I Need 1,000 Candles in 20 Days — Should My Raw-Material Purchase Include Extra Inventory Specifically for Emergency Remakes?

The short answer: yes, but the reserve is a time problem before it is a quantity problem

Every order in this series carries a reject allowance — a percentage of extra candles for the ones that come out with a sunken top, a crooked wick or a cracked jar. On a relaxed timetable that allowance is enough, because anything that fails inspection can simply be remade and cured. On a 20-day timetable it is not, for one reason: cure time. CSI's product page for Luxury Soy Wax Chunks states a cure of at least 48 hours and ideally one to two weeks. If you work to a 7-day cure checkpoint (a labelled working practice), the last candle that can be poured and still be cured by day 20 is poured on day 13. A remake that becomes necessary after that day does not help you.

So an emergency remake reserve for a short deadline is two decisions, not one. How much: enough to replace the largest single loss you could plausibly suffer — here, one whole 5 kg melt of 67 candles, lost to a temperature mistake, a contaminated jug or a bad wick setting. And in what form: materials you can pour if needed before day 13, or spare finished candles poured in the first days so they are cured when you need them. On this example the reserve adds ₹6,617.95 to the CSI order; how you hold it decides whether it can actually save the delivery.

The order without a reserve, and with one

The example is 1,000 candles of 80 g in Mini Glass Jars, Black — CSI does not publish their fill, so 80 g is illustrative and you should weigh a test pour — in Luxury Soy Wax Chunks with Mango Coconut at 8%: 6.4 g of oil and 73.6 g of wax per candle. Chunks' product page states a maximum load of 13%. The normal stack is a 3% reject allowance (1,031 production candles) plus 4 check candles poured from the first batch. The reserve is added as whole candle-sets — wax, oil, wick, sticker and jar — because a remake needs all of them.

Note the order of operations. The reserve is not a bigger reject percentage. Rejects are spread across the run and found at inspection; the reserve is a lump for a single bad event. Folding it into the reject rate — "let's use 10% instead of 3%" — hides the fact that the reserve has a deadline and the reject allowance does not. Keep them as separate lines on the sheet, so you can see on day 13 whether the reserve was used.

The 20-day timetable the reserve has to fit

Two things in that timetable are yours alone: how quickly materials reach you, and how many candles you can pour in a day. CSI publishes no delivery times, so ask on WhatsApp before you accept a 20-day order. And 95 candles a day is simply 1,035 candles over 11 pour days; if your workshop pours fewer, the window is too short and the reserve will not save it — the 30-day, 500-candle post shows the same planning with more slack.

How big should the reserve be?

There is no published figure for this; it depends on how your workshop fails. The cleanest rule is to size the reserve to the largest single loss you can plausibly suffer, because a deadline order is usually lost to one bad event, not to a steady trickle (the reject allowance already covers the trickle). In most small workshops that is one melt. At a labelled 5 kg melt and 73.6 g of wax per candle, one batch is 67 candles. Other rules of thumb give different numbers; the table prices each in CSI material at about ₹99.10 a candle.

Whichever rule you choose, the reserve is not money lost if it goes unused. Wax, oil, wicks, stickers and jars bought for it carry into your next order; the CSI 464 page, for example, states a 60-month shelf life cool and dry, and Chunks publishes a cure, not a shelf life. Finished spare candles are different: if your order carries a client's label, unused spares may be unsaleable elsewhere. That is the argument for splitting the reserve — half poured early as finished spares, half held as materials.

The priced CSI shopping list

Everything is ordered on day 0, because a 20-day order has no room for a second delivery. Quantities include the 67-candle reserve; the table above shows the order without it.

Mango Coconut is one of the oils with a real price step at volume: ₹3.96 a gram at 500 g and 1 kg against ₹5.00 at 100 g — a 20.7% saving from 100 g to 1 kg on the 24 September pull — so the kilos carry this order. Chunks are ₹599.00 a kilo at 1 and 5 kg and ₹599.90 at 10 kg, so the wax is in 5 kg bags. Mini Glass Jars Black are ₹21.24 each in the 100-pack against ₹25.96 in 5s, so the 100-packs carry the jar line. The jars are glass; add breakage with the breakage method if your run has a history of it.

When not to carry a reserve

The reserve also cannot fix a supply problem. If a material is short on day 0, more of the other materials does not help. Ask us on WhatsApp to confirm stock of every line before you accept a short-deadline order — the 100-packs of jars, the 5 kg wax bags, the 1 kg oil bottles and the 1,000-pack of wicks — and order all of it at once.

The rest of the 500–1,000 candle cluster

This page owns the deadline reserve. Jar breakage, wick allowances and colour trials size the other extra lines; the new-fragrance post and the unvalidated-wick post explain why a short deadline needs every material validated first; the buffer-logic post covers how much spare each material should carry in general; and the procurement sheet puts the reserve on its own line. Pilot, test, reject and replacement allowances covers the ordinary allowance stack this reserve sits on.

Frequently asked questions