In 2013, Joe Stacey had an idea. A lifelong Nashvillian, he’d been working in automotive design, wrapping cars and semi-trucks in eye-catching graphics. One day, he called up a friend who ran a funeral home.
“Hey, let me get a casket from you,” he said. “I’ll put some graphics on it. Let’s see what I can come up with.”
Stacey covered the casket in University of Tennessee Vols imagery, finishing it with a bold blaze-orange stripe. When Stacey returned the casket, he and the funeral home director had a laugh. But a few days later, the friend called Stacey with surprising news.
“You’re not going to believe this,” the friend told Stacey. “We sold that casket. The family came in, went straight to it, said, ‘This is what we want,’ and they wouldn’t look at anything else.”
That was the beginning of Nashville Casket Sales. Stacey runs the company with his high school-sweetheart wife Tabitha and their son Bret. The family business has built a devoted following — thanks in part to the KISS Kasket, which Stacey says has replaced the band’s legendary pinball machine as the ultimate collector’s item for devoted fans.
Stacey describes the caskets as something you have to experience in order to fully appreciate.
“If you go to a funeral and Mr. Smith is in a white casket or black casket, it’s a somber situation,” he explains. “But if you go there and he’s in a fishing casket, or he’s in a camouflage casket, or whatever he likes, people start smiling and talking and start telling stories. ‘Oh, he would have loved this.’ Or, ‘This is perfect for her — she loved rhinestones.’
“Whatever it is, people start smiling and talking, and that can change a somber situation.”
Stacey has a comfort with death that serves him well. In fact, his first business was a haunted house — back then all the coffins in his workshop were props.
“The death scene never bothered us,” he says. “Going into a funeral home didn’t bother us. Having caskets. I’ve got a hearse in my driveway right now. It freaks some people out, but for us, it was natural.”
These days, the steel casket frames that come to Stacey are a little more substantial. He calls them “shells.”
“We bring it in and we modify it and do our graphics and stuff on it — either wrap it, or there’s things that we add to it, like rhinestones.”
The rhinestone-covered caskets can take him days to finish, but the results are staggering. After making his first rhinestone casket, Stacey posted a short video to the shop’s TikTok account. It got 31 million views.
If there’s a fandom, Stacey can make a casket out of it. He’s made a Dukes of Hazzard casket, a Dallas Cowboys casket, an Iron Maiden casket. He’s made a Ghostbusters casket equipped with plastic tubing that makes it look just like Ecto-1.
The first Spider-Man casket he made hit closest to home — Stacey’s son had been a Spider-Man fan when he was about the same age as the boy who would soon be buried in it. As he wrapped the casket in the superhero’s red-and-blue imagery — symbols he’d associated with his own family’s joy — he realized he was in tears.
“We have a saying here: The smallest ones are the heaviest,” he says. “We do a lot of children’s caskets — probably more than anyone else around — but we do have a sense of pride about it that we really want to make it special for that child.”
Another of Stacey’s special caskets looks just like a Radio Flyer wagon — it’s small and red, with four wheels and a handle for pulling. The family who ordered it had a young son who spent much of his life in the hospital, where they used a wagon to wheel him through the halls. “That was his favorite thing, that wagon,” Stacey recalls. When they came to him, he knew exactly what to make.
“That little boy is actually in a mausoleum spot,” Stacey says softly, “which was behind the funeral home. And so they pulled him out there, just like it was [his] regular wagon.”
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