It started with my father.
The Late Company wasn’t born from a business plan. It started when my father became ill with cancer.
Death suddenly stopped being something abstract or comfortably distant. There were decisions to make, conversations to have and questions I had never really thought about before. What happens when someone dies? How do we choose how they should be remembered? And why do so many of the choices available to us look almost exactly as they did generations ago?
Around that time, I met Stein Nerland.
Stein is a craftsman, inventor and someone with a deep respect for nature. He showed me something he had been working on: an unconventional prototype for a new kind of gravestone.
It was called Vannstein.
Instead of treating a gravestone simply as a piece of stone carrying a name, Stein had started thinking about what else it could do. Could it collect rainwater? Could it sustain the plants growing around it? Could a memorial actually give something back to the place where it stands?
That conversation stayed with me.
I came from a very different world — innovation, design thinking, technology and building new businesses. Stein came with materials, craftsmanship and an inventor’s instinct for making things work.
We started asking questions together.
Why are so many gravestones transported halfway around the world when we have materials and craftsmanship here?
Why should a memorial need drinking water to keep flowers alive?
Could sunlight collected during the day create a gentle light at night?
Could a gravestone change when a family changes, rather than being discarded and replaced?
Could the stories behind the names somehow become part of the memorial too?
Vannstein led to new ideas. Lysstein explored light. Livstein pushed the idea of a living, evolving and more sustainable monument further. Heart Medal began connecting the physical memorial with photographs, stories and memories that cannot fit on a piece of stone.
And gradually we realised that the gravestone itself was only one small part of something much bigger.
From stones to stories.
My daughters became involved too.
That mattered.
What had begun with the death of one generation was suddenly becoming a conversation with the next one. Over time I have passed on knowledge and responsibility, and they have become involved in areas spanning memorials, services and death technology.
It reinforced something that has become increasingly important to us:
Remembrance shouldn’t only begin when somebody dies.
There are stories we should ask our parents while we still can.
There are voices our children may one day want to hear again.
There are recipes, mistakes, jokes, beliefs, experiences and tiny pieces of family history that disappear surprisingly quickly.
And there are things we should probably do while we’re still here.
That thinking eventually took us beyond monuments.
late.me asks what it would mean if more of your voice, stories and personality could remain accessible to the people you love.
Mer av livet turns the idea around completely: before worrying about what we leave behind, perhaps we should make sure we’re still creating things worth remembering — travelling, meeting people, telling our stories and doing more with the time we have.
Our care businesses deal with something more practical but equally human: looking after graves, making memorials safe and helping families care for places they may live hundreds of kilometres away from.
Different businesses. Different moments in life.
But increasingly, they felt like parts of the same idea.
And that became LATE.
Today The Late Company brings those ideas together.
LATE Experiences is about experiencing more while we’re here.
LATE Me is about preserving more of who we are.
LATE Monuments explores better, more personal and more sustainable ways to remember.
LATE Care looks after the physical places where memories live.
We don’t think death needs to become less serious.
We think everything around it can become more human.
More personal. More sustainable. More connected to the life that was actually lived.
And perhaps, by thinking a little earlier about what comes afterwards, we become better at noticing what matters now.
LATE
For moments before. And after.