I Have Ten Candle SKUs — Should I Optimise the Highest-Volume Products First Even If Another SKU Has Worse Percentage Margins?

The ten-SKU table, ranked two ways

Every figure in this table is a labelled worked example: your volumes, prices, COGS and achievable savings will differ, and the achievable saving is whatever your own audit of each SKU found (pack sizes, a load test, waste). Three SKUs share the clear 200 ml Salsa jar at a 160 g worked fill; the rest use the reader's own jars. Margin here is (price − COGS) ÷ price, materials only.

Read the last column, not the margin column. The worst-margin SKU, the oud reserve at 38.4%, ranks ninth by rupees; the lavender, with an unremarkable 60.3%, ranks first. The ten SKU-level opportunities add up to ₹3,09,720.00 a year, and the top three (lavender, vanilla, lemon) hold ₹1,49,040.00 of it, 48.1%: nearly half the money in three of ten SKUs, while the bottom three, the oud included, hold 15.1%. Ranges with a few strong sellers often look like this (judgement; check your own split), and it is the whole argument for starting at the top of the rupee ranking.

Why the percentage ranking points the wrong way

The pull towards the worst-margin SKU is understandable: 38% looks like a problem and 60% looks fine. But a cost-down does not change a percentage in the abstract; it adds rupees per candle, multiplied by the candles you sell. The oud's ₹40.00 saving is five times the lavender's ₹8.00 per candle, and the lavender sells more than eighteen times as many candles a month. Volume wins by ₹45,600.00 a year; the lavender's opportunity is 3.7 times the oud's. For the oud to match, it would need to sell 130 candles a month; for the lavender to fall to the oud's level, its saving would have to shrink to ₹2.15 a candle.

There are cases where the percentage view is right to worry you, and they are pricing questions: marketplace fees and discounts are charged as a percentage, so a thin-percentage SKU is the first to go negative when you run a sale. That is a reason to reprice it, not a reason to spend your first test candles on it. The full argument for rupee margin versus percentage margin belongs to the fast-seller margin post; a formal scoring system for a larger catalogue is the SKU ranking system, and the bestseller-versus-slow-seller version of this comparison with a ₹15.00 and a ₹50.00 saving is the ₹15 versus ₹50 post.

After the test cost: first-year net and payback

Every saving that changes the formula needs a test. Our worked example prices one nine-candle test per SKU (three candles at each of three settings) at the SKU's full COGS, plus 6 hours at ₹200.00 an hour (worked example; use your own rate). Expensive SKUs cost more to test, which widens the gap further:

The order barely moves, and the ends move further apart: the lavender's test pays back in 0.6 months, the oud's in 4.8. The top three SKUs' tests together cost ₹9,117.18. A sensible sequence is therefore: free purchasing changes first (no test), then tests on SKUs 1, 3 and 2 in parallel, then the middle of the list as capacity allows, with the low-opportunity SKUs last or never. Seasonal SKU 7 ranks last on our numbers; if it sells only in a festive window, its true annual volume may be lower still. How to run several SKU tests without losing track of which change did what is the 20-SKU confirmation-test post.

Inside SKU 1: where an ₹8.00 comes from

The top SKU's ₹8.00 is not abstract. Here is the illustrative BOM behind it: the wax and wick are CSI's (Luxury Soy Wax Chunks at the 10 kg tier, Eco C2), the oil, jar and label are the reader's own supplier's figures (labelled; not a claim about any supplier).

Two levers make the ₹8.00. a. Oil pack size (no test): buying the same oil in 1 kg instead of 500 g packs from the reader's supplier, ₹3,200.00 to ₹3,000.00 a kilo on 16 g, saves ₹3.20. b. Load 8% → 7% (test-gated): 2 g less oil at ₹3.00 a gram, with 2 g more Chunks to keep the fill, saves ₹4.80. Lever a can start tomorrow; lever b waits for a blind burn test across the candle's life (finding the lowest load that still throws owns that method). At 650 a month, lever a alone is ₹24,960.00 a year before any candle is poured.

Notice what the BOM also shows: Chunks wax is 50.6% of this candle. That is not a SKU-level lever; it is shared by all ten SKUs, which is where the next section starts.

Shared components: one change, many SKUs

A line used by several SKUs aggregates their volumes. Changing it is one purchasing decision, or one formulation decision, with the volume of the whole group behind it. In this range three components are shared: the Chunks wax (all ten SKUs, about 479.1 kg a month at 8%), the Eco C2 wick (all ten) and the clear Salsa jar (SKUs 2, 4 and 7). Here is what each can and cannot do, on CSI's live prices:

The jar pack break is free money, if it applies. The clear Salsa is ₹29.50 a jar in 50s and ₹40.12 in 5s. Counted on SKU 7 alone (110 a month) the saving looks like ₹14,018.40 a year; counted on the three SKUs that share the jar it is ₹1,18,519.20. If you already buy in 50s or 100s, there is nothing here; check before you assume.

Bigger packs of our wax and wicks lift nothing. We would rather say it plainly: the Chunks 10 kg bag costs ₹9.00 more than ten 1 kg bags, and Eco C2 is ₹9.44 a wick from the 10-pack to the 1,000-pack. Pooling ten SKUs' orders into bigger bags of either buys convenience, not a lower price.

Switching the shared wax is the biggest number on the page, and the biggest job. Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 is ₹92.50 a kilo cheaper than Chunks at the 10 kg tier (₹17.02 on a 184 g candle); Eco Soy CSI 400 is ₹200.90 a kilo cheaper (₹36.97). Across this range that is ₹5,31,840.96 or ₹11,55,101.07 a year. But it is a reformulation of all ten SKUs: ten tests (₹36,183.18 at full COGS), a lower stated load ceiling on CSI 464 (up to 10%, against Chunks' 13%) and none stated for Eco Soy in the text we captured. By the same rupee arithmetic it outranks every single SKU (₹5,31,840.96 against SKU 1's ₹62,400.00), which is why the method pulls shared components out first. Plan it as a range project and test it in rupee order: SKUs 1, 3 and 2 first, then the rest. Whether one commercial wax across a whole collection makes sense is the standardise-on-one-wax post; whether the wick and fragrance retesting it triggers is worth the saving is the retest-every-SKU post.

The worst-margin SKU: reprice, optimise later, or drop

SKU 10 sells 35 a month at ₹999.00 against a ₹615.00 COGS: ₹384.00 a candle, 38.4%, ₹13,440.00 a month. To match the range's roughly 60% it would need a price of ₹1,537.50. Its ₹40.00 saving is real but ranks ninth, so the first move is the price. These are the options, with a 30% volume fall as a labelled worked example of how buyers might react:

At ₹1,299.00 the oud earns ₹684.00 a candle, and it keeps today's contribution down to 19.6 candles a month: it can lose 43.9% of its buyers before repricing costs you anything. Test it the honest way: change the price on the listing for a month and watch units, rather than guessing. Bank its ₹40.00 saving later, after the top three.

Drop it only if repricing fails and something better needs its cash, shelf space or production time. Its oil is a small draw (about 0.56 kg a month at 16 g a candle), so the cash case for dropping is weak here; it would be stronger if the oud needed a separate bulk oil bought far ahead of use. How to price an expensive oud candle against the rest of the range is the expensive oud post; whether a premium candle's cost needs cutting at all is the premium-COGS post.

The shared components, priced

Four components the worked-example range shares, chosen on page statements, price and stock on 4 October 2026. CSI publishes no throw or burn data, so nothing is ranked on performance. Per-candle figures use 184 g of wax (200 g at 8%).

Skip: bigger bags of Chunks and bigger packs of C2 for a discount (there is none), and any production quantity of a new wax before your top SKUs have passed on it.

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