There had to be a better way to honour someone.
Styx is two people. We are best friends, and we started this after somebody in Arjun’s life died.
What followed was the part nobody warns you about. Between the funeral home and the phone calls, there was a form to fill in, and at the end of it a paragraph. A whole person, everything they did and everyone they loved, in forty words next to a stranger’s advertisement. It was not that anyone had done anything wrong. It was that this was simply how it was done, and how it had been done for decades.
He said there had to be a better way to honour someone’s life. We could not find one, so we started building it.
What we think is true.
A life is worth celebrating, not just recording
Grief is not the only thing people feel when someone dies. There is also everything that was funny and stubborn and good about them, and most memorials leave no room for any of it.
The photographs already exist
They are on phones and in old albums belonging to dozens of people. Nobody in the week after a funeral has the strength to go and collect them, so we built something that does.
The people at the funeral know things you do not
Everyone in that room is holding a story or a picture nobody has asked them for. A memorial should be able to receive them.
No advertising, ever
We would rather charge honestly for this than sell the attention of a family in the worst week of their lives. That is not a business model we are willing to have.
Where we are now.
Styx is early. It is two of us, it is not finished, and we would rather tell you that than pretend to be a larger company than we are. Some of what you can see on this site works today and some of it is what we are building next, and we have tried to be clear on every page about which is which.
What that means for you is that you are unusually close to the people making it. If you write to us, one of us reads it, and it will probably change what we build next.