Noppamas Incense Sticks

Noppamas began around 1950 as one woman's backyard incense-making, made for friends and her children's teachers rather than for sale. As demand grew, her daughter — later joined by her own daughter, Sureeporn Rohitopakarn — turned the craft into a small trade, selling hand-rolled incense alongside traditional Thai perfume and scented powder from a stall at Bangkok's Wang Saranrom Sunday market. That weekend sideline became a standing incense business around 1960, run across what is now three generations of the same family, and was formally registered as a Limited Partnership in 1991 (per the company's own history page; a secondary directory listing shows 2015, likely reflecting that platform's own join date rather than true incorporation) from its base in Bangkok's Wang Thong Lang district. The house makes traditional Thai joss and fragrance incense sticks by hand-rolling wood powders, resins, and perfumed oils onto bamboo cores in the small-batch, household-scale method still typical of Thai incense production, and now exports beyond the domestic temple and home-altar market that built it. Three generations from a market stall to an exporting manufacturer is a modest but well-documented arc, and a rarer thing in incense retail than the founding claims usually offered without it.