Step 1 — forecast the units before you think about scents

The structural problem with festive candle making is a cash-flow one. You commit fragrance money in August and September against demand that arrives in November and December, and the compressed shape of the season means there is no meaningful ability to restock mid-way. A reorder placed on 20 October arrives, cures for a fortnight, and is ready to sell three days before Diwali. That is not a supply chain; that is a hope. So the forecast is one number, built from three inputs: last year's festive units, a growth multiplier you can defend, and committed orders already in hand.

Notice what is not in that table: follower count. A jump from 4,200 to 7,100 followers tells you your reach improved; it does not tell you 69% more people will buy a ₹799 candle. Social growth is a sanity check, not an input — feed it into a fragrance order and you buy oil against an audience that never intended to transact.

Step 2 — split the forecast across your scent mix

This is the step where even-handedness costs money. Four scents, 600 candles, 150 each feels fair and is almost always wrong. Festive demand concentrates. A gifting buyer is not exploring your range; they want the scent that reads as appropriate for a Diwali hamper, and two or three scents absorb the overwhelming majority of that intent. Split evenly and you sell out of the hero in the second week of October while a quarter of your fragrance budget sits in the scent that came fourth.

Applying the pattern is arithmetic; choosing which scent occupies which slot is a commercial decision with a long tail. Whatever sits in the hero and second slots, you are buying in kilograms. Put a novelty scent there and you have bought kilograms of something that dies on 26 December. Put a cross-seasonal scent there and the surplus becomes wedding-season stock. That is the argument for making scent choice part of the forecast rather than a separate creative exercise.

Step 3 — convert units into grams of oil

Fragrance is bought by weight and sold by candle, and the bridge between the two is your fragrance load. The standing CSI maths for a 200g finished candle at an 8% fragrance load is 16g of oil and 184g of wax. Multiply units by 16 and you have your gram requirement. Change either the candle size or the load and the multiplier changes with it.

Two rules govern this table. First, calculate the load against the finished candle weight, not the wax weight alone — a 200g candle at 8% is 16g of oil and 184g of wax, not 16g of oil and 200g of wax. Getting this backwards is the most common reason a maker runs short mid-batch. Second, your load ceiling is set by your wax, not by your ambition. Luxury Soy Wax Chunks take up to 13%; Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 flakes take up to 10%. There is no universal ceiling, and pouring above the one your wax states makes an oily candle that sweats, pools badly and burns unpredictably.

For the worked example, the split from step two becomes: 240 × 16g = 3,840g hero, 150 × 16g = 2,400g second, 120 × 16g = 1,920g third and 90 × 16g = 1,440g tail. Total 9,600g, which is exactly 600 × 16 — a useful check that nothing has drifted.

Step 4 — the buffer, and why 15–20% is the right number

Buffer stock feels like waste in September and looks like foresight in November. The case for it is not optimism about demand; it is the asymmetry of the two errors. In an ordinary trading month, over-ordering and under-ordering are roughly symmetrical — one ties up cash, the other loses a sale you recover next week. In a compressed season they are not.

A 20% buffer across the three cross-seasonal scents in this plan costs about ₹10,000 of additional oil. One missed 60-unit corporate hamper order costs several times that in margin alone, and the customer relationship on top. Buy the buffer — but weight it, because it should follow each scent's ability to survive the season:

Applied to the worked example, the buffered requirement becomes 3,840 × 1.20 = 4,608g hero, 2,400 × 1.20 = 2,880g second, 1,920 × 1.20 = 2,304g third and 1,440 × 1.10 = 1,584g tail — 11,376g in total, up from 9,600g.

Step 5 — convert grams into bottles and write the order sheet

Now the arithmetic meets the catalogue. Each buffered gram figure rounds up to the cheapest combination of 100g, 500g and 1kg bottles that meets or exceeds it — and that combination is not always the obvious one, because the per-gram curve differs from oil to oil. On three of the four scents below it is essentially flat, so buy the closest fit rather than over-ordering to chase a discount that does not exist. On Vanilla Bean there is a genuine bulk break, and the arithmetic changes.

The wax, wicks and vessels that have to scale alongside

A fragrance order placed without the matching wax, wick and vessel quantities is half an order — and the half that stops your production line. 600 candles at 184g of wax each is 110,400g, over 110kg, and that arrives on a pallet, not in a parcel. Order it in the same week so nothing waits on a second delivery.

That is ₹288.72 per candle in materials including all buffer. Stripped of buffer, the true per-unit cost is ₹251.94 on a weighted average across the four scents — 184g of wax at ₹110.20, one wick at ₹5.90, one jar at ₹47.20, and a weighted ₹88.64 of fragrance. At a materials-to-retail ratio of roughly 30–35%, that supports a retail price around ₹720–₹840, which is where well-made 200g Indian soy candles sit. Six hundred units at ₹799 is ₹4,79,400 of festive revenue against ₹1,73,232 of committed material cost.

Wick sizing is set by jar diameter, not by scent, and it should be locked during your September test pours rather than argued about in October. Eco Candle Wicks in Thin (C1) suit the jar in this order sheet; wider vessels move you to Thick (C2) at ₹944 per 100. If a festive candle reads weak, the wick is the first suspect, not the oil — the weak throw diagnosis guide works through the sequence properly.

The calendar: twelve weeks to 8 November, week by week

Diwali 2026 falls on Sunday 8 November, with Lakshmi Puja observed in the Pradosh Kaal muhurat between 5:31 and 7:55 pm. The five-day festival runs across the days either side, Dhanteras roughly two days before and Bhai Dooj roughly two days after — so the real selling and dispatch peak is the last ten days of October and the first week of November, not the festival day itself. From mid-August that is twelve weeks, and the sequence that consumes them is not negotiable: fragrance ordering → test and cure (14–21 days) → production run → cure again → packing → dispatch.

Holding stock through the season, and what to do with the surplus

Buying twelve weeks ahead means holding raw materials through a hot, humid Indian autumn, and storage discipline is what protects the money you have just committed. None of this is complicated; all of it is skipped.

What happens to what is left on 9 November

This is where the scent choices made in step two pay off or cost you. Cross-seasonal scents carry. The Indian wedding season runs broadly November to February and overlaps Diwali directly, which is exactly why fragrance stock has to cover both at once. Sandalwood, vanilla and oud move from festive gifting into wedding favours and return gifts without a single change to the product, and then into Valentine's Day on 14 February 2027, where Smoked Rose Royale, British Rose and Mogra come into their own. Surplus of a cross-seasonal oil is not dead stock; it is next quarter's stock, bought at this quarter's price.

Novelty scents do not carry. Apple cinnamon, pumpkin spice and autumn-leaf accords have a commercial life that ends with Christmas on 25 December 2026 and does not resume until the following September — a kilogram of surplus there is ten months of storage, quality risk and tied-up cash. What you choose in step two decides whether your buffer is an asset or a liability in December.

One habit worth building: record actuals against forecast the week after the season closes — units sold per scent, units left, oil left, and the date you ran out of anything. Twenty minutes while the numbers are fresh is what turns next August's forecast from a guess into a calculation, and it is the input that lets you shift the 40/25/20/15 distribution to match your actual customers rather than the market average.

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