I Have ₹25,000 for Fragrance Oils — How Should I Divide It Between Core Fragrances, Experimental Scents and Seasonal Fragrances?

Months of cover: the only unit that works across three tiers

The 60-25-15 habit is comforting because it is arithmetic you can do in your head, and because it feels disciplined. Its weakness is that it assumes the three tiers are the same kind of thing. They are not. A core scent is a flow problem — it runs down at a predictable rate and needs replacing before it hits zero. An experimental scent is a capacity problem — it costs you pours and cure weeks far more than it costs you rupees. A seasonal scent is a timing problem — all of its demand arrives in a few weeks and none of it arrives afterwards. One ratio cannot be right for all three.

Months of cover is the unit that lets you compare them honestly, because it converts rupees into time. The formula is three steps and it uses only your own numbers:

Now the tier rules fall out of it. Core: target three months of cover. Three months is long enough that you are not reordering weekly and short enough that a scent you retire has not become a liability. Experimental: target one quarter's testing bench, whatever that costs. Seasonal: target the test quantity only, and hold the production money.

Is ₹25,000 even the right number for you?

Before you split a budget, check that the budget fits the business. Months of cover works in reverse too: pick a cover target, multiply out your volume, and see what three months of oil actually costs. The range below uses ₹3 and ₹5 a gram, which brackets most of the single-note oils in the range — Citrus Lemon is ₹2.832 a gram at 1 kg and Lavender is ₹5.221.

If your row is 150 or 250, the structure on this page still holds — scale the core tier and keep the bench and the staging exactly as they are. The experimental tier does not grow with your budget, because it is bounded by how many honest tests you can run, and the seasonal tier does not grow until a season has actually reported back.

Tier one · the core kilos

Core scents are the ones you would be embarrassed to be out of. Four is a sensible number at this volume: enough range for a customer to choose, few enough that each one gets 17 or 18 candles a month and therefore turns over. The two selection tests are simple — the scents must be genuinely different from each other, which you can check from the pages' own note structures, and the kilo must actually be the cheaper rung, which you have to check per listing because it is not always true.

Tier two · the experimental bench

This is where the 25% rule does the most damage. ₹6,250 buys roughly thirteen 100 g packs of single-note oil. Thirteen new scents means thirteen separate pours, thirteen cure windows and thirteen sets of burn notes — and because a new scent can change the wick you need, it also means up to thirteen wick comparisons. That is not a quarter's work. At 100 candles a month, with 15% of your units available for experiments, you have about 15 candles a month to spend on unproven oils. A proper six-jar test consumes 88.8 g and six of those candles.

Gardenia is worth pausing on, for two reasons that both come straight off its page. The first is pricing: at ₹4.330 a gram the 100 g pack is the cheapest rung on the entire listing, marginally below the 500 g and 1,000 g packs at ₹4.332. There is literally no volume reward there, which makes it the ideal bench oil. The second is process: its stated flashpoint is 98°C, and the page itself notes the lower figure and says to add the oil to wax below that temperature. Most soy pages specify adding fragrance at 80–90°C, so there is room — but it is less room than usual, and that is exactly the kind of thing a bench test is for.

Tier three · the staged seasonal buy

Diwali 2026 falls on 8 November. A festive range concentrates most of its demand into a few weeks, and then stops. That asymmetry is what makes seasonal fragrance the single easiest way to create dead stock: a spiced gourmand bought in quantity in September is either sold by mid-November or it is 500 g of oil you will not want to pour again until next October. So the seasonal tier gets a different rule from the other two — buy the test quantity now, hold the production money until early sell-through is visible.

The whole ₹25,000, line by line

Here is the complete allocation, with every figure traceable to a listed variant price. Note what it does not do: it does not spend the budget. ₹7,813.84 stays uncommitted, and ₹4,672.80 of that is earmarked rather than spent — it only moves if the seasonal test says so.

Set against the 60-25-15 rule, three differences stand out. Core takes a smaller share than the rule suggests in rupees but a larger share of the grams, because the kilo rung is where the per-gram price actually improves. Experimental drops from 25% to 7.5%, which is not thrift — it is the honest size of one quarter's testing. And seasonal splits into a spent ₹1,748.16 and an earmarked ₹4,672.80, which is the only structure that lets a festive range respond to its own first fortnight.

Three reorder rules to carry forward

An allocation is a snapshot. What keeps it working is three rules you apply every month, each using only your own figures. Lead time below is your observed figure — the number of days between placing an order and being able to pour from it, measured by you, on your own last three orders.

The demotion rule is the one that keeps this allocation from quietly becoming the dead-stock problem it was designed to avoid. Core status is not a permanent award. A scent that sold 20 a month in March and 8 a month in August is telling you something, and the correct response is a smaller pack at the next reorder rather than a discount in six months' time. The sell-through threshold itself — how many candles you should test and sell before a scent earns a kilo — is worked through in how many candles a fragrance should sell before it deserves bulk inventory.

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