An interesting side category is our incense. We Kinda didn’t know what to expect when we started this. I guess The ethos here can be explained very well in one of our other blogs ‘Tea a hobby of the senses’. Loosely put we believed that if you’re into the wonderful flavorous world of tea then you may be a good candidate for the aromatic world of incense. I wouldn’t say that I was entirely correct here, I mean we have had some limited success amongst tea drinkers wanting to explore incense a little bit better but we have noticed that most of our incense clients mainly come to us for our incense only. Any who we’ve hit the ground running and this gives us the excuse to find more amazing and rare scents for you guys to discover!
Our Frankincense has been doing really well with so many happy customers. Among all the Omani resins the especially popular ‘Royal Green Hojari’ has been a big hit. Our incense stick collection has been doing okay but we are about to be stocking some much higher quality incense sticks very soon, watch this space! A more recent addition to this category is our Palo Santo smudge sticks. This is a really intriguing sent from the Peruvian rainforest. We are very lucky to be able to have sourced some extremely high quality Palo Santo heartwood wood sticks.
Until recently we took a break from selling our Vietnamese Agarwood ‘oud’. This was largely down to the fact that I has no more credible sources on which to acquire this amazing wood. I can happily say that in the next few days we will be receiving our first shipment of Vietnamese Agarwood direct from the Plantation in Vietnam. I can assure you that exploring the world of Agarwood is a murky business fraught with peril. Allow us to take the hit on the scams, the risk on the bad quality for you. We will only ever be offering mediocre to high end agarwood at a reasonable price in store. We plan to make a trip to the Middle East in search of potentially better quality frankincense, myrrh and Agarwood soon! Saudi Arabia ‘Riyadh’ and Dubai is on our hit list, maybe Oman. Oh..I feel some incense exploring YouTube videos coming up! Any excuse to get out there and discover new things ???. Riyadh is actually the perfect destination to source Oud ‘Agarwood’ from. The Saudis use Oud chips often multiple times a day and there’s a big wholesale market here. Buying Oud is a scary business but Saudi has some very very strict rules on cheaters! Think of Saudi as kind of a safe space for Oud buying and selling. Prices here are more reasonable than Dubai as it doesn’t carry the heavy ‘Dubai’ pricetag. We’ll see what the future brings!
Thank you everyone for your support in Turning our dreams into reality and giving us an excuse to run round the world in search of interesting things!
Guru Team ?
Greetings from Puerto Rico, my cozy island home in the Caribbean!
I got to know about your YouTube channel and online store precisely due to the incense! I’ve been into incense for the last 10ish years, including trying out natural incense (woods, spices, herbs, flowers and resins), dough incense (pellets formed from resin incense mixed with essential oils) and stick incense. It’s been a while since I’ve had high grade Hojari frankincense, something I just purchased and am waiting for in the mail.
On the part of the relatively little overlap between tea enthusiasts with incense enthusiasts, my excuse is that I’m from a coffee-producing region, so I’m generally filling my cups with the caffeinated bean brew. Been at this for a bit longer, and have set out to try countless brands, mainly locally, but starting to branch out to other parts of the world. I do have an occasional interest in tea, but have yet to break into the premium stuff, partly because I already devote much of my hot drinking to coffee, and because I still want to master consistently brewing teas to reach their respective optimal tastes before spending more on the good stuff.
Paradoxically, several of the formal tea ceremony customs do involve incense, so you’d expect more of the tea enthusiasts to at least have interest in the beautiful and mystical aromas to serve as a background for their leafy brews. And amusingly enough, the homeland for both coffee and many incenses, Ethiopia, does have a coffee ceremony that involves frankincense! It’s more casual and relaxed compared to the more rigid and methodical tea ceremonies you’d find in China, Japan, Korea or Vietnam, but it’s equally delightful to the senses and for bonding between the participants.
Keep on doing what you do best, sourcing high quality goods and inviting others to explore this world of delight to the senses!