Agarwood incense sticks — koh (香) in Japan, oud incense sticks across the Gulf, agarbatti in South Asia — are the highest-volume form of finished agarwood product in world trade. The category splits on one structural question before anything else: does the stick have a bamboo core, or not? A cored stick is cheaper to produce and mechanically stronger. But the bamboo itself burns and contributes a dry, papery note that becomes obvious in the final third of the burn. A coreless stick is extruded entirely from incense material, so every second of the burn is agarwood and binder. For premium retail and for the Japanese market, coreless is effectively the price of entry.
The second structural question is the binder. Traditional Japanese production uses makko — powdered bark of Machilus thunbergii — which is both an adhesive and a clean-burning fuel. Cheaper production uses charcoal plus saltpetre to force a fast, hot burn, which flattens the scent and produces the black smoke that ruins meditation and yoga use. Our sticks are makko-bound across every tier. If you are comparing quotes and one supplier is dramatically cheaper, the binder is usually where the difference lives.
Third comes the agarwood itself: species, resin content and grade. We work exclusively with plantation Aquilaria sinensis and Aquilaria crassna. Plantation material is the responsible and legally straightforward choice — the source lot is traceable and it is reproducible batch to batch. That matters enormously when you are building a retail SKU that has to smell the same next year. Our top tier is koh grade: the highest resin fraction a managed induction cycle yields, cut to Japanese expectations. Above that sits kyara, which nobody can farm and which we therefore do not offer — if a shelf needs a kyara anchor, that lot has to come from somewhere other than us.
Format then follows the destination market. Japanese and East Asian retail favours short sticks — 10.5 cm and 13.5 cm — burning 20 to 30 minutes, sold in 30- to 40-stick boxes. Gulf and Middle Eastern markets favour longer, thicker sticks with a bolder, sweeter profile that can carry a large majlis or hotel lobby. European and North American wellness retail sits in between, and is the most sensitive to smoke volume — low-smoke formulations sell disproportionately well there. Getting the format right for the destination is worth more than a small unit-price saving.
On packaging and OEM: our standard boxes ship unbranded or with a neutral kraft sleeve. Private label starts at 500 boxes and covers stick length, count, blend ratio, box structure and print. We supply the dieline, run a pre-production sample for your sign-off, and only then start the main run. Typical OEM lead time is 25 to 35 days from artwork approval. For buyers testing a new market, we recommend starting with stock packaging at 50 boxes, validating sell-through, and converting to private label on the reorder.
Finally, the declaration. The single most common customs problem in this category is not the agarwood at all. It is a binder or fragrance declaration that does not match the physical goods, which gets the consignment reclassified as a chemical product and held. We declare the makko binder explicitly on the commercial invoice, which removes that failure mode before it starts. Which permits and certificates your particular import route requires is a question for your broker. It is worth asking before you book rather than after.
A practical note on comparing quotes. Stick weight is the variable that makes two prices look different when they are not. A 21 cm stick at 1.8 mm diameter and the same stick at 2.4 mm differ by roughly a third in material. A quote that omits the diameter is not comparable to one that states it. Ask for length, diameter, weight per stick and count per box on every quotation you collect, and normalise to cost per gram of incense material before you decide anything. Suppliers who quote only per box are, intentionally or not, making that comparison harder.
The second thing worth normalising is burn time, because it is what your customer experiences and it is not proportional to length. A thicker stick burns longer per centimetre but also throws more smoke per minute. That is why the 21 cm low-smoke format burns 35 to 45 minutes rather than the hour a naive calculation would suggest. If you are replacing an existing SKU on a shelf, match the burn time your customer is used to rather than the dimensions. A stick that looks the same but finishes fifteen minutes earlier generates complaints that no specification sheet will answer for you.
Finally, storage on your side. Sticks arrive dried and sealed with desiccant, and they hold in a warehouse at normal humidity. What breaks them is a cold container unloaded into a humid receiving bay. Condensation forms on the cartons and the outer boxes soften. The sticks at the edge of the tray pick up enough moisture to burn unevenly. If you are importing into a monsoon or Gulf-summer climate, let the pallet equalise for 24 hours before you break the shrink wrap. It costs a day and it prevents the complaint that looks exactly like a quality fault but is not one.
