Candle Making Raw Material List for a ₹25,000 Budget

The ₹25,000.00 raw material list, line by line

This basket makes 120 candles across six SKUs: three fragrance oils in two sizes, 60 candles at 150 g and 60 at 70 g. It totals ₹24,302.02 at September 2026 pricing, with ₹697.98 held back. Every candle carries 8% fragrance of wax weight — 12 g in the 150 g jar, 5.6 g in the votive — which sits inside the 10% maximum published on the Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 page and inside the 6–10% soy range published on all three oil pages. Where the wax ceiling and an oil range differ, the lower governs; here they agree at 10%.

Note where the money is. Vessels are 30.3% of the budget, wax 30.4% and fragrance oil 23.1%. That is the shape of a range business rather than a wax business: once you sell a jar that looks finished, the glass and its lid are the largest thing you buy. If that split looks wrong for your product, change the vessel before you change the wax — the 200ml Salsa Glass Jar at ₹29.50 each would take ₹64.90 out of every 150 g candle.

Three scents, two sizes: why six SKUs and not twelve

A SKU is not a recipe, it is a commitment: a scent in a size, in a vessel, with a wick that has passed a burn test, at a quantity that survives one market weekend. Split this budget twelve ways and each SKU is ten candles — too few to learn anything from, too few to photograph a shelf with, and too many wicks to test. Six SKUs at an average of twenty candles each is the smallest honest range this budget supports.

The three oils are chosen to be different from each other rather than similar-but-safe. The Roasted Coffee page describes a gourmand — warm, rich, invigorating — with a flashpoint of approximately 191–193°C and vanilla and caramel base notes that contain vanillin, which the page notes can tone white wax warmer over time. Woody Oud is described as oriental, woody and exotic. Lavender is floral, herbal and fresh, and the page states IFRA certification. All three publish a soy range of 6–10% of total wax weight.

Yellowing from vanillin is cosmetic, not a fault, and it matters more in a clear jar than in a tin. If a warm tone would bother you in the clear glass jar, run the coffee SKU in a coloured or opaque vessel and keep the clear glass for the oud and the lavender. That is a range decision you can make before you pour, and it costs nothing.

The trial scent gets thirty candles, not forty-five, and a 100 gm oil pack instead of a 500 gm one. That asymmetry is the whole point of the third slot: you are buying the right to find out whether lavender sells for you, without buying half a kilogram of it. A verified buyer of the Woody Oud oil above mentions that a lavender scent they bought is selling fast — useful, and still not your customer base.

Pack size moves the candle by rupees. Scent and vessel move it by tens

Take Roasted Coffee at 12 g a candle. In the 100 gm pack it is ₹3.90/g, so the oil in one candle costs ₹46.80. In the 500 gm pack it is ₹3.78/g — ₹45.36. At 1 kg it is ₹3.74/g — ₹44.86. Moving from the 100 gm pack to the 500 gm pack saves ₹1.44 a candle; going all the way to 1 kg saves ₹0.50 more. That is a 3.1% rate cut and then a 4.2% one, and in rupees per candle it is almost invisible.

Now change the scent instead. Lavender at the 100 gm rate puts ₹64.80 of oil in the same candle against ₹45.36 for Roasted Coffee — a difference of ₹19.44 per candle, and ₹583.20 across the thirty lavender candles in this list. Change the size instead and the gap is larger still: a 150 g jar costs ₹228.51 in materials against ₹97.65 for the 70 g votive, a difference of ₹130.86.

The practical rule that falls out of this table: choose the vessel and the size first, the scent second, and the pack size last. The vessel alone is 41% of the 150 g candle and 33% of the votive, while the fragrance is 20% of the jar. A maker who spends a week optimising pack sizes and then picks a heavier jar has moved the cost the wrong way by more than every pack decision put together.

The eighty spare wicks are not spares. They are the test budget

This list buys 200 wicks for 120 candles. The extra 80 are not insurance against loss; they are the burn tests that decide whether the Thin (C1) or the Thick (C2) belongs in each size. CSI publishes no wick-size table by jar diameter on the wick pages, so the honest answer is that you test. The live wick guide by diameter gives starting points; your own jars, your own wax and your own fragrance load finish the job.

At ₹5.90 and ₹9.44 each, a six-candle test round across both sizes and both wicks costs under fifty rupees in wicks and about ₹456.66 in wax. Against a ₹24,302.02 order, that is the cheapest insurance available, and the only one that catches a wick failure before you have poured sixty jars of it. The Luxury Soy Wax Chunks page asks for at least 48 hours of cure and ideally one to two weeks before burn testing, so build the test into the calendar rather than the last evening.

What ₹25,000.00 of raw materials does not include

This page prices only what CSI sells, from live CSI product pages. It does not price equipment, and it does not price packaging, freight, labour or marketing, because CSI neither sells nor publishes those — and a supplier inventing a number for your courier bill is worse than no number at all. Fill the rows below in yourself, then total the page as materials from CSI plus your own costs.

A six-SKU range raises the second column more than a two-SKU range does, and it is worth saying so out loud on a page that has just spent ₹24,302.02 of your money. Two vessel sizes usually means two carton sizes. Three scents means three label artworks, and a trial scent that fails still cost you its label print run. Plan the second column before you decide the range is affordable.

Two planning assumptions are baked into the materials column and should be named. The spare wax, wicks and stickers in this list amount to roughly a 5% allowance for spills, re-pours and breakage; that is an assumption for planning, not measured data. And the 8% fragrance load is a starting point — the Luxury Soy Wax Chunks page calls 8% a starting point and 10% its recommended figure, so a decision to move up will raise the oil line and nothing else.

On GST, registration and what you may claim, talk to your own adviser. CSI issues GST invoices and its listed prices are inclusive of taxes, as stated on the Luxury Soy Wax Chunks page. What that means for your turnover and your state is not a question a supplier or a blog should answer.

Cost per candle, and the four thousand rupees still on your shelf

Pouring all six SKUs consumes ₹20,254.57 of the ₹24,302.02 basket. The remaining ₹4,047.45 is stock: ₹913.32 of wax, ₹332.64 and ₹398.75 of the two anchor oils, ₹367.20 of lavender, ₹613.60 of wicks and ₹615.12 of care labels. Dividing the basket by 120 gives ₹202.52 a candle, which silently books next month’s oil into this month’s candles.

Use the SKU figures instead: ₹228.51 for a coffee jar, ₹237.52 for an oud jar, ₹247.95 for a lavender jar, and ₹97.65, ₹101.85 and ₹106.72 for the three votives. Those are what a candle costs in materials. Everything else — packaging, courier, labour, marketing, platform fees — is the second column you filled in above, and the pricing formula guide is where the two columns meet a retail price.

Three ways to spend the same ₹25,000.00 differently

Variant A — more candles, plainer glass

Swap the Clear Glass Jar with Golden Lid at ₹94.40 for the 200ml Salsa Glass Jar at ₹29.50 in the 50-pack, and the 150 g candle falls from ₹228.51 to ₹163.61 in materials. The saving of ₹64.90 a candle buys roughly another twenty-five candles across the range. You give up the lid and the weight that make a jar feel like a gift, which is exactly the thing customers pay for at the premium end.

Variant B — two scents, deeper stock

Drop the trial scent and put ₹1,620.00 into 1 kg packs of the two anchors instead: Roasted Coffee at ₹3,738.00 is ₹3.74/g and Woody Oud at ₹4,531.20 is ₹4.53/g. You get a lower per-gram rate, roughly a quarter’s cover on both scents, and four SKUs instead of six — a narrower shelf, a simpler label set and no answer at all to the question of whether a floral would sell for you.

Variant C — a premium wax on one line

Premium Coconut Soy CSI 468 is ₹650.00 a kilogram at 1 kg and ₹637.00/kg in the 5 kg pack, against ₹507.40/kg for CSI 464 — one of the few CSI waxes whose per-kilogram rate actually improves with pack size. Its page gives a melting point of 50–53°C, a pour temperature of 58–60°C and a ceiling of up to 13%, so it is a different process, not a drop-in swap. Running one SKU on it adds ₹19.44 of wax per 150 g candle and gives you something genuinely different to sell.

What none of the variants do is buy a cheaper candle by buying more of the same thing. Across CSI 464, the wicks and most vessel ladders, the per-unit rate is already what it will be. A better materials cost at this budget comes from choosing a lighter vessel, a cheaper scent family or a smaller fill — decisions about the product, which is what the profit guide and the which fragrances actually sell post argue about, and which no purchase order can fix.

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