Making diamonds from human ashes | Big Think
ETERNEVA CLIENT: This is my mom, and the diamond was made from her ashes.
NARRATOR: This is a story about a radical death care company called Eterneva. With backing from Mark Cuban, Eterneva is turning people's lost loved ones into diamonds.
CLIENT: Wow! Welcome home, honey.
ADELLE ARCHER: The way people react when they hear about this, it was either like, "This is the most amazing and incredible idea I've ever heard," or like "I don't know, this is kind of weird."
NARRATOR: They believe that America's cultural response to loss is broken, leaving people without rituals to help them heal.
ADELLE: Grief is an experience we're all gonna go through. It's one of the most shared human experiences there is, and yet it's governed by just tradition and obligation. That's doing more harm than good. And so we have to overcome every obstacle because the cost of our mission not being seen out is too high.
PRODUCER: There's a slight lag. If I step on you at all, I apologize. I'm not trying to cut you off. There's just a little bit of a lag.
ADELLE: I'm literally fundraising right now, and all VCs do is cut you off, so I'm very used to it. This is one of our machines. This one is under pressure. So we are currently actively growing a diamond right now. At these stations...
NARRATOR: Adelle Archer is the co-founder and CEO of Eterneva, and she's on a mission to transform the way that we grieve. After completing her MBA, Adelle got the idea for Eterneva in 2015 after losing her good friend and mentor, Tracey.
ADELLE: When Tracey passed, she actually had her ashes split between three of us. And she was just like, "Hey, go do something meaningful that you think both of us would really like." So we started doing a ton of research. Everything felt really like trinket-y and cheap and transactional. And nothing kind of really spoke to me.
NARRATOR: But then Adelle had a conversation with a diamond scientist.
ADELLE: He's like, "Well, if we can get the carbon out of Tracey's ashes I think we could grow you a diamond." And I mean, as soon as he said it, I was like, "This is the idea. This is the thing that I'm meant to work on." She was the first diamond that we ever made. This is her black diamond. I wear it every single day.
ETERNEVA STAFF: I'm so excited to introduce y'all to Peggy. We are growing two beautiful diamonds, one for her daughter, Laurie and another for her grandson, Alex.
ETERNEVA TEAM: Yay, Peggy!
GARRETT OZAR: Any time you start a company it's like a huge rollercoaster. One of the challenging things about starting Eterneva was just, it was so unknown in so many different ways. I mean what we do has so much pressure, you know? We're handling someone's most valuable possession basically. And you have this incredibly difficult thing to do which is growing a diamond from carbon.
ADELLE: In the beginning when we started, this was a crazy supply chain to set up. A lot of these scientists don't even exist in the United States. We were hunting down scientists internationally. Flying to Europe, convincing them to get coffee with me and having to learn how to negotiate in completely different business cultures. A lot of this technology actually came out of Russia. So dealing with Russian business culture it's so different than the United States. Honestly, that was kind of my first encounter with a bit of misogyny. Gosh, I learned a lot. But Lord, the lows can be excruciating. We've had moments where our entire supply chain went away. They basically were like, "Good luck."
NARRATOR: And then in 2019, Eterneva caught a big break. A $600,000 deal with Mark Cuban.
ADELLE: Going on Shark Tank, I mean, that was a moment. We were the first death care company ever to go on Shark Tank. That was really a turning point, too, in how people started seeing this. They're like, "Oh wow! What if diamonds become the new urn?"
NARRATOR: Eterneva commissioned grief research from Baylor University to investigate the diamond's impact on the recipients' mourning experience.
CLIENT: This is like, John coming home.