A Boutique Wants 100 Candles at Wholesale Pricing — How Much Can I Discount if Larger Raw-Material Purchases Reduce My Cost Per Candle?

What the cost per candle actually does at a hundred

Every wholesale conversation starts from the same shared assumption: that a hundred-unit order lets the maker buy raw materials at a better rate, and that the better rate funds the discount. It is a reasonable assumption. On this store it is mostly not what happens, and the honest version of this page has to say so before it does any arithmetic in your favour.

Here is the whole of it, on a 200 g soy candle at an 8% fragrance load. A fragrance load is a percentage of wax weight, so 200 g of wax carries 16 g of oil and 216 g goes into the vessel — that is the reading this page carries throughout, and every per-candle figure below uses it. Buy the smallest sensible packs and the candle costs ₹230.02: Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 at the 500 g pack rate of ₹520.00 a kilogram, Japanese Cherry Blossom at the 100 gm rate of ₹5.00 a gram, a 200ml Salsa Glass Jar at ₹40.12 in the 5 Pcs pack, and a Thin (C1) wick at ₹5.90. Buy the packs a hundred-candle order justifies and it costs ₹214.35.

₹15.67 a candle. Across a hundred, ₹1,566.80. That is a real number and it is not nothing — but it is 6.81% of the cost, not the thirty or forty per cent a boutique buyer often imagines is sitting there. If you quote on the assumption that volume halves your materials cost, you will be funding the difference out of your own contribution for as long as the account lasts.

Where the ₹15.67 comes from, line by line

Run the ladder on each product rather than assuming, because the four lines behave in four different ways and only one of them behaves the way the wholesale conversation expects. Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 has one step and it sits at the bottom: ₹520.00 a kilogram in the 500 g pack, and ₹507.40 a kilogram in the 1 kg, the 5 kg and the 10 kg. On 200 g of wax that step is ₹2.52 a candle, and it is entirely spent by the time you reach the 1 kg pack. Going from 1 kg to 10 kg saves ₹0.00. The 10 kg pack is worth buying for the single delivery and the single unpacking, not for the rate.

Japanese Cherry Blossom falls the other way — gently, and all the way up. Its rungs run ₹6.93 a gram at 15 gm, ₹5.40 at 50 gm, ₹5.00 at 100 gm, ₹5.00 at 500 gm and ₹4.84 at 1 kg. The step you will actually use is the one from 100 gm to 1 kg, which is ₹0.16 a gram, or ₹2.53 on the 16 g in one candle. Note the 100 gm and 500 gm rungs are the same rate as each other; buying the 500 gm pack instead of five 100 gm packs changes your outlay and not your cost per candle. Other oils on the store behave differently again, so run the ladder on the one you are actually buying.

The vessel is where the money is, and it is the line most makers never check. 200ml Salsa Glass Jar is ₹40.12 a jar in the 5 Pcs pack and ₹29.50 in both the 50 Pcs and the 100 Pcs packs. That is ₹10.62 a candle — more than the wax and the oil steps put together, and 67.79% of the whole fall. If you take one thing from this page into your next order, take that: on a hundred-candle job the pack size that matters most is the jar pack, not the wax pack.

The wick does not move at all. Eco Candle Wicks Thin (C1) is ₹5.90 a wick at the 10, 20, 50, 100, 500 and 1000 packs — identical at every one. The Thick (C2) grade is ₹9.44 a wick, also identical across its own packs. Choosing a bigger wick pack is a decision about how often you want to reorder, not a decision about cost per candle.

The order sheet for a hundred, with the leftovers named

A hundred candles at 200 g of wax each needs 20 kg of wax and 1.6 kg of fragrance oil, plus a hundred jars and a hundred wicks. The wax is tidy: two 10 kg packs come to exactly 20 kg for ₹10,148.00, nothing left over. The jars are tidy: one 100 Pcs pack is exactly a hundred for ₹2,950.00. The wicks are tidy at ₹5.90 each, whichever pack you take. The oil is where pack arithmetic starts costing money, because 1.6 kg is not a pack size.

There are two honest ways to buy it and they give different-looking answers. Buy 1 kg + 500 gm + 100 gm and you get exactly 1,600 g for ₹7,842.00, which is ₹4.90 a gram — a little above the 1 kg rate of ₹4.84, because two of the three packs are priced at ₹5.00. Buy two 1 kg packs instead and you pay ₹9,684.00 for 2 kg at ₹4.84 a gram, with 400 g left over worth ₹1,936.80 at that rate. The second route costs ₹1,842.00 more today and leaves you holding stock; whether that is a cost or an investment depends entirely on whether the boutique reorders that scent.

Two honesties about that sheet. First, it assumes zero wastage: no wax left in the jug, no abandoned pour, no chipped jar. Your real figure is above ₹215.30 a candle and the only way to know by how much is to weigh what you start with and count what you finish with over one full batch. Second, it buys exactly a hundred jars for exactly a hundred candles, which no experienced maker does. A hundred and five jars for a hundred candles is prudent; at ₹29.50 each that is ₹147.50, or ₹1.48 a candle, and it is your call rather than an industry rule.

The two levers that are not on any rate ladder

CSI publishes three spend-based discount codes: HAPPY5 for 5% off an order over ₹5,000, BIZWIZ8 for 8% off an order over ₹12,000 and YAY10 for 10% off an order over ₹20,000. Say plainly what they are, because the distinction matters when you explain your pricing to a buyer: these are discounts on the value of the whole basket, not breaks on the rate per kilogram of any product. A basket of wax alone and a basket of wax, oil, jars and wicks reach the threshold the same way.

The hundred-candle materials bill is ₹21,530.00, which clears the ₹20,000 threshold with ₹1,530.00 to spare. Ten per cent of it is ₹2,153.00, or ₹21.53 a candle, which is larger than every rate step on this page combined. It also introduces a genuine cliff worth knowing about: a sixty-candle version of the same order would come to about ₹12,918.00 and reach only the 8% code. Reaching a threshold by buying a scent you do not need is not a saving, but reaching it by consolidating orders you were going to place anyway is.

The second lever is inbound delivery, and it rewards a single consignment rather than a large one. The packs in this order carry stored packed weights of 11 kg for each 10 kg wax pack, 1.5 kg for the 1 kg oil, 0.8 kg for the 500 gm, 0.2 kg for the 100 gm and 0.2 kg for the wicks. Sent as six separate parcels those bill ₹2,850.00 between them at the published September 2026 bands. Sent as one consignment they weigh 24.7 kg, which falls in the Under 25 kg Expedited Shipping band at ₹2,000.00. The difference is ₹850.00, or ₹8.50 a candle.

The jars have to travel separately and the arithmetic stops there, which is worth saying rather than quietly omitting. The 100 Pcs pack of 200ml Salsa Glass Jar carries a stored packed weight of 110 kg and the 50 Pcs pack 53 kg. The heaviest published band on the store stops at 50 kg, so no published rate covers either pack and this page will not extrapolate one. Ask for the delivery cost on the jars when you place the order — WhatsApp is the right place for it — and treat it as a blank row in your costing until you have the figure. Two reviews on the store say the delivery charges are high; that is a fair criticism and the answer to it is to consolidate and to ask for the figure before you quote, not to leave it out of the sheet.

What all of that actually funds

Stack the levers in the order they arrive and the hundred-candle job looks like this. A maker buying the smallest sensible packs pays ₹230.02 a candle in materials. Buying the packs this order justifies takes that to ₹215.30 on the order sheet. The published YAY10 code takes it to ₹193.77. Add the consolidated inbound consignment at ₹20.00 a candle and the landed materials cost is ₹213.77 — plus the jar delivery, which is a blank row until CSI quotes it.

Now the part this page will not do for you. ₹36.25 a candle separates small-pack buying from properly-bought-and-coded buying, and a further ₹8.50 comes from consolidating the inbound delivery. That is the room. It is not a discount you owe the boutique — it is contribution you created by buying well, and how much of it you pass on depends on what the account is worth to you, what your own channel earns, and whether the boutique's customers would otherwise have been yours. Some makers pass on all of it to win a first account. Some pass on none and treat the buying gain as the reward for the extra work. Both are defensible. Neither is arithmetic.

What is arithmetic is the floor. Whatever wholesale price you land on has to sit above your landed materials cost plus every blank row above plus whatever contribution the job has to earn to be worth doing. Fill the blanks in once, honestly, and the floor writes itself. Quote below it and you are paying the boutique for the privilege of making their candles.

Costing a hundred-unit order on your own products

One last timing note, because a hundred candles is a fortnight of work rather than an afternoon. Soy throw keeps developing well past a first test burn — the Luxury Soy Wax Chunks page itself says ideally one to two weeks — and 14 to 21 days is normal practice for a soy container candle. If the boutique wants the hundred for a Diwali window, and Diwali 2026 falls on 8 November 2026, the pour date rather than the price is the thing to agree first. Work backwards from the shelf date through the cure, the packing and the delivery leg, then back through your own inbound delivery, and place the CSI order before you quote rather than after.

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