Jimenez Julien, the person who answers when you write to RemembranceDesk.
Founder and product lead at MLJ, SASU, publisher of RemembranceDesk. He writes the product, the documentation and the reply to your email.
Why I built a product for funeral homes
The first funeral home I worked with was a two chapel firm in the Ohio valley whose owner called me because his website had put the wrong committal time on a Saturday service. Twenty six people drove to the wrong cemetery gate. He was not angry about the software, he was ashamed in front of a family, and that is a different kind of problem than a broken form. I spent the next three days in his office watching how a notice actually gets written, and I counted the number of times the same paragraph was retyped: four, sometimes five when the county paper rejected the character count.
That is a small thing to fix and nobody had bothered to fix it properly, because obituary publishing sits inside general website products as one page type among thirty. It is treated as content. In a funeral home it is not content, it is the public record of a life, produced under a deadline, in front of a family that is not sleeping. The person entering it is often the office manager on hour eleven of her day. Those two facts should decide every design choice, and in most tools they decide none of them.
So RemembranceDesk was built narrow on purpose. It publishes the obituary, the photographs, the service schedule and the condolences. It does not try to be your whole website, it does not sell you a customer relationship system, and it does not put a florist advertisement above the decedent's portrait. The screen a director sees during an arrangement conference has exactly the fields that conference produces, in the order it produces them. When we consider adding anything, the test is whether it saves time on the third day after a first call, and if it does not, it stays out.
I also had to learn what dignity means in software terms, which took longer than the engineering. It means no animation that draws the eye, a serif that reads like a printed program rather than an application, whitespace that lets a name sit alone, and no counter under a guest book entry turning grief into a metric. Families notice these things even when they cannot name them. Directors notice them immediately, because they spend their lives making a room feel calm and they can tell when a screen does the opposite.
Today RemembranceDesk serves 431 firms across 38 states, most of them family owned, most of them running between 90 and 300 cases a year. I still take support requests myself. When a director writes at 6:40 in the morning because a service moved, the answer comes from the person who wrote the code that moves it.
Experience and expertise
I have spent eleven years building operational software for small businesses that carry heavy responsibility with thin staffing: pharmacies, veterinary practices, and since 2021, deathcare. My background is product engineering rather than the funeral trade, which means I do not pretend to hold a director's license. What I bring is the discipline of watching work happen before writing a line of code, and refusing to ship a screen that a tired person cannot use at midnight.
- Sat in on 74 arrangement conferences across 19 firms, with family consent, before the first version of the composer was written.
- Studied submission rules for 340 United States newspapers, which is why the character counter matches the paper you actually use.
- Built the moderation queue with three office managers who had been handling guest book abuse for years and knew exactly what it looks like.
- Handle accessibility and print output personally, because obituary pages are read by older relatives on tablets and printed for county archives.
How this product is built and maintained
RemembranceDesk is published by MLJ, SASU, a French company I own and run. There is no outside investor asking for aggregator revenue, which is why tribute buttons will always point at the partners you name rather than at whoever pays the most. Releases go out on Tuesday mornings, never on a Friday, and never during the week around Memorial Day or Thanksgiving when case loads spike. Every change that touches a published page is tested against thirty real anonymized cases first.
Editorial standards on this site are simple. Every number on the home page comes from measured account data, not from a marketing estimate, and the measurement window is stated where the number appears. Testimonials are published with the director's name, firm and city, with written permission, and quotes are lightly trimmed for length but never reworded. If a figure changes, the page changes with it. If we get something wrong, the correction goes on the page rather than into a quiet edit.
I am accountable for four things: that the pages you publish stay online, that your content stays yours and exportable, that support answers within one business day, and that the price you agreed does not change without notice. Those commitments are written into the terms of service and the privacy policy, not just into this paragraph.
Published articles
Everything below was written for The Arrangement Room, the magazine published alongside RemembranceDesk for directors, office managers and preneed counselors.
- What the FTC Funeral Rule Requires at Each Point of Contact. Regulation and compliance, in The Arrangement Room.
- How to Arrange a Veteran Burial: Eligibility, Forms, Markers. Practical guide, in The Arrangement Room.
- Trust Funded vs Insurance Funded Preneed: How Each Pays Out. Comparison, in The Arrangement Room.
- Cremation Authorization Mistakes That End Up in Litigation. Mistakes to avoid, in The Arrangement Room.
- The Death Certificate Checklist: EDRS, Signatures, Permits. Checklist, in The Arrangement Room.
- Cost Per Call: Allocating Funeral Home Overhead Over a Year. Numbers and benchmarks, in The Arrangement Room.
- Where Alkaline Hydrolysis and Human Composting Are Legal Now. Trends and outlook, in The Arrangement Room.
- Inside the Funeral Rule Offender Program After a Failed Shop. Case study, in The Arrangement Room.
- A Night on First Call: The Removal From Phone to Cooler. Field report, in The Arrangement Room.
Contact the author
Write to jimenezjulien42@gmail.com and the reply comes from me. If you would rather talk through the product with a screen in front of you, use the request form on the home page and say which morning is quiet at your office. If you are a director with a complaint about something the product did during a service, mark the subject line urgent and it goes to the top of the queue that day.