I Have 20 Candle SKUs — How Do I Combine Their Individual BOMs to Calculate My Total Monthly Wax Requirement?

Why twenty SKUs need twenty wax lines before they need one

With twenty SKUs, nobody wants to calculate wax twenty times — so the usual shortcut is to add up the fill weights. That treats every gram of every candle as wax. On this page's range, the fills add up to 136,125 g a month; the candles actually hold 123,794 g of wax, because the fragrance oil takes 9.06% of the finished weight on average. The shortcut over-states the wax by 12,331 g before any allowance — and it hides a second problem: the SKUs do not all use the same wax.

The reliable method is short. Give every SKU its own wax line (fill × (1 − load)), apply the allowances per SKU because QC candles and rejects happen per pour, and only then add the lines up — separately for each wax. The wax total is a sum of twenty BOM lines, not a property of the range.

The 20-line BOM, one row per SKU

The range below is the reader's example: five fragrance families in five containers, 905 candles a month. Twelve SKUs run at 6–10% in Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464, whose product page states a fragrance load of up to 10%. Eight stronger SKUs run at 10–12% in Luxury Soy Wax Chunks, whose page states up to 13% — which is why they cannot move into CSI 464 at 12%. The 200 g White Matte, 110 g Yankee and 180 g Salsa fills are the reader's weighed fills; the 85 g tin and 50 g velvet jar fills are published by CSI. Allowances: one QC candle per SKU, an example 3% reject rate and 4% pour loss on wax.

Two lines show why the load column matters. A 200 g candle holds 184 g of wax at 8% and 176 g at 12%: the strong-throw SKUs use 8 g less wax per candle and 8 g more oil. Across the four 200 g Chunks SKUs that is small, but across a whole range with mixed loads it is the difference between the right bag count and one bag too many. And Jasmine and British Rose in the velvet jar at 6% put 47 g of wax into each 50 g candle — almost the whole fill.

A faster check: group the SKUs that share a BOM

Twenty rows collapse into a handful of groups once you notice that wax only cares about three things: fill, load and which wax. Every SKU with the same three is the same wax line, whatever its fragrance. Use the grouped table to sanity-check the 20-line total — if the two disagree, a row has the wrong load or the wrong wax.

In this range, 9 groups carry all twenty SKUs. That is also a useful signal for standardising a range: every extra fill-and-load combination is another wax line to manage, and a second wax doubles the number of bags on the shelf. Whether a second wax is worth it is a formulation question — here it exists because the 12% SKUs need a wax whose published ceiling is above 10%.

Rounding each wax to real CSI packs

CSI 464 is priced flat at ₹507.40 a kilo in 1 kg, 5 kg and 10 kg bags (the 500 g bag is ₹520.00 a kilo), so its cheapest cover is simply the fewest bags that reach 89,682 g: 9 × 10 kg, ₹45,666.00, leaving 318 g. Chunks are shaped differently. The 500 g bag is the cheapest per kilo (₹598.00), the 1 kg and 5 kg are ₹599.00, and the 10 kg is ₹599.90. The strictly cheapest cover for 47,361 g is 95 × 500 g at ₹28,405.00; the practical one is 9 × 5 kg + 2 × 1 kg + 1 × 500 g at ₹28,452.00 — ₹47.00 more, far fewer bags. This page buys the practical one.

The leftover is not waste: it rolls into next month's calculation as stock on hand. If you would rather run the whole range on one wax, Chunks is the only one of the two that can — its page's 13% ceiling covers the 12% SKUs — and 137,043 g of Chunks would cost ₹82,362.00 as 27 × 5 kg + 2 × 1 kg + 1 × 500 g, against ₹74,118.00 for the two-wax split. That is a cost difference of ₹8,244.00 a month in exchange for one fewer wax to stock — but moving twelve SKUs to a new wax is a formula change, and each would need retesting first.

The month's shared-materials order

Wax is not the only line the twenty SKUs share. Wicks (two types — the reader's tested Eco Thick C2 in the 180–200 g containers and Eco Thin C1 in the smaller ones; CSI publishes no wick-size-per-diameter chart), one sticker per wick, and five containers. Breakage of 2% is applied to the three glass jars; the aluminium tins get none, and the velvet jars are left at zero — use your own figure. The oils are deliberately not on this list: each fragrance is its own reorder, and the one-oil-in-three-products post shows how to combine an oil used across several SKUs, as Lavender, Vanilla Bean, Roasted Coffee, British Rose, Jasmine and Woody Oud are here.

Two price shapes are worth noticing. The Salsa jar is ₹40.12 each in 5s and ₹29.50 in 50s and 100s — yet for 127 jars the cheapest cover is 1 × pack of 100 + 6 × pack of 5 at ₹4,153.60, because a 100 plus a 50 (₹4,425.00) buys 23 jars you do not need. Always compute the cover; the cheaper unit price is not always the cheaper order. The Yankee jar is sold singly at ₹47.20, so the count is exact. The White Matte jar is ₹70.80 in 5s and 10s alike. The Thin C1 10-pack was out of stock on the 4 October 2026 re-check; the Thick C2 10-pack is in stock.

Buy now, buy after testing

Everything on this order supports SKUs that already sell, so it can all be bought now. The buy-after-testing lines in a 20-SKU business are usually consolidation ideas: moving SKUs onto one wax, one wick or one container to simplify the order. Each is a formula change and waits for a test.

The two waxes and the shared lines

Keeping a 20-SKU wax total right every month

The per-SKU forecast that feeds the units column is the five-SKU forecasting post at a smaller scale. The same combine-by-material logic is applied to one oil across products in 5986, one jar across fragrances in 5987 and three wick sizes in 5988; all of it lands in one consolidated monthly order. The method end to end is on the cluster hub.

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