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Cold Spring Memorial Group announces changes to
become market-focused company

Jan 11, 2005

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COLD SPRING, Minn. - The Cold Spring Memorial Group, the largest provider of granite and bronze memorial products in the United States, has announced new executive appointments and sales regions designed to make it a more market- and customer-focused company.

Three sales regions - East, Central and West - have been created. They are respectively headed by newly named sales directors John Mueller, Vaughn Giwa and Johnny Phillips. The Central market, covering the Midwest, is Cold Spring's core memorial market. The East and West markets represent those in which Cold Spring Granite will develop new cemetery and monument company customers.

Mueller and Phillips have been with the Memorial Group for a total of 44 years and know every aspect of the Memorial Group business. Giwa (pronounced Guy-wah) and newly named Vice President of Sales and Marketing of the Memorial Group Philip C. Weigel are veteran executives of the Alderwoods (formerly Loewen) Group, the second-largest operator of funeral homes and cemeteries in North America. Weigel was formerly Alderwoods' group vice president of sales. He was a member of Alderwoods' Consumer Products Group which oversaw launching of new products and revenue-boosting sales and marketing programs.

"While our past emphasis may have been on selling memorial product lines, we are now positioning ourselves to develop options, designs and services based on various regional preferences and market needs," says Jeff Rathjen, vice president and general manager of the Cold Spring Memorial Group. "Everything we do from now will be geared toward the personalization of memorials and responding to the rapidly changing personalization needs of consumers."

To further strengthen customer support, Mark "Mac" Cariveau was named director of customer care, a newly created position. Cariveau formerly was director of customer support services for Bankers Systems, a St. Cloud, Minn.-based supplier of compliance information solutions to financial institutions. Jim Hemmesch was also named product inventory manager and inside sales representative for Royal Melrose Granites, the monument division of the Memorial Group. Hemmesch has 15 years of Royal Melrose Granites sales and customer service management experience.

These changes coincide with three major trends impacting the memorialization industry that will force funeral homes, cemeteries and monument companies to change the way they do business and market their products and services.

• No longer limited to strict religious themes or flat or upright rectangular dimensions, memorials are becoming highly personalized with different colors, shapes and etched images. Today's customized memorials are increasingly shaped like motorcycles, cars, musical instruments, animals, gardening tools and sports paraphernalia, reflecting the diversified lifestyles of baby boomers.
• Cremation is changing the landscape of memorialization. According to the Cremation Association of North America, 28.63 percent of deaths in 2003 ended in cremation. That figure is expected to reach nearly 50 percent by 2025. Thereafter, cremation will surpass the number of traditional burials when annual deaths will have increased to more than 3.2 million compared to around 2.4 million in 2003.
• The ethnic diversification of the U.S. market continues to deepen. Various ethnic groups with distinct memorial tastes are growing at a high rate, behooving memorialization companies to market to them differently.

"We've reached a new threshold where memorial products and services will be marketed according to preferences that will be defined by income levels, occupations, ethnicity, spiritual beliefs, urban and rural locations, gender, and a host of other factors," Rathjen says. "The latest changes underscore our effort to become totally customer-focused to assist our customers, cemeteries and monument companies, and to develop memorials that will suit the diversified tastes of the American consumer, while supporting the business goals of our customers."

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The Cold Spring Memorial Group is a division of the Cold Spring Granite Co., the largest manufacturer of bronze and granite architectural building and memorial products in North America, including national memorials, granite slabs and design features for buildings, flush and upright memorials, and community and private mausoleums.