Tending Wins ICCFA Award for Innovation in Headstone Restoration and Grave Care

When a family in Florida loses their mother and she's buried in Ohio, what happens to the headstone five years later? Ten? Twenty? For most families, the answer is some version of guilt and helplessness. They live too far away. They can't drive twelve hundred miles every spring. The cemetery doesn't clean individual stones. And so weather, lichen, and time slowly erase the lettering — and with it, a piece of how someone is remembered.

This is the problem Tending was built to solve. And this week, the deathcare industry's most respected professional body confirmed that the solution is working.

On May 1, 2026, All Funeral Services' Tending App was honored with the ICCFA Keeping It Personal (KIP) Award in the Innovative Personalized Product category — one of the most respected recognitions in the funeral and cemetery profession. The award was presented at the 2026 ICCFA Experience in Fort Worth, Texas, where Tending exhibited.

Why This Award Matters in the Deathcare Industry

The deathcare industry is, by nature, slow to change. It is built on trust, tradition, and the kind of word-of-mouth credibility that takes generations to earn. New technology rarely breaks through. When it does, professional recognition is one of the only signals that families and partner businesses can rely on.

That's what makes the Keeping It Personal Awards unusual. Established in 2001 by the International Cemetery, Cremation and Funeral Association's Personalization subcommittee, the KIP program now has 25 years of history rewarding work that genuinely raises the bar for how families are served. Crucially, entries are judged by professionals from outside the deathcare field, which makes the evaluation independent and unbiased — and which is why a KIP win carries weight that self-promotion never could.

The ICCFA itself represents over 10,000 members worldwide across cemeteries, funeral homes, crematories, and supplier businesses. Its endorsement is the closest thing this profession has to a stamp of legitimacy.

For Tending being named the most innovative personalized product is not just a marketing milestone. It's a signal to two distinct audiences: families researching professional headstone cleaning and restoration services, and the funeral homes and cemeteries who decide which technology partners to trust.

What Tending Actually Does

Tending is the first nationwide digital service for headstone restoration and grave maintenance in the United States. Families download the app, locate their loved one's cemetery, and choose the level of care they need — from a one-time cleaning and lettering restoration to ongoing monthly or annual grave maintenance subscriptions.

A vetted, fully insured contractor visits the site. The team performs professional headstone cleaning, removes biological growth, restores faded lettering, and addresses cracks or settling where possible. Every service ends with a detailed photo report sent directly to the app — a before-and-after record of the work, accessible to every family member who has been invited to share access.

There's no phone tag. No driving across the country. No guessing what condition the stone is in. The whole experience — request, service, proof, billing — lives in the app, supported by AI-powered monument condition recognition that helps standardize quality across thousands of contractors and tens of thousands of cemeteries.

The Numbers Behind the Recognition

• 20,000+ monument restorations completed nationwide to date
• Every U.S. state covered, including remote and rural cemeteries
• $2 million in service insurance backing every job

For context: more than 2.8 million Americans pass away each year, and a growing share of their loved ones live hundreds of miles from where they are buried. Until recently, cemetery monument cleaning and restoration was overwhelmingly a local, fragmented, deeply manual market. There was no national standard, no transparent pricing, no way to verify the work without driving there yourself.

That's the gap Tending was designed to close — and the gap the ICCFA judges saw closing.

Artem Manilov, Founder and CEO of All Funeral Services:

We're incredibly honored by this recognition. The most valuable thing that remains after a funeral is the memory of the person who passed away.

We built Tending to help families preserve that memory with professional care, no matter where they live. At the same time, it gives funeral homes and cemeteries a way to stay connected with families long after the service.