How Farewill is changing the way the world deals with death
One week he was traveling around the country for meetings. Next thing I knew, I was giving a speech about how much my dad meant to me. Really the only thing I remember from the funeral was being awash with emotion. I couldn’t think straight. And I can’t imagine that my mom, who had to deal with everything associated with the bereavement and estate planning process, could have been either.
We are surprisingly bad at planning for the deaths of ourselves and our loved ones. And we often put off planning for the inevitable until it’s too late. Over 60% of adults in the UK don’t have a will and less than 1% have a lasting power of attorney.
The death services industry doesn’t make dealing with the bereavement process any easier. On top of having to confront the intense, emotional, and raw aspects associated with death, it is often prohibitively expensive, unwelcoming, and confusing.
Every stage of the process is riddled with complications, little information about what to do, how much to pay, and whether the services provided are any good at all.
For those who decided to get a will or are faced with probate, they often turn to family, friends, or the internet to find a local solicitor to write their will or handle probate. And often they are getting charged hundreds of pounds more than they should for a will or thousands of pounds more than they should for probate.
Technology has touched virtually every aspect of our lives, but it has yet to impact the bereavement process. So when we came across Farewill, the UK-based digital wills, probate, and cremation provider that is digitizing death services, it struck a chord. They are well-positioned to disrupt death services companies that represent the three “O’s” — old, offline, and overleveraged (and often, PE-backed) — in an industry where consumers have long deserved a better experience for something that’s so important to them and their loved ones.
Farewill has entered a market where only 2% of the experience is digital and has brought customers online, offering a simple, tasteful, and empathetic experience for writing a will, handling wealth transfer in probate, or organizing a cremation, and providing a significantly less expensive set of options. All of which has centered around something very human: how they can help people deal with death — with dignity.
Farewill has developed a very elegant consumer brand to address this most difficult of subjects, helping customers through these universal life events. Death is not only the hardest emotional challenge we face, but it’s also the biggest financial event of a lifetime. Over the next 10 years, £1 trillion will be inherited in the UK alone, yet most consumers and their wealth advisors are ill-equipped with the tools and knowledge to deal with death and bridge the gap between generations.
Farewill has brought dealing with death into the modern age with an end-to-end process, and they’ve done so in a way that allows people to confront death in a way that positively impacts them and their loved ones, both emotionally and financially. They offer customers the ability to write a legally binding will — online — in 15 minutes, offer fixed price probate that is 5x less expensive than a solicitor, and provide a simple, affordable direct cremation service. This translates to an average of £5,000 in savings for their customers through their straightforward and fair prices, which is even more meaningful when the average spend on a funeral varies little by household income, causing 1 in 8 families to go into debt to cover a funeral in a given year.
In a few short years, Farewill has become the UK’s leading death expert — they write 1 in every 10 wills, were voted UK’s best-rated death experts on Trustpilot, won National Will Writing Firm of the Year in 2019 at the British Wills and Probate awards, and recently won the Hottest Social Innovation at The Europas. They’ve grown over 10x in the past year and have forged partnerships with leading UK financial providers like Legal & General and Aviva. Through partnerships with charities, Farewill customers have pledged over £265 million to support their legacy campaigns.
They have built their user experience and team culture around something so very human, yet something that’s so difficult for many tech companies to capture — empathy. Empathy is core to Farewill’s DNA and it’s their unique differentiator. They understand their job is to provide a uniquely special service to their customers and guide them through exceptionally tough emotional territory. This focus on empathy has brought out the best in Farewill’s customers. Over 80% of their wills customers leave personal notes when writing a will like this one below.
Farewill’s success stems largely from their ability to construct a team that deeply cares about the mission of creating a simple, fast, and fair way to deal with death. The team that Co-Founder Dan Garrett has constructed harkens back to the legendary football teams like Manchester United in the 1990s, stacked across the board with highly talented, capable players who would all be stars in their own right on any other team. Farewill’s total football approach has enabled them to build a culture that combines the best of an analytical, data-driven company with a very human touch that allows them to serve consumers in a way that their incumbents cannot.
Dan has a great background to build a category-defining, brand-led company. He’s a polymath who has managed to tie together his experiences — which started with a Masters in Engineering from Oxford and a Double Masters in Design from the RCA to designing cars for McLaren, publishing papers on surface mathematics, creating fashion work displayed in MoMa, the V&A, and the Design Museum to spending countless hours learning how to write wills and direct funerals. Most importantly, he has an unmatched passion to serve customers at one of the most emotionally jarring times of their lives and build a team of people whose empathy can match the life events facing their customers.
We are proud to partner with Dan, the entire Farewill team, and a stellar group of investors on their £20M fundraise today — Highland Europe, Augmentum FinTech, Keen Venture Partners, Kindred Capital, Saatchinvest, dmg ventures, JamJar, Tiny.vc, and the Founders of Transferwise and Zoopla, amongst others — to give everyone a better way to deal with death.
