In 1961, Babubhai Chaganlal Makwana came to Mumbai with nothing but the will to work. He sold onions and potatoes in the market — sorting the good from the spoiled before sunrise, every single day. And every evening, the vegetables that hadn't sold were thrown into the garbage.

His son, Yogesh, grew up watching that waste, and it never sat right with him. Good things ending up as refuse, simply because no one had found a better use for them.

So Yogesh set out to build something that wasted nothing. He had always loved fragrance, and incense became the obsession. After countless failed batches, he cracked a formula of his own — honey water to bind it, natural flower oils for scent, and bamboo to hold its shape. In 1964, the first stick was rolled by hand.

The business grew — and then it burned to the ground. An electrical fault took the entire factory in a single fire. By sheer luck, not one worker or family member was harmed. Everything else was gone. Babubhai took on a loan, started again from nothing for the second time in his life, and rebuilt. His four sons and his daughter worked side by side, and what rose from the ashes outlasted the fire.

I'm Suraj Yogesh Makwana — the third generation. I grew up inside this craft, and as I came of age I kept circling one thing the family had never questioned: the charcoal. Like every incense maker of that era, we used it because everyone did. But charcoal is burned and breathed inside homes — near children, near the people we make this for. It no longer fit the principle the whole business was built on: use only what nature offers.

So I set out to remove it — and the sticks fought me. Pull the charcoal, and they'd sputter and die, again and again. The fix came from nature, not chemistry: T1 wood powder bound with jigat, a natural plant binder, until the stick held its shape and burned clean on its own. No charcoal. Nothing harmful breathed into a home.

In 2016, that became Incense Hub Co.

Six decades after my grandfather sorted good from spoiled in a Mumbai market, every stick still carries the belief he arrived with: nothing good should ever go to waste.

— Suraj Makwana, Third Generation