Want to be buried in a shiny box made of zombie-proof 12-gauge stainless steel with a vegan leather interior and optional seatbelt in case the thing careens off into space following some unanticipated catastrophic event?

Titan Casket has just the thing.

It’s called the Hypercasket. Yes, it looks a bit like Tesla’s Cybertruck (though Titan says the similarities are “for creative expression only and do not imply association” with Tesla). Retailing for $9,999.99, it’s an impressively crafted “death vessel of the future,” in the words of Titan’s creative director, Elan Gale. 

Also read: Titan Casket interviews celebs in caskets for new talk show ‘Grave Conversations’

Gale and company have been disrupting the funeral industry for a while with content that’s unusual for the category, including the entertaining “Grave Conversations” video series and a serious-not-serious attempt (with agency Maximum Effort) to “bury” daylight saving time. The Hypercasket applies this category-defying approach to the product, which Gale told Ad Age is long overdue for fresh thinking.

We chatted with Gale about the Hypercasket’s design, the connection between humor and death, and making consumers more comfortable with a topic that’s anything but.

 
Ad Age: You’ve been doing a lot of fun things lately. How did this project come about?

Elan Gale: This was a conversation we were having internally about design and the idea that every time you see a casket, it looks more or less the same, especially traditional American caskets. What we’re trying to do, holistically, is let people know there are options. There’s lots of caskets you can buy. You should take the time to find the one that’s right for you—whether you need steel protection in the event of a zombie apocalypse, or just because you’d like to save some money during a time of grief and not get raked over the coals for every dime in your pocket.

We challenged ourselves to say: Is there something we’re not considering? Is there a new shape? Is there a new form? How do you make a casket exciting? The Hypercasket is about finding the death vessel that speaks to your personality. I think just the act of looking at it will send people down a course where they may find a casket that better suits their lifestyle and their deathstyle.

So it’s about getting hyperbolic as an invitation for folks to come into your universe?

Absolutely. With the added bonus of—this is a real product that people can actually be buried in. There’s a fun sarcophagus feel that I think people can really lean into. If you’re the kind of person who cares about your way of saying goodbye, there’s an impersonality to the ways we approach these moments now. I think there are ways to just make it a little less scary. There’s a whimsy that I think is missing from the choices available to you after death.

It’s one thing to make fun content, it’s another to design and manufacture a new product. How much is Titan invested in doing this kind of heavy lifting?

They’re more into it than any other company I’ve worked with. There’s a tremendous “Let’s find a way to make the idea work” attitude. There’s a real enthusiasm for change. That enthusiasm has been about messaging for a while. Now we’re talking more about product.

You need emotion to make any advertising work, and few things are as emotional as death. It seems like you’re redirecting that emotion toward something positive, in a space where people bring a lot of baggage to it. Done right, there’s probably a lot of blank space in the category to make an impression.

I hope so. My background is in television. I’m newer to advertising, so I have a lot to learn. But it is about creating a feeling. With Hypercasket, the way people generally feel is, “Oh, that’s kind of funny.” “That’s a little silly.” “Oh, that’s ridiculous.” I don’t know if those are the right feelings to have, but I know that having a feeling is great. And I know that when you see a traditional casket, you’re very unlikely to have a new feeling because you’ve seen it a million times.

In this way, it’s similar to the Cybertruck.

Yeah, I mean, obviously we took inspiration from the DeLorean and the 2025 Subaru Forester. [laughs] No, the Cybertruck feels to me like a very intentional leap outside of traditional form factors. That is certainly exciting. There’s certainly inspiration drawn from a simple lack of desire to conform to a shape that is obvious.

This is kicking off a new era of design for us. We’re going to continue to make traditional standard and custom caskets, but at the same time, we’re rethinking what the inside an urn could look like and how it functions. Rethinking what the outside of an urn could look like. I’m fascinated by things that don’t look like the things they are. I think the Cybertruck, as an example, did a good job of getting people to redirect their attention simply because it looked tremendously different.

There’s also that tension of people ridiculing it, even as it stands out and makes an impression.

The way our world works right now—and I’m not sure I understand it very much—is if you make anything particularly different, people will form a strong opinion about it one way or the other. The truth is, whether you like the Hypercasket or don’t like the Hypercasket, I think both of those make sense. If you have a negative feeling toward it, I totally get that. If you have a positive feeling toward it, I get that, too.

I’m not the arbiter of what’s good and normal. If you like it, you should feel free to die in one. Well, die and then get in one, I think is probably the better order. If you don’t, I think that’s great. But you should know there are options. Find the one you like.

Giving people an opportunity to feel anything, whether it’s ridicule or joy or whatever, is certainly a change for the category.

I think a lot of people want permission to not be as sad as they are. A lot of people turn to humor and the comfort of humor in sad moments. If that doesn’t appeal to you, it’s really easy to disregard. But if it does, it’s nice to have a sense of community in that and the idea that it’s OK to laugh if you feel like it. 

Also read: Titan Casket wants to ‘bury’ daylight saving time

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