Kuumba Carhartt

  

I've been curious about Kuumba since encountering the feverish excitement about the brand on the FaceBook group IncenseCorner.  Kuumba International is a Japanese lifestyle brand started by Eiji Koyama in 1993 - the first shop was a crazy barber shop with video games, which sold incense. Koyama is a fascinating man - really cool, sophisticated, and open. A modern day business hippy, who has a brilliant mind for marketing strategy. Kuumba gets into a number of  cool and trendy collaborations, and is mostly sold via clothing or lifestyle stores rather than incense shops. There are a number of desirable incense accessories, such as the bucket incense burner and the Carhartt burner, seen in the photo above, which was gifted to me by Adia, who runs an incense burner shop. Part of the attraction of Kuumba is the marketing collaborations with cool and trendy brands, the attractive accessories, and the ever growing (over 300) range of scents with eye-catching and brilliant names such as Wet Dream, Pink Pussy, Paris Hilton, Is Anybody Up?, Get Your Freak It's On, Final Fantasy, etc. An Incense Corner user has created this spreadsheet of Kuumba scents.

The sticks are 11 inches long with 8 inches of paste. The paste is machine extruded onto machine cut bamboo splints. The scent on the stick is modern, light, pleasant. Typical perfumed-dipped room freshener. It's a familiar scent, though I can't pin it down. I feel it is a scent used on one the foil wrapped incenses made by Balarama of Thailand. Indeed, given the material used, the quality, the appearance, the scents, even the names (many are exactly the same), I am confident that Kuumba buy their incense from Balarama. Not 100% certain because anything is possible, and the Kuumba length is slightly shorter than the Zam Zam length of 13 inches - but if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it's likely to be a duck. 

The scent on the burn is the same as on the stick - light, modern, pleasant. Perhaps a bit too light as the scent of the wood powder (tabu, also called makko or jigat) sometimes comes through. As with pretty much all machine-extruded incense I've encountered, the burn is clean, steady, and problem free. There is an unfortunate ashy after-smell from the burned sawdust, but on the whole I quite like this incense. Mildly sweet, floral, citric, fruity - it's a modern room or car freshener scent. Attractive without being beguiling or sensual or exciting. 

I love the idea of Kuumba - the bright marketing, the playful names, etc. The incense itself is somewhat of a let-down after the hype, and there's clearly a big profit here for Kuumba given the prices these sticks sell for (usually around £10 for 15 sticks). This is fairly crude and cheap perfume-dipped incense. It's a simple sawdust paste, impregnated with fragrance oils which have been watered down with DPG (typically 1 part scent to 2 parts DPG). Though, to be fair, the scent is attractive, if a bit weak. 

These sticks were made for Carhartt, a traditional working men's American clothing company which became very trendy when fashion designers Edwin and Salomée Faeh started working with them in 1994, turning the work wear into funky street wear. 

I think it would be fun to try a few more scents, but not at these prices (and not when Zam Zam foil wrapped can be bought for around £2 a pack). And I doubt that Kuumba will be contacting me to offer free samples, given the success they already have outside the incense community. Ho hum.


Date: Oct 2024    Score: 29

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