MILWAUKEE — It all starts with a board. After one cut here and one cut there, Ian Sustar has created a beautiful hand-crafted wooden urn.
“It felt like I was doing something that people appreciated and felt like I was offering them a service that was needed," Ian Sustar who created Perennial Memorial Urns.
Sustar, who owns an equally successful furniture-making business called Sustar Woodworks, used his woodworking skills to make urns for family members.
"For years I had built urns for other family members, and in 2019 I had an uncle who I built an urn for his father. And then I had a family friend who I built an urn for, and they both kind of encouraged me, and said other people would appreciate these you should really offer these," Sustar said.
Sustar's urn business has taken off more than he imagined when he built his first test batch of urns to sell on the Internet.
“It was maybe three or four months, and it went from that first batch of eight to almost immediately up to what it is now which is between 70 and 100 urns a month," Sustar said.
Sustar builds furniture and urns out of his Milwaukee workshop. While Perennial Memorial Urns formally started in 2019 and Sustar had made a few urns for family members, he actually began building urns decades ago.
"That’s where it started was with my dad, so it's always kind of in the back of my mind," he said.
When Ian was 10, his dad died. Alongside his siblings and father's employees, he helped build his dad's urn.
“You know it’s an honor that people trust me with this, and there’s also too - it’s kind of just honoring my father’s legacy on a daily basis," Sustar said.
Urns are an intimate and important memorial. Sustar builds each one with the same care he’d build for his dad.
“Because it is their final resting place, and it’s, you know, these people are looking for something that represents their loved one. It’s something tangible that represents something more than just a box.”
That’s why Perennial Memorial Urns has experienced so much success. His furniture can sell for thousands of dollars, but the value of his much cheaper urns is worth so much more.
“I think I’ll always do the furniture as to, you know, to some degree. I do see the urns becoming more and more a part of the business.”
So with a cut here and a cut there, another urn is built ready to memorialize a loved one.
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