The Hare Krishna Movement

This is an interesting story/history, of the beginning of the Spiritual Sky Incense business started, as told by H.G. Gargamuni das.

 How I started Spiritual Sky Incense

by Gargamuni das

This is the Story of How I started Spiritual Sky Incense in the winter of 1968 at 61 2nd Ave Iskcon NYC– with the motto, ”Krsna Makes the Best Scents” (Sense), which increased Sankirtan Literature Distribution 20 times. Myself and Brahmananda thought of the name Spiritual Sky, with Srila Prabhupada’s blessings in the winter of 1968. I started making the Spiritual Sky incense in the very small cellar at the temple. I not only made stick incense but I also packaged resin incense, which I bought from an old East European man who was 90 years old. He used to make frankincense that was used in churches. He had several other mixes with spices and resins which were very fragrant. You would put these on self-igniting charcoal. There were little round charcoals, you would light a match and touch it, and it would self-ignite. Then you would sprinkle on these resins with spices and you’d get very nice fragrance. I made different names with small containers, and sold them to the stores. I also bottled fragances in designer dripless perfume bottles. In this way, I was practically the only one making extra money for the temple.

Spiritual Sky started but it was a one-man operation and I couldn’t expand it. So Prabhupada gave me the permission, because I was invited by Tamala Krishna, who was the president in the old LA Temple at La Cienega Blvd. It was a very large Mexican church, old church. There was space and there was man power. There about about 75 devotees there compared to New York which had much less. So I moved the whole operation by the summertime of 1969 to Los Angeles where I mass-produced the Spiritual Sky incense.

This immediately had an influence on the BTG magazine distribution. Magazine distribution was very slow in the beginning when sankirtana started on the street. [3,500 per month in LA] Most people didn’t want to touch the magazine. They would just hear the kirtana and then walk away. To get someone to buy a magazine, you had to have experience, which we didn’t have. And the people had to be attracted. Most of the covers of BTG were Oriental Eastern religion photos of paintings, especially if there was a cover with Vishnu. People saw that as a four-arm lady. In their eyes, it looked like a four-arm lady. The American public were uneducated in this tradition, they would say, “A four-arm lady, what is this?” They wouldn’t buy such a magazine. But when you put on a pack of incense on top of the magazine and handed it to them, they could smell the incense because the packaging had a little hole. When you hand it, they go, “What’s that smell?”

The best-selling incense was fruit incense. I made strawberry, cherry, blueberry that was blue, pineapple, coconut, apple, banana, grape, peach, watermelon, raspberry, orange and tangerine. All these fruit incenses, I would prepare them myself by buying the sticks. I used to buy 10,000 sticks in a box. The sticks came from a Chinese man. They are made from pig dung on bamboo sticks. They were used to light fireworks. When you light fireworks, you light a stick and then use that. They call it in America a ‘punk stick’. I used those to dip the sticks in the essential oils which I ordered from the largest essential oil company in America. I used to purchase sandalwood oil, almond oil, all kinds of oils, cherry oil, and strawberry. Even Srila Prabhupada used Spiritual Sky oils for His daily massage:

Prabhupada: Thank you very much for the sandalwood and sweetpea oils that you have sent me. I was just thinking of these oils because my stock was just finished, and Krishna has sent it just in time through you.>>> Ref. VedaBase => Letter to: Gargamuni — Los Angeles 11 January, 1969

I used to dip the sticks in oils. I had these big chemistry beakers made of unbreakable glass. I would take big handfuls of sticks and dip them, then spread them out and dry them in the sun on long tables. The whole neighborhood smelled of all kinds fragrances. At that time, Los Angeles was like a North Indian climate. You had a monsoon, so eight months, there was no rain, just sun. I had the factory outside of the temple, but with a gate so nobody could see. I would have these long tables, 20-30 feet long, and spread thousands of incense sticks in sections by scent and let them dry in the sun. Every morning, 50-60 devotees, we would turn on a lecture or kirtana of Prabhupada, and they would package all the production I did. It was the combined effort of all the the LA devotees that made this business a success, and no one, including myself, ever got a salary.

I would do all the dipping production myself but they would do all the packaging and we’d get it done within 60-90 minutes. Then they would take these packs out on sankirtana and distribute them. By doing this our BTG distribution went up 20 times because practically we gave the magazine for free when they were buying the incense. And they wouldn’t buy one pack, they’d buy ten packs. Most of the time, they are going to ask, “How much?” We said, “Well, give a donation” So they gave us $10, $20, $30 when the packs of incense cost us less than $1, the magazine cost us 25 cents. So we were able to make a lot of money from magazine and incense selling. The distribution of Back to Godhead went up from 3,500 to 60,000. So the incense definitely helped the distribution of Prabhupada’s literature on a massive scale. That was the only way we distributed these books and publications—through sankirtana.

Then I started selling to temples all over the USA, and their literature distribution also went up. By 1970, I was able to buy the largest Iskcon property for Srila Prabhupada [see photo], which still exists today for $225 Thousand, with a $50 Thousand cash down-payment…………