FAQs Stamford London

All our incense sticks and cones are handcrafted in Karnataka, southern India, using traditional techniques and timeless recipes handed down through the generations. We have many more people working in our factories than we have machines. We produce incenses with the personal touch, creating local jobs and using local resources. Our factories are happy places where our employees are the stars who high quality products with speed and finesse every day and with justified pride.

We believe in fresh, hand-made products using natural ingredients such as plants, clays and essential oils with a proven history of effective, safe use. This is a value that we have always held dear, because it’s important not just to us but to our customers.

We strictly minimise the use of synthetics – they are only included as a last resort, where the alternative would be an animal product or something else equally ethically unacceptable.

Yes – and we are proud to be the only incense brand globally certified as vegan by BeVeg, the world’s leading ISO-accredited vegan verification and certification scheme. BeVeg-certified products are free from animal ingredients and never tested on animals.

We use bamboo reed for all our stick incense (both hand-dipped and hand-rolled). It’s a lightweight, fast-growing renewable product and highly sustainable – and it burns cleanly without interfering with the incense’s aroma.

Agarbatti is simply another name for an Indian incense stick.

Incense sticks are sometimes referred to as joss sticks, after the sticks traditionally used for incense burning in Chinese temples or “joss houses”.

“Dhoop” is another name for an incense cone. Rather than being fashioned around a stick, this is moulded from a combustible paste of natural ingredients into a cone shape.

A backflow cone has a narrow shaft drilled through its base to create an inverted chimney when it’s positioned over the hole in a backflow burner. As the smoke is drawn down, it cools and becomes slightly heavier than the surrounding air, causing it to cascade down the base of the burner like a waterfall.

All our products are available individually, and we also provide a wide range of gift and variety packs featuring our best-selling fragrance/style combinations, both single scent and mixed.

Many of our products have very little packaging – our policy is to always try to minimise our impact on the environment. The small amount of packaging we do use is made from 100% recycled paper, with the creative development team constantly rising to the challenge of developing innovative products and formulations that don’t require heavy packaging to protect and present them. We believe that the best way to tackle recycling is to minimise the potential waste in the first place – simple, really!

This is a hexagonally shaped box for incense sticks which combines space efficiency for shipping and display with protection for the delicate sticks within – plus, it looks great, too.

Yes, we do – and not least because it enables us to control and be aware of what exactly is going into them. Our inventors love to challenge convention and come up with unique new blends and evocative names to pique the imagination as well as the senses. We probably create new products faster than any other incense brand – which is particularly important for businesses who wish to cobrand with us.

Cobranding is a way to create a new incense brand or bolster your existing one, using our expertise to select the best fragrances and product types for your audience. We take all the stress out of the process, from developing the brand names and packing designs to production and shipping, so it’s ready for you to take to market. Many companies wish to feature our name on the finished products, either alongside or instead of their own, because our excellent reputation and market visibility accelerate sales – which is particularly important for a new product.

The market for candles, reed diffusers and room fresheners is highly competitive, with low profit margins and targeted primarily on the household sector. Conversely, incense offers good margins for a comparatively low investment, with appeal across many categories, including hospitality and the vast and still expanding wellbeing sector.

After being a distributor for over 20 years, in 2020 Stamford London won the exclusive UK import and distribution rights for Shrinivas Sugandhalaya LLP of Mumbai’s legendary Satya brand, including its iconic Nag Champa products.

As the name suggests, we are a London-based UK company – the only one in the country focused entirely on incense manufacture and distribution, with our administrative offices, warehousing, distribution and logistics all based in the UK.

There is evidence that incense was used in cleansing and religious rituals in the ancient civilisations of Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Arabia, Egypt, India, Greece and Rome, while the Vedas – the oldest Hindu sacred texts – describe a method of making it. Incense made its way to China along the Silk Road during the Han dynasty (206 BC to 220 AD, where it became an integral part of Buddhist ceremonies, and it was introduced to Japan along with Buddhism in the mid 6th century.