act of like maybe we don't have to hide what happens in here, maybe we could let people see in, and make this experience kind of less nervy and scary when the time comes.

Lorraine:

I think that was the impression that I got when looking at the Poppy's Funeral was exactly that, that it was something different. There was a transparency about it that I had never seen. We all, at some point in our life, have to consider what happens either to us or to our family around about death and what that might look like, and I think it brought a comfort and a clarity that I hadn't seen when thinking about it in other areas. I guess that's it. It sounds like you're making such an impact with Poppy's Funeral certainly in London, but actually from an industry perspective. It's that nudges, isn't it? Do you think that there could be a ripple effect with that? Obviously, you've spoken about you've seen that impact in other local funeral directors, but do you think that, as an industry as a whole, Poppy's Funeral is the model that is hopefully going to be followed in the future?

Poppy:

Yeah, definitely. Definitely. So we started in 2012. There were a few funeral directors doing things differently, going back to the sort of late '80s, early '90s, and they're all brilliant, and they're trailblazers in their own way. I don't think they ever were able to have that kind of wider impact on the mainstream, and I don't think they were looking for that.

I think what we have been able to start to do, and other businesses have set up in our wake around the UK and I'm thrilled about it, is we've started to say this isn't about, as I said earlier, being on a fringe. This isn't about kind of doing anything alternative. This is about questioning the norms.

We have this thing at Poppy's, which is like the norm is not normal. The way we're doing things is not normal, and you just described it yourself. You come to our website, and I think what I saw in your face is a sense of like, "Oh, why are we doing it this way? Now I see it in this new way. Why I've been putting up with that?"

I think that's the kind of pressure we're trying to assert. I can be critical of the sector, and I have been critical of the sector, and I will continue to be critical. We're consciously not part of any of the trade associations because we want to kind of be able to have that critical voice, be a critical friend. But we do want to be a friend. We do want these businesses to succeed and progress. They're full of great people coming to work for all the right reasons.

I think it's a matter of just challenging assumptions about the past and having a more customer-focused approach, which isn't hard, but it does take... You do have to lay some things down, and I think that's what the sector will struggle with is letting go of some old ways of doing things.

Lorraine:

Love that. I think slightly off on a tangent, but in my sort of day-to-day role, I work a lot with financial services, and there's a real shift there that's going on through the sector around about looking at this from the customer's point of view. I think you've hit the nail on the head, that actually, again, that shift in focus and that shift in approach, really makes for a much more better experience.
That makes for a better experience even for me, if I was going to be the deceased person, actually knowing that that's there and that that's available and some of those decisions can be taken in a very thoughtful and sustainable way.

Poppy:

Yeah. The funeral sector is full of people doing work that nobody knows about behind closed doors, and sometimes getting it wrong, and then there's like no one to tell. It's just full of kind of secrets, and it's such a shame because it's such honourable work.

So I think it is about the customers, but I think putting the customer at the centre of the experience then pays off hugely for the people working in the sector who get to lie in bed at night thinking like, "I'm very, very proud of what I do and people care about what I do and it matters." I think that it's just a, yeah, hugely virtuous circle.

Lorraine:

Such a beautiful way to put it. Can I just pause slightly and talk about sort of sustainability? Because, again, on these podcasts we often have guests around about sort of the transition to net-zero, both for their business and for themselves individually.

I know from a business point of view, Poppy's Funeral, so many more options that I have seen around about things like choice of coffin, for example, choice of process following death, whether it's a natural burial. Can you talk me through a little round about the concept of sustainability, how it's been embedded into Poppy's and also how that kind of flows through into the provision of the services for your clients?

Poppy:

Yeah, yeah. And I think it's really key. I think of it there is the sort of way we run as a business, and then there's kind of what we offer and how we can help shape there. So in terms of the customer's experience, there are some really, really obvious things that most people maybe haven't thought about, like embalming is one. So embalming is something that funeral directors push quite hard. It is exchanging a lot of the natural fluids in the body for a solution that is a mixture of kind of formaldehyde and some other chemicals and a pink dye. The purpose of embalming is to slow down the rate of decomposition in the body.

I think there's some huge confusion in the public about why you would embalm. The way it is sold by funeral directors is often if you want to see your dead person, we recommend they're embalmed. So I think there is a misunderstanding from the public's point of view because it's not explained. But that's because to see your dead person not embalmed would be somehow scary or shocking or we've seen too much TV as well. It's given us a lot of unhelpful images.

The reason why funeral directors are pushing embalming so hard is actually because of how they work. The common model for a funeral director is that you will have a kind of hub mortuary where the dead are cared for, and then you will have separate shops dotted all over the high street. So if you want to spend time with the person who's died, that person will need to be driven from the hub to the shop where there won't be any refrigeration or there's unlikely to be refrigeration.

So funeral directors want you to embalm your person if you might see them because they're going to be having to sort of drive them around unrefrigerated, which I think is a problem that needs to be solved within the sector. It's not something that customers should have to kind of accept and pay for. So there's the fact that there's a cost associated to it.

But the much bigger thing is it's formaldehyde. It's a nasty substance. It's not great for the embalmer. It's a very, very, very invasive process for the dead person. There aren't official statistics, but based on sort of BBC reports or research we've done, we think about 40% of people are being embalmed, and at Poppy's we embalm less than 1%. But we offer embalming. It's not that we don't offer embalming. It's that the way we are set up means that we don't have to do that. That comes down to, there's two things. One is that when you come and visit your person, you do it in our beautiful burial chapel, which is where our refrigeration also is. So there's no need to do anything with the people who've died.

The second thing is just information. It's explaining to people what death is, what death looks like, that there's nothing to be afraid of. I think we have this, because most of us or many of us haven't seen a person who's died, we build up a huge terror around that experience. Whereas if you break that down and say, "For most people, the person who's died looks the way they looked last week because they were dying, and so they haven't changed dramatically." So I'm sorry to go off on a tangent, but that's such a huge one that people don't know anything about.

Lorraine:

And I saw that. Again, again, there was this absolute sort of air of transparency on your website and on the information that you provide. I think there was one page that you had around about if you want to keep your deceased person at home, you absolutely can. This is how it would work best. This is what the effects would look like. You might see blood moving downwards, and so there would be the bruising at the bottom, and it just took away the unknown. It also opened up opportunities. I didn't know that you could do that, and I didn't know that actually it sounds fairly simple-

Poppy:

Totally.

Lorraine:

... in the nicest way. Keep the room cool. You gave such good, really practical advice that I had never really considered, and it was just, in a very strange sense, such an empowering article to read.

Poppy:

Good.

Lorraine:

So no, I don't think you're going off on a tangent. I think it is at the heart of the difference that you seem to be presenting to the market, compared to what is a very traditional service provider.

Poppy:

Maybe I'll talk a little bit about the other ways that we present things for clients.

Lorraine:

Yeah, please.

Poppy:

So really obvious things like there are loads of green products out there. I think there's been a sense in the past of funeral directors not really liking working with new products and then pricing them in a somewhat unaffordable way. For us, it's really important that we have affordable green choices. So we have a kind of really lovely simple cardboard coffin that is one of the most affordable things that we offer that is gorgeous. It means children can decorate the coffin. It means you can just lay a flag or a piece of material over it. It's really light to carry. There are stunning willow coffins that are grown and woven in Somerset so you can do that all from the UK. In fact, you can go down there and help weave the coffin yourself if you want to, which is wonderful. Flowers. We work with the sort of traditional florist because we have customers that want very sort of traditional like the "Dad" in carnations and that's fine. But we also work with another florist who grows everything in her own garden, doesn't use Oasis.

I think a really interesting thing about our business, and I'm sure it's true for lots of other businesses, too, and it comes back to that thing about not wanting to brand ourselves as the green funeral director or the alternative funeral director, is we believe these choices can and should be mainstream choices, and we want our clients to feel really welcome to locate themselves.

That means we're not going to say, "You can't have this, you can't have that." We're going to just do our best to say, "Did you know you could?" And let them then go from there. So it's very normal for us to have a client who does want the sort of classic Daimler hearse and does want the three limousines and maybe wants their person embalmed for specific reasons, but then will choose the willow coffin or will choose the no Oasis flowers. Similarly, we have clients who come to us with sustainability at the forefront in their mind, saying, "I want to do this as lightly as possible on the planet, and I want all my choices to be guided by that."

So I say that because I sort of want to make the point that, particularly perhaps in grief when people haven't planned ahead, I don't think it's reasonable to lecture people on the kind of moral choices they make at this time. Lots of those choices will be dictated by sort of culture and religion, too. Our job is to endlessly kind of provide opportunities when the door is open to that to help people make those positive choices kind of as and when they feel able to do that. Also in the belief that, next time, they'll have even more information about how to do it and sort of how to do it positively.

On the other side, so that in terms of our business, we have an electric collections vehicle, so that's lovely. The vehicle that comes to collect people who've died traditionally in the sector would be a kind of diesel van, and it would be black, and it would say Private Ambulance. Ours is this lovely lilac electric collection vehicle with our illustrations on the front.

We do lots of really tiny things. We collect water in a water bath from the cemetery roof to wash our vehicles. We just had our Culture Day this week. We go and use a female-run charitable space. So we're like a lot of businesses from the kind of very top to the very bottom, and we became a B Corp as well this year.

Lorraine:

I was going to say I think you've got your B Corp Certification.

Poppy:

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's been an amazing process. I really admire anyone who makes it through because it's not something you strap to the side. It's not easy, and I've been reflecting a lot, too. One of the things I'm particularly proud of is how we went through it. It was run by someone in our team called Sarah, who worked on the front line. She was the person kind of picking up the phones from grieving people. She came to me a number of years ago and said, "I think we should do this." I'd heard of B Corp, but I was more than a bit nervous about the process and kind of whether we were at a scale and size to be able to do it.

It's been really interesting. Sarah has been the champion in the team, and I think there's been something about having someone embedded in the operational team in charge of the process that has made this a company-wide experience. It's not something that a few people in management have like shuffled into a room and kind of figured out themselves. It's something that has kind of happened from the ground up. And I'm thinking I'm really fascinated. I'd be fascinated to kind of have a conversation with one of the huge corporates who've gone through the process to better understand like, "What would it be like for you? That must be so hard."

Lorraine:

Yeah, and I think that's what we see from our clients so I think there's lots of interest in different sectors around about B Corp Certification. It's an onerous process. I think well done and congratulations on going through that, but I do think that you need that rigour in that process for the B Corp certification to hold you to the standards that it is representing to the market. And, again, really interesting to hear who led it and how that impacted because I think that's absolutely key. Sometimes that's the case, sometimes that's not necessarily the case.

But having that, again, that ripple effect through the organisation and then being able to kind of proudly present yourself as a B Corp really does distinguish you sort of in the market, and I think it's much more well known from the general sort of retail consumer perspective as well.

We've spoken a lot about Poppy's and the business. We've got a couple of questions that we always try to ask guests. From your own personal perspective, do you have your own personal commitment over the next sort of 12 months around about sustainability or transition to net-zero carbon sort of economies, or anything that you're doing in your sort of private life to live a little bit more sustainably?

Poppy:

Well, I think it happened to me. I've got three young children, and so my life has just totally shrunk. I was thinking about this, that I don't really fly anywhere. I don't often drive places. Being honest, I think it's happened to me, rather than it's happened sort of consciously.

But I think you either respond to that as a kind of like, argh, and I can't wait for this to be over so I can get back to my old ways of doing things. I think the combination of the pandemic and sort of particularly as a funeral director during the pandemic, being right on the front line and seeing some stuff that I hadn't seen before, having these small children and maybe being an age, I'm 41, I'm sort of approaching midlife, I wonder if this is the beginning anyway of a different way of living and feeling kind of really good about that.

So cute things like particularly with young children, it's such a massive opportunity to have the conversation together, that they're learning stuff at school, they're teaching me stuff. But things like all the little things, like going off as a family to our local fruit market to make that trip meaningful and bring stuff back we might cook together. Or one of my kids is responsible for like gathering up all that plastic you can't recycle and sort of putting it in a special bag, and then we go on a little family trip down to Sainsbury's to dispose of it. We cycle everywhere. We live in Tooting in Southwest London, which is a really, really fantastic case of community that already is quite progressive when it comes to sustainability. So I think actually it's about taking the way we're living now and thinking, when we don't need to live like this anymore, perhaps we might choose to because it's better.

Lorraine:

Yeah, I completely understand that. Also, I think that's really helpful in terms of the children understanding that each of these small actions actually has a bigger effect. Because I think for them they're growing up and they're hearing, certainly in school, around about climate crisis, and it's quite fearful sort of language sometimes for them. I think linking that to the mitigating actions can really kind of calm that as well and show that there is hope, and there's progress and all that good stuff. What a great example.

Okay, we are coming sort of up to the end of time, but listen, if you could provide listeners with one action to take away, what would it be? You've got the absolute sort of carte blanche in front of you.

Poppy:

It would be to take the opportunity today to have one conversation around death and dying because it is a taboo, and it doesn't make any sense that it's a taboo because it's going to happen to absolutely every one of us. The more we bury our heads in the sand, the less control and power we have to shape our experience when our time comes.

When I say a conversation, it simply could be, look, the trees are turning. I noticed it the week before last. It was a really hot day, and it felt like summer still. Then I've cycled past this tree, and it was just completely brown. The leaves were all falling. I then went, picked up a tonne of conkers. Or it could be a conversation with someone in your household to say like, "What would you want for your funeral? What songs would you want? If we had to pick a song what song would you want?"

So it doesn't have to be a massive conversation, but I'm sad to see so many people getting to the point of when someone dies and being so at sea and just having no knowledge, no way to articulate what's happening. I wish we were better at having these conversations when we had the time to have them.

Lorraine:

Poppy, this has been the most interesting and insightful conversation. Honestly, it has given me so many things to think about so genuinely thank you so much. I could genuinely talk to you about Poppy's Funeral for days and days and days. I am delighted to hear what you're doing. Wish you all the success, and I will be following you from now on. So thank you so much.

Poppy:

Thank you so much for having me. I loved it.

Lorraine:

Thank you for listening to this episode of ESG Matters at Ashurst. I hope you found the episode engaging and inspiring. To subscribe for future episodes of Game Changers and Transition Makers, and to hear previous episodes, click on the link in the show notes, or search for ESG Matters at Ashurst on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. While you're there, please feel free to leave a rating or a review, and finally, to learn more about all Ashurst podcasts, visit ashurst.com/podcasts. In the meantime, thanks again for listening and goodbye for now.

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