Cycle Pure Agarbathies

N. Ranga Rao & Sons began in 1948, when N. Ranga Rao turned down a central government job offer to start Mysore Products and General Trading Company in his hometown of Mysuru. In 1950 he launched the Cycle brand of agarbathi (incense sticks), choosing the name — his own account went — because a bicycle was something every Indian household could recognize and pronounce; the tagline was 'as simple and affordable as a cycle.'

Cycle Pure Agarbathies is now the flagship of the NR Group, generating roughly seventy percent of the group's revenue, and the company still operates from Mysuru — corporate offices on Vanivilasa Road and an export office in the city's Industrial Suburb, alongside a retail storefront in the city center. Beyond incense sticks, the brand has expanded into a broader puja-room product range: dhoop, camphor, and other worship accessories sold under the same name.

Seventy-plus years after N. Ranga Rao's original storefront, Cycle remains headquartered in the same city where it began, still trading on the purity and long-lasting fragrance claims that built its reputation, and still selling from Mysuru to a national and export market that has made it one of India's most recognized agarbathi names.