Nirmalaya

Nirmalaya

Added on April 13, 2026

The origin is specific: Rajeev Bansal visited the Shirdi Sai Baba temple in 2019 and noticed flowers offered by devotees being recycled into incense rather than thrown into the river. The model, collecting floral waste from temples, processing it into products was already working at small scale. He returned to Delhi with his brother Bharat and sister-in-law Surbhi to replicate it at city scale.

Nirmalaya now processes 500 tonnes of temple floral waste annually from 400+ temples across Delhi-NCR. The products, charcoal-free incense sticks and cones, havan cups, essential oils, attars are made by a predominantly female workforce (80%+ women) sorting petals by hand, then processed through a CSIR-patented recycling method. The absence of charcoal in the incense is the critical product difference: standard incense sticks emit roughly 80% carbon; Nirmalaya's emit under 3%.

Revenue: ₹7 crore in FY23 to ₹10.6 crore in FY24. They've raised seed funding from Artha Venture Fund. Available at ISKCON Dwarka, select airports & online across major platforms. The repeat customer rate of 30% is strong for this category. The product range is genuinely circular in a way that most "eco-friendly" brands can't claim.

Best for: households that burn incense regularly and want to stop worrying about what they're inhaling and feel good about where it came from.

— D2C Bazaar

About this brand— in their own words

The scents of India emerged from our gifts of nature, from flowers and fruit, from spices and the bark of trees, even from the fragrance of rain. Our ancient texts recognised how these fragrances could heal our hearts, soothe our souls.

Our ethos is to draw from this rich tradition, and offer fragrances in many forms, both traditional and newly created. We wish to perfume every life with the essence of nature, distilled but pure, truly Nirmalaya. Our product portfolio consists of Havan Cups, Incense Sticks, Incense cones, Dhoop sticks, Essential oils and diffusers with many others in the pipeline.