I Know My Monthly Candle Sales — How Do I Convert Units Sold into Monthly Requirements for Wax, Fragrance Oils, Wicks and Jars?

Why units sold are not the number you buy for

Monthly sales are the best number most small candle businesses have, and they are the right starting point. But three gaps sit between "we sold 300 candles last month" and a wax order. The first is the shelf: if you finished the month with fewer candles in stock than you want to start the next one with, you must make more than you sell; if you over-poured last month, you make fewer. The second is yield: some poured candles are pulled for quality control and some fail. The third is formula: a sold candle is wax and oil together, so a 180 g candle holds 165.6 g of wax and 14.4 g of oil at 8%, not 180 g of wax.

Get those three right and the conversion is mechanical. Skip them and you get one of two familiar months: the one where you run out of Citrus Lemon on day 22, or the one where a 10 kg bag sits unopened because the shelf was already full. This page works one example through, SKU by SKU, and ends with a conversion card you can reuse every month. Its sibling 500 candles across five SKUs takes the next step — forecasting the month ahead per SKU rather than reusing last month — and 20% monthly growth handles a sales line that will not sit still.

Step 1: correct sales for the shelf

The example business sold 130 Roasted Coffee, 95 Citrus Lemon and 75 Cinnamon Vanilla candles last month. It wants to start each month holding about a quarter of a month's sales as finished stock (a labelled example — roughly a week of cover; pick your own figure). Today the shelf holds 25, 30 and 10. So Coffee needs 33 on the shelf and has 25: make 130 + 33 − 25 = 138. Citrus Lemon is over-stocked: 95 + 24 − 30 = 89, fewer than it sold. Cinnamon Vanilla is short: 84.

If you do not hold finished stock — you pour to order or sell everything you make within days — set the target and today's shelf both to zero and "to make" equals "sold". The rest of the method is unchanged. If you sell through a marketplace that holds your stock, count what is in their warehouse as shelf. And if last month was unusual (a festival week, a stock-out that capped sales), correct the sales figure before you start: the reorder sheet keeps a three-month average for exactly this reason.

Step 2: QC and rejects turn "to make" into "to pour"

Every SKU here is poured weekly, and one candle from each weekly pour is kept as a retained QC sample — 4 per SKU per month, a labelled working practice. Rejects (sinkholes you cannot fix, a tilted wick, a chipped rim) are an example 4%. QC candles are whole candles, so they are added first; rejects are a share of what you pour, so you divide. Coffee: (138 + 4) ÷ 0.96 = 147.92 → 148. Citrus Lemon → 97. Cinnamon Vanilla → 92. Total poured: 337 candles to sell 300.

Notice the shape of the result. The wax, wick and jar lines are added across SKUs because every SKU uses the same ones; the oil stays separate because each SKU has its own. That is the general rule for this whole cluster, and the 20-SKU wax post, the one-oil-three-products post and the one-jar-eight-fragrances post each take one material and do it at scale.

The conversion card: material per candle sold

If your shelf stays roughly level from month to month, the shelf correction drops out and every material becomes a simple multiplier on units sold. The card below folds the 3% loss, 4% rejects and 2% breakage into one factor per material for a 180 g candle at 8%. QC candles are left out because they are a fixed number per pour, not a share of sales — add them on top.

So every candle sold costs you 177.68 g of wax and 15.45 g of oil to replace, not 180 g. For a steady month of 300 sales with four QC candles per SKU on top, that is about 55,776 g of wax. This example month needs 57,481 g instead, because it is also rebuilding Cinnamon Vanilla's shelf. Keep the card next to your sales report; recompute the factors only when your loss, reject or breakage rates change by more than a point.

Step 3: round to real CSI packs and price it

Now each material is rounded up to the cheapest in-stock combination of CSI packs. The wax is Natural Soy Pearl Wax, the only CSI soy wax with a real bulk break: ₹450.00 a kilo at 1 kg, ₹424.80 a kilo from 5 kg — 5.6% less. Natural Soy Pearl's page publishes no fragrance ceiling, melt point or pour temperature, so the 8% here is the reader's own tested formula, not a CSI specification. The jar is the 200 ml Salsa Glass Jar with golden lug cap; CSI does not publish its fill weight, so the 180 g is the reader's weighed fill. The wick is Cotton Braided Wicks Ready Made, the wick that passed the reader's burn tests in this jar.

Two rounding details matter here. The wax is 5 × 10 kg + 1 × 5 kg + 3 × 1 kg: Natural Soy Pearl is also listed at 50 kg (₹21,240.00), but at ₹424.80 a kilo it is the same rate as the 10 kg bag, so it only saves handling — and it is in limited stock, so confirm on WhatsApp before planning around it. Rounding up to six 10 kg bags instead would cost ₹25,488.00, ₹774.00 more, for a cleaner shelf. The jars show the one real pack-price step in this order: the Salsa jar is ₹200.60 for 5 (₹40.12 each) but ₹1,475.00 for 50 and ₹2,950.00 for 100 (₹29.50 each). Buying 344 jars in 5-packs would cost ₹13,841.40; in 100s and 50s it costs ₹10,325.00.

At this order's own rates the material cost per candle is ₹165.89 for Roasted Coffee, ₹153.58 for Citrus Lemon and ₹179.19 for Cinnamon Vanilla — wax at ₹0.42/g, oil at the per-gram rate of the packs bought, the ₹12.00 wick and the ₹29.50 jar with its lug cap. Labour, labels, boxes, freight and GST are not included.

Buy now, buy after testing

All three SKUs are established, so their production materials can be bought today. One change is worth testing this month, and it shows how the split works. The Cotton Braided wick is ₹12.00; an Eco Candle Wick Thin C1 is ₹5.90. If an Eco wick passed in the Citrus Lemon candle, that SKU alone would save ₹6.10 a candle — about ₹591.70 on this month's 97 pours. CSI publishes no wick-size-per-diameter chart and no burn data, so that saving is worth nothing until a test says the wick works in this jar.

So this month buys the full Cotton Braided quantity for every SKU, plus one 20-pack of Eco Thin C1 (₹118.00 — the 10-pack was out of stock on the 4 October 2026 re-check) for three Citrus Lemon trial candles poured from the same wax and oil. If they pass a full-life burn against a Cotton Braided control, next month's order switches that SKU. Three wick sizes and their reorder points shows how to carry two wicks in stock without doubling the safety stock.

The CSI products on this order

Next month, and where to go from here

Run the same three lines again next month with the new sales figure and the new shelf count. If sales are steady, the conversion card does the work in a minute. If they are not, use a forecast instead of last month's actuals — per-SKU forecasting — or a growth model — ordering for 20% monthly growth. When you want one order a month across every material, the consolidated monthly order brings dyes and moulds in too, and the safety-stock post decides which of these lines must never reach zero. The whole method from formula to order is on the cluster hub.

Frequently asked questions