BIZ PAYS TRIBUTE

Franchise helps owners grieve & honor their beloved pets.

From L to R: James M. Curran, President, Wilbert Funeral Services; Randi Binstock, Chief Operating Officer, Paws & Remember LLC; and Mark Minnick President of Minnick Enterprises, a Fort Wayne, Ind., licensee of Wilbert Funeral Services. See sidebar for info.

While society has prescribed structures for dealing with death on the human side, the same can’t be said for pet owners, who might not know where to turn, what they need to do or how best to bring closure to the grief that follows after the death of their pet.

Providing pet owners with appropriate solutions to recover from their loss is the goal of Paws & Remember, a service provided through veterinary clinics, pet hospitals, humane societies and others. Paws & Remember offers full-service memorialization for pets of all kinds by offering cremation and grief support through a wide variety of memorial products such as urns and other keepsakes to help pet owners and their families express their feelings, reflect, celebrate and pay tribute to their pets’ lives.

Paws & Remember offers a full selection of beautiful and unique memorialization packages tailored to pets such as dogs, cats, large and small animals, birds, exotic species and more. Packages are personalized and include memorial items such as handcrafted urns, photo frames, outdoor garden stones, wind chimes, jewelry, ornaments and other crystal items.

Founded in 1997, Paws & Remember recently launched a franchising program and is projected to have 12 franchised locations in operation within the next 12 months. It currently operates two locations in Indianapolis and Fort Wayne, Ind. Long-range projections call for 40 franchises within three years.

There are numerous suppliers in the respective industries of pet cremation and pet memorial products but what makes Paws & Remember unique in the $36 billion pet industry is that it is the only franchised company with a national growth strategy that offers a combined package of death care and memorialization services for pets along with training and education to assist veterinary clinics and other pet specialists in helping their clients at times of pet loss.

What does it all mean? Pet owners are given easy and affordable options to help them cope with their loss and honor their pets in a meaningful way and veterinarians and other providers have a simplified method to aid theircustomers during difficult times.

“It really connects the dots in a marketplace where the dots are not connected,” said Paws & Remember COO Randi Binstock.

Judging from veterinarian surveys and pet-owner focus groups, Paws & Remember’s services are sorely needed. According to members of the Indiana Veterinary Medical Association who were recently polled, the majority of respondents (44 percent) said that only “some” of their clients are aware of the options that are available.

At the same time, the results from a focus group of pet owners found that those individuals believed that when a pet dies it is a subject that most veterinarians are not comfortable dealing with. Participants indicated that their vets do not know what to do or what to say. But keep in mind that the death of a pet can even be stressful to professionals.

“That’s understandable because of the emotional and practical commitment the vet’s office plays in making the decision about a pet’s life in cases where the animal might be very sick.” Binstock said. “The vet's office feels its own sense of loss, two.

Paws & Remember is a partnership between Wilbert Funeral Services, the leading single-source supplier of burial vaults and cremation-related products and services to North American funeral homes, and Minnick Enterprises, headed by Mark Minnick, a Fort Wayne, Ind., licensee of Wilbert Funeral Services.

Minnick launched Paws & Remember in 1997 and spent nine years perfecting the system before launching the franchising program in partnership with Wilbert Funeral Services in 2006. Binstock joined the company as COO after working for Arthur Andersen, GE Capital and Baxter Healthcare.

Franchising of the Paws & Remember concept couldn’t come at a more opportune time. The pet industry continues to grow. According to the American Pet Products Manufacturer’s Association (APPMA), about 63 percent of U.S. households own at least one pet and there are 164 million dogs and cats in the United States.

“Pets are much more integrated into today’s society than even 10 or 15 years ago,” said Binstock, who noted that some hotels today even offer special room-service menus for dogs and cats. “The whole market is evolving.” •

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