We were founded in 2016 because the funeral industry was broken.
Four corporations own thirty percent of US funeral homes and have raised prices roughly seventy percent above inflation since 1990. The industry is dominated by upsell scripts, opaque pricing, and the assumption that grieving families will not comparison-shop in the first forty-eight hours after a death.
That assumption is correct. The result is a generation of customers who feel taken advantage of at the lowest moment of their lives.
Lena's path here
Marker's founder, Lena Park, has a master's in mortuary science from Mt. Hood Community College and seven years of experience at a corporate firm in Portland. She worked there from 2007 to 2014. By the end of that period she could no longer hand a grieving family a price sheet for a hardwood casket without flinching.
She walked out one Tuesday in October 2014. She spent two years working as an independent funeral director — a freelance arrangement that kept her bills paid while she figured out what kind of firm she wanted to start. She opened Marker on January 8, 2016, in a converted printing-house ground floor on Western Avenue.
What Marker promises
Three things, in order:
- Pricing on the website. Every service. Updated when prices change. Same number on the website as on the contract you sign.
- No upsells. No commission. Our directors are paid a salary, not a percentage. The hardwood-casket conversation does not happen at Marker because the financial incentive that drives it does not exist.
- What we don't do, said plainly. We don't embalm. We don't do multi-day services with rented limousines. We don't have our own crematory. Most firms hide what they don't offer; we list it.
What Marker does well
- Direct cremation, end-to-end, in seven to ten days.
- Small, modern memorial services in our chapel or your home.
- Honest cost conversations, both before and after the death.
The team
Five people work at Marker. We are listed by name because that's how we like it, and because at a firm this size there is nowhere to hide.
- Lena Park, founder and director (since 2016)
- Drew Vasquez, director (since 2018)
- Mira Tanaka, director and family-services coordinator (since 2019)
- Kenji Watanabe, operations and logistics (since 2020)
- Susannah Brock, family aftercare (since 2022)
We've buried fourteen hundred people since 2016. We've never charged a markup we couldn't explain in one sentence.
What's next
Marker has stayed deliberately small. We don't want to be a chain. The next ten years are going to look like the last ten — same chapel, same prices on the website, same five-person team or a sixth or seventh if we need them. If you're shopping for the firm that will be there when your kids' kids need it, we are probably the wrong choice. If you're shopping for the firm that will be there in seven days with the certificate in hand and an honest bill, we are very likely the right one.