What you are paying for
It is a fair question and it deserves a straight answer, so here is where the money actually goes.
Agarwood forms resin slowly, over years, and only some of a tree carries it. Parcels are bought a few kilos at a time and judged by nose before payment. The raw material is the single largest cost in anything here, and it is paid for long before there is anything to sell.
Distilling agarwood is not an efficient act. A substantial parcel of wood yields a quantity of oil you could hold in a spoon. That ratio, not brand positioning, is why oud oil is sold in single millilitres while other perfume is sold in fifties.
One to two weeks of soaking. Days on a slow fire. Then months or years of resting in glass before it is good enough to sell. Royal Kalakaasi was distilled in 2022 and only released now. That is three years of something finished sitting in a cupboard earning nothing.
Batches here run from twenty to sixty. Every bottle is filled by pipette, every label lettered by hand, every box folded and tied. None of that gets cheaper with volume, because there is no volume.
No advertising. No retail margin, no distributor, no duty-free counter. No celebrity, no licensing, no reformulation to protect a margin. The price is the materials, the time and the hand — which is a rarer split than it sounds.
And the proof of it
Species, origin, soak, still, distillation date, resting time and batch size are printed on every product page and enclosed with every order. Ask and photographs of the wood and the still for your batch will be sent to you.