How to Calculate Profit Per Candle

Profit per candle is a subtraction, not a percentage

There are two useful questions about a candle and they are not the same question. What proportion of the price is profit is a ratio, and it is useful for comparing one SKU against another. What does this candle leave in my hand is a subtraction, and it is the one that buys your next 10 kg of wax. This page is entirely about the second. Every figure below is in rupees per unit, and the sum runs in one direction only: start with what you receive, take away everything that exists because this candle exists, and stop.

The formal name for what survives that subtraction is contribution. It is not profit yet. Profit arrives only when enough candles have contributed to cover the costs that do not move with production — rent or the share of the kitchen you have annexed, your Shopify plan, your camera, the bulk of your own time. Contribution per candle multiplied by candles sold, minus those fixed costs, is the month's operating result. Keeping the two ideas apart is the single most useful discipline in candle costing, because it tells you immediately whether a weak month was a pricing problem or a volume problem.

A cost is variable if it appears again when you make one more candle. Wax, oil, wick, sticker, jar and care label obviously qualify. So do the less obvious ones: the jar that broke, the pour that frosted badly enough to reject, the wax left clinging to the pitcher, the tester you posted to an influencer, the commission a marketplace takes, the courier you absorbed as free shipping. A cost is fixed if making one more candle does not change it: the melter you bought once, the stall rent for an exhibition weekend, the annual domain fee. Fixed costs are not less real — they are simply recovered by volume rather than by unit.

The costed unit: one candle, every rupee

The candle: a 150 g fill of Eco Soy CSI 400 in a White Matte Glass Jar, scented with Roasted Coffee Fragrance Oil at 8% of wax weight, an Eco Candle Wick Thin (C1), a wick sticker and a care sticker. The Eco Soy page describes a single-pour soy that needs no additives and recommends Eco Wicks; it does not publish a fragrance ceiling, so 8% here is a working load taken from the oil's own stated range rather than from a wax maximum. If you intend to push higher, ask on WhatsApp first.

Sixty of those candles — a realistic weekend and a half of pouring for one person — consume ₹11,083.92 of CSI materials, or ₹11,745.85 once the two allowances are applied. Those are the numbers to carry into a purchase order. The per-candle figure is for pricing; the batch figure is for buying, and confusing the two is how a maker ends up with a beautiful cost sheet and an empty jar shelf on the Thursday before a fair.

The per-unit costs makers forget

The material lines are the ones people remember, because they arrive in a box with an invoice. The costs below arrive quietly, one candle at a time, and they are the difference between a sheet that says a candle earns ₹453.24 and a bank balance that disagrees. Each one is genuinely per-unit: it grows with every candle you make or sell.

Rejects, breakage and the monsoon

A frosted top you would not sell, a sink hole that reopened overnight, a jar that arrived cracked, a candle that tunnelled in the test burn. At the 5% allowance used here, every saleable candle carries ₹9.24 of the ones that failed. Glass deserves particular respect in Indian conditions: a delivery van standing in 40°C Ahmedabad afternoon heat, a monsoon week in Kochi with damp cartons, an inter-city transfer with three handovers. Order glass a little deep, count what arrives, and treat the breakage rate as a number you measure rather than a hope.

Testers, samples and the candles you give away

Every brand gives candles away — to a stall visitor, a photographer, a potential stockist, a friend who posts about it. If one candle in every twenty-five leaves without money attached, each sold candle carries ₹7.70 of sampling on this build, taking variable cost to ₹203.46. That is a marketing decision worth making deliberately, with a number attached, rather than discovering at the end of a quarter.

Discounts, codes and commissions

A 10% code on the illustrative ₹649.00 ticket takes revenue to ₹584.10 and contribution from ₹453.24 to ₹388.34 — a fall of ₹64.90 per candle, which is far more painful than 10% sounds because the whole discount comes out of contribution rather than out of the price evenly. A marketplace commission behaves the same way: 15% of ₹649.00 is ₹97.35, gone before the money reaches you. CSI does not publish or sell any channel cost, so the rate you use must come from your own platform statement.

Free shipping and the order that had one candle in it

Absorbed courier is a real per-unit cost on a single-candle order and a much smaller one on a three-candle order, which is why free-shipping thresholds exist. Work it out per order, then divide by the candles in a typical order rather than assuming one. CSI publishes no delivery rates or timelines, so this figure can only come from your courier's invoices — but leaving it at zero quietly moves your whole range into loss on exactly the orders you are most proud of.

Profit per candle at four illustrative prices

Here is the contribution the costed candle makes at four illustrative price points. These are arithmetic illustrations, not recommended prices — CSI does not advise on what you charge — and every figure is before your own packaging, courier, labour and channel rows go in.

Read the last column carefully, because it is the sentence most candle businesses never finish. At ₹449.00 a candle you need 40 candles a month to clear ₹10,000.00 of illustrative fixed costs; at ₹749.00 you need 19. That is the whole argument for pricing well stated in units rather than percentages — and it is calculated before your own per-unit rows, so the true count is higher than both.

A month of candles: what the arithmetic leaves

Contribution per candle multiplied by candles sold gives the month's contribution, and it is the only number that tells you whether the range and the volume fit each other. The table below runs four realistic monthly volumes for a home or small studio operation against the four illustrative prices. Every cell is contribution before your own per-unit rows and before any fixed cost — a ceiling, in other words, and one that falls as soon as your packaging and courier figures go in.

Two readings of that grid are worth having. The first is the diagonal: 120 candles at ₹549.00 and 60 candles at ₹749.00 are not far apart in contribution, but they are an entirely different amount of pouring, curing, labelling, photographing and answering messages. The second is the floor: whatever your fixed costs are, they cut a horizontal line across this grid, and every cell below it is a month that lost money however busy it felt.

Break-even, without inventing your numbers

Break-even in units is fixed costs ÷ contribution per candle. CSI has no idea what your fixed costs are and will not guess, so fill the first column with your own figure; the three rows below are illustrative amounts included only to show how the arithmetic behaves.

Equipment, minutes and the hour nobody paid for

Equipment is fixed cost, not variable, and mixing it into the per-candle line distorts everything. A Mini Electric Wax Melter at ₹2,360.00 spread over 500 candles is ₹4.72 each; over 2,000 candles it is ₹1.18; after that it is nothing at all. A working starter bench of melter, Pen Thermometer, Steel Pouring Pitcher and Wick Centring Device is ₹3,540.00, or ₹7.08 a candle across 500. Keep that number beside your sheet if you like, but keep it out of variable cost, or your first month will look like a disaster and your sixth like a fantasy.

Labour is the opposite: entirely variable, entirely real, and almost never in the sheet. Time one honest batch from switching the melter on to sticking the last care label, including cleaning the pitcher and the bench. Divide the minutes by the candles. Apply whatever hourly rate you would pay someone else to do it — not what you think your time is worth in the abstract, but what the job costs in your city. CSI cannot price this and does not try; it is one of the blank rows on every worksheet in this series. A sheet with a zero in the labour row is not describing a cheap candle, it is describing an unpaid one.

Scale changes the shape of the argument. The same hour that produces twelve candles by double boiler might produce many more with a bigger melter — the imported Electric Wax Melter at ₹21,240.00 for the 10 kg model exists for exactly that reason — and the correct way to evaluate that purchase is not "can I afford it" but "how many candles of contribution does it take to repay it, and will I pour that many this season". At ₹453.24 of contribution a candle, the mini melter repays itself in 6 candles under the illustrative price used here. That is a decision you can defend at a bank counter.

Six ways profit per candle goes missing

One: costing from the wrong pack. Wax at a 500 g rate, oil at a 100 gm rate, wicks by the ten. The per-candle figures in this guide come from 1 kg wax, 1 kg oil, 100-wick and 10-jar packs; move down the pack ladder and every candle costs more. Re-cost whenever your buying pattern changes, and check the linked product pages, which are always authoritative.

Two: no allowance for what never sold. Rejects, breakage, pot residue and testers add ₹18.73 to this candle under the assumptions used here. Left out, they look like nothing; across 240 candles a month they are ₹4,495.02.

Three: the gift set that was never costed as a unit. Two candles, a bigger box, a ribbon, one courier. It is a different unit with a different variable cost, and it usually contributes less per candle than either candle sold alone. Cost the set as a set.

Four: unpaid labour. If your hours were free, your contribution is overstated by exactly what someone else would have charged. It is the quickest way to build a business that cannot hire, because the first employee makes the maths collapse.

Five: fixed costs that crept in as variable. The melter, the fair stall, the annual subscription. Amortise them or put them below the line, but do not sprinkle them across the candle line, where they make small batches look impossible and big ones look like magic.

Six: never re-running the sheet. Material prices move, packs change, couriers revise their cards, and a candle costed last Diwali is not this Diwali's candle. Re-run it before every season and before any wholesale conversation — and ask on WhatsApp for bulk pricing before you commit to a price, because published pack rates are the starting point rather than the whole story at volume.

Get those six right and profit per candle becomes a number you can act on: which SKU to push, which to retire, whether a discount is affordable, how many candles a fair has to sell to be worth the stall, and what a wholesale price would have to clear before it is worth quoting. It will not tell you the business is healthy on its own — that needs volume and the costs below the line — but no other single figure tells you more per minute of arithmetic.

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