Retailers discover potential market in pet memorials

Garden centres are becoming hotbeds for pet memorials and coffin sales as a way to keep business going in the recession.
Watford-based Initial Monogram Co has sold house numbers through 250 garden centres for 17 years but now it is launching a range of pet and human memorial letters and numbers.

Farewell My Pet manager Jay King said September 2008's launch of pet memorials into garden centres had been going better than expected, with thirty independents now featuring the memorials. "It's a growing market. Garden centres are always looking for new products. You don't need to stock ours - you just need a display stand and we deliver to the customer or the centre."

The Suffolk-based company is a trading subsidiary of Bradnam Joinery, which makes coffins and caskets for humans and animals.