Designer urns, ash diamonds, boutique mourning: Mourning in China goes lifestyle

Death is getting a makeover in China. Young entrepreneurs are transforming funeral products from somber necessities into objects of beauty, opening boutique-style stores in trendy shopping districts and selling ash diamonds alongside designer urns. A year ago, Wu Tong transformed her decade-long pet funeral business into one that serves humans, curating an eclectic collection of urns and keepsakes from around the world and meticulously arranging them onto the shelves of her online store. A designer’s journey from pet funerals to human memorial art “I believe beautiful things can help ease the pain of losing someone we love,” she tells Jing Daily. She entered the funeral industry in 2014 when searching for an urn for her aging dog. “I scoured all over Beijing and found none of the urns were attractive enough, and the way they were displayed was downright frightening," she says. A trip to India’s vibrant street markets sparked the idea of creating her own line of pet funeral urns. An architecture major, she designed the products herself and collaborated with a manufacturer. But years later, as the market grew crowded, she felt her creative edge dulling. She turned to human funeral products, finding them dated, melancholy, and homogeneous. She named her store Goodbye & Hello Studio, which resembles a home décor boutique more than a funeral product shop. Memorial objects come in a spectrum of hues, materials, and shapes: There’s a ceramic lily blossom, a postmodern-style crystal ball made from earth and salt, a classical oval, each artfully crafted to blend into everyday home settings. The cultural reframing of death Death is taboo in many cultures. In China the avoidance runs especially deep. The portrayal of death, morticians, and funerals as somber and macabre in literature and folklore has long shaped the Chinese psyche. Death carries a sense of ominousness, and even mentioning it at celebratory occasions, such as weddings or births, is believed to bring misfortune. In some regions steeped in superstitions, an entire family might be seen as “ritually polluted” after a death in the household. Residences built atop former crematoria sell at drastically reduced prices. The taboo surrounding death has long shaped the country's funeral trade. Funeral supply shops largely concentrate near hospitals or in suburbs, their narrow, decrepit aisles crammed with wreaths, burial garments, filial sashes, stacks of ghost money. In Mibeizhuang, a village in Hebei Province south of Beijing, over 20,000 residents live off the death economy’s industrial chain, from urns to crystal coffins. At its peak, the compact town housed around 500 funeral shops, churning out 90% of China’s funeral products, according to Chinese media reports. “Everyone is a unique existence when they are alive, but once they die, they are simply put into similarly dull and grim urns, which is pathetic,” Wu says. “The whole funeral business in China is about using these dreadful visual symbols to make you feel that the deceased has immediately crossed into another world, distant and inaccessible.” With her studio, she seeks to change the status quo by bringing warmth to death and funerary rituals. Boutique funerals: When mourning meets modern retail Gao Guqi, founder of the designer furniture brand FNJI, ventured into this niche market with a similar motive. After his parents died, he couldn’t find suitable urns for their remains. He also found modern funerals too focused on elaborate procedures and efficiency while neglecting emotion. In 2023, he created Greatroam, a funeral supply line that started online before opening a brick-and-mortar store in June 2024. The shop is located in Sanlitun, Beijing’s most vibrant destination, famous for its bars, nightlife, and trendy shopping. Amid the hustle and bustle and glowing neon signs, the store offers a quiet refuge. According to Zhao Ming, a co-founder, they chose Sanlitun over conventional locations near hospitals or funeral homes to make conversations about loss part of daily life, not apart from it. The two-story storefront features warm earthy tones designed to offer peace of mind. Urns and burial garments are the main offerings. Most urns come in muted wood and ivory hues, with pink versions for young girls and graffiti options for pets. Hanfu-inspired burial garments use silk, cotton, and other natural fabrics, featuring fret patterns symbolizing that life is a cycle and death is not the end. Other products range from food packages, such as raw salmon and organic milk, to miniature items like digital cameras. The store also houses spaces for mourning, including a “paradise post office” where people can write letters to their loved ones and then burn them in the censer to “mail” them. Greatroam also provides services including funeral design, mourning-hall decoration, and memoir writing. Designer urns, spirit tablets, and ash diamonds Although Greatroam founder Gao Guqi comes from a furniture design background rather than fashion retail, he has intentionally adopted the visual logic of fashion boutiques for his funeral supply store. Curated racks, warm spotlighting, coordinated color stories, and a showroom-style layout reframe funeral garments and urns as design objects rather than utilitarian necessities. This strategic shift in presentation has changed both consumer perception and behavior. Since adopting this boutique model, foot traffic at the Sanlitun store has reportedly increased from roughly 30 visitors a day to 50-100 on weekends, drawing not only families preparing for funerals but also passersby who enter out of aesthetic curiosity. Greatroam’s minimalist aesthetic with a neo-Chinese touch contrasts with Wu’s playful and colorful products. Yet, both share the same goal: transforming the funeral industry into one centered on beauty, memory, and life. Chinese consumers, especially younger generations, are approaching death with greater openness and intimacy. This shift has driven demand for thoughtfully designed urns, attire, and accessories. The best seller at Greatroam is a translucent spirit tablet made of crystal glass, which contains a silver capsule for cremated ashes, or hair, or other mementos. The rise of memory objects in Chinese households “A customer ordered this tablet and had the words ‘Across the worlds, my love endures’ engraved on it. With their permission, I shared a photo online and it became an instant hit. Many people came to buy one to place at home, which signals a change in mindset, since cremated ashes were traditionally buried underground in cemeteries,” Zhao tells Jing Daily. Ash diamonds are the best sellers at Wu’s shop. Through her funeral industry connections and networks at international expos, she became the sole China agent for an Austrian company that transforms cremated remains into gemstones. The diamonds are made from hair or cremated ashes from humans or pets, and then crafted onto necklaces or rings. Most consumers of these products are from the post-1990 generation, followed by those born in the 1970s and 1980s. Wu recalls a young mother who kept a small portion of her late mother’s ashes in a calla lily-shaped container — a collaboration with a Bulgarian company — and later set the lily atop a piano at her son’s first birthday party. “I was surprised and also comforted upon seeing the photos she sent me, because at that very moment, death is no longer taboo at a celebration of new life,” Wu says. A growing market amid China’s aging demographics China is aging, with its population falling for three consecutive years. Births reached 9.54 million in 2024, while deaths hit a record 10.93 million, resulting in a natural population growth rate of –0.99 per thousand. The 6.1 million marriages registered in the same year represented a 20.5% decline year-on-year and the lowest since 1980. Population Research, a journal, forecasts that annual deaths in China may peak at 19 million in 2061. The rising number of deaths is set to drive funeral industry growth and transformation. China’s funeral services market reached 310.2 billion RMB ($43.7 billion) in 2022.As more people move beyond silent grief and hasty farewells, players from across industries are entering this market. Documents, a perfume label backed by L’Oréal, collaborated with Greatroam for the 2024 Qingming Festival (also known as Tomb-Sweeping Day), launching a conch-shaped ceramic incense burner. With new designs and services, these entrepreneurs are reshaping China’s funeral industry. They are not just aestheticizing death and loss, but also bringing order and transparency to a market long plagued by false advertising and deceptive practice. Given the taboo surrounding death, few would purchase funeral items in advance. Hence most families end up buying them in crematoria where an urn could cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of yuan. “We usually had to pay for the overpriced ugly urns on the spot, so these memorial stores give us more choices, of beauty and of dignity,” a Xiaohongshu (also known as RedNote) user comments. IP theft and the battle for original design “For us, aesthetics is more of a means to an end, which is to change the industry to make it fairer and better,” says Zhao. However, their businesses face challenges. One pressing concern is intellectual property protection. Sun Xizhen, another co-founder of Greatroam, says competitors often come to their store to steal ideas and even their guest books. For Wu, seeing her designs copied and numerous homogeneous products appearing on the market was one of the reasons she shifted from pets to humans ones. Now she’s facing a similar problem: Some foreign funeral product brands she approached for collaboration rejected her over IP concerns in the Chinese market. Another challenge is profitability. For Wu, costs account for up to 80% of prices, leaving slim margins. She is also struggling to adjust to livestreaming and worries that limited visibility could threaten her business. Greatroam, despite faster growth, has so far only broken even. Yet as China’s demographic crisis deepens and younger consumers embrace new attitudes toward death, both entrepreneurs remain committed to transforming an industry long dominated by tradition and taboo.

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Designer urns, ash diamonds, boutique mourning: Mourning in China goes lifestyle