A brand new service has been launched for the funeral stationery market, providing an online portal for customers to create and order personalised printed products.
Order of Service, which specialises in funeral memorial cards, is the brainchild of Suffolk-based printing firm Healeys. Focusing on combining high quality professional printing with the speed and ease of ordering online, Healeys managing director Philip Dodd said the aim of Order of Service was to provide bereaved families with more choice and convenience.
Dodd said: “The death of a loved one is a difficult time for anyone. When you are involved in organising a funeral, there is so much to think about while you are trying to come to terms with your own grief. We saw an opportunity to improve what was currently on offer with regards to funeral stationery, both in terms of the quality of product and the service we provide.
“Traditionally, things like order of service booklets, announcement cards and books of condolence are off-the-shelf products you buy from a store. You are limited in the amount of choice you have. If you want to order a customised product, you might be talking turnaround times of a week or two from most print suppliers. That might mean they don’t arrive in time for the service.”
He added: “We wanted to offer a way to get premium quality, personalised funeral stationery without any of the hassle. The beauty of the internet is that you can hand control back to the customer. With our online text and photo editor, customers can pick a product and a template design, and then customise it to their tastes – adding the name of the deceased, photographs of their loved ones, details of the service and so on. It is all very simple and straightforward to use and typically takes just a few minutes to complete.
“Then it is over to us, and we guarantee rapid delivery by courier – next day if you order by 12pm. The last thing anyone organising a funeral wants is to be worrying about whether the order of service cards arrive on time.”
Order of Service currently offers four products – funeral service booklets, announcement cards, thank you cards and books of condolence. In addition, it ships all orders in a keepsake box – something it describes as “a small gift to our customers” – which can also be purchased separately.
While all printed products can be customised by means of editing template designs online, the company also offers an ‘Upload Your Own’ facility for funeral service cards. For people who would like to create their own order of service from scratch, they can upload their design as a PDF via the web portal and have it printed and delivered.
Healeys was founded in 1982 and has gone on to specialise in premium quality bespoke printing services for businesses, charitable organisations, the education sector and more. The company is committed to sustainable business practices and is one of only 10 printers in the UK accredited as carbon neutral by the World Land Trust. It is also a member of the Woodland Trust’s Carbon Capture programme and is certified by the Forestry Stewardship Council (FSC) for sourcing all of its paper products from well-managed, sustainable forests.
Dodd added that while speed and convenience is key to the Order of Service proposition, there was no question of that coming at the expense of quality. “I’ve been in the printing game almost 40 years and quality has always been an obsession of mine if I’m honest. We only print on premium 350gsm board, we only use the very best, cutting edge reproduction techniques to ensure the sharpest images and most vivid colours – the last thing you want on a funeral service booklet is a blurry photo of the deceased.
“We are a small business and our main attribute is the care and attention we are able to put into our products and our services. Over the years, we have done a lot of printing for funerals and we understand that people want the very best, they want a quality of product befitting the occasion. You only get one chance to say goodbye to a loved one, after all. We’ve drawn on that experience and, through the online editing tool, realised we can offer something a little different with Order of Service.”
