Cottage Industries was started in 1949, under the personal guidance of The Mother, to provide Sri Aurobindo Ashram with incense sticks and grass mats. The surplus was distributed among devotees. Soon, demand for the incense began to arrive from devotees living overseas — and in 1973, Cottage Industries made its first export.
The name was chosen carefully, and it has guided everything since. As the team writes: we try to maintain a natural ambience and a simple style of working, avoiding as far as possible an industrialised approach to manufacturing. Recycled materials are used. Nature-friendly methods are integrated wherever they can be.
Today the product line has grown to include perfumed incense sticks, hand-poured candles in many shapes and fragrances, cold-process soaps and body care, and small artefacts in ceramic, terracotta, and wood. But the cottage in Cottage Industries remains literal — small workshops, modest scale, hand methods.
The unit operates as part of Sri Aurobindo Udyog Trust, which means every purchase ultimately supports the Ashram and its broader spiritual and educational work.
In a world increasingly dominated by white-label drop-shipping and identical mass-produced goods, Cottage Industries is something rare: a unit that has continued, almost without modification, for seventy-five years. The methods are unhurried. The intention is unchanged.
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