Djarum Kudus Cigarettes 1951

It is fitting that one of Indonesia's best known kretek companies, both at home and overseas, has its entire manufacturing and packaging line located in Kudus, Indonesia, the birth of kretek. While all the other larger kretek companies are either wholly or partially owned by direct descendants of the original founding family, the present owners of Djarum have no connection whatsoever with the people who first established the business.

The company was originally called Djarum Gramophon, (lit. 'gramophone needle'), but when the firm was acquired in 1951 by Oei Wie Gwan, the father of the present owners, he shortened the name to just Djarum.
Wie Gwan started out with seventy employees and from the beginning he kept a firm grip on all aspects of kretek production, personally blending the tobacco, cloves and sauce mixture himself, to ensure that the quality of his kretek was maintained. The company's first brands were Djarum and Kotak Adjaib and originally they were only sold in the Kudus area.

Realizing the need for professional management, Wie Gwan's sons, Budi and Bambang hired the best that the market could offer and in 1970, they established a research and development department to come up with new and innovative tobacco products. Budi and Bambang also saw that while Indonesia might provide a huge market for their kretek, the potential for export was even bigger. In 1972, they began exporting handrolled kretek to tobacco retailers around the world, from Japan to the Netherlands and the best-known brands of kretek outside Indonesia, with the famous gramophone needle logo a familiar sight in tobacconists far and wide.

Come the mid-1970s, Budi and Bambang were quick to realize that if they wanted to stay competitive, they would have to follow Bentoel's lead and mechanize. The first of their machine-made kretek, Djarum Filter, was launched in 1976, followed in 1981 by Djarum Super, which for a time, was Indonesia's best-selling filter kretek.

By far their most innovativer product, however, was the Djarum Kretek Cigarillo - the world's first cigarillo spiced with cloves. In 1984, the company sent two of its employees to the Oud Kampen Cigarillo factory in the Netherlands in order to learn the intricacies of making cigarillos. It took some time to perfect the art of blending cigar tobaccos with cloves but Djarum finally got the formula right and introduced a completely new kretek experience to the smoking public.

(Contents are taken from "Kretek Book" by Mark Hanusz)