I Sell 1,000 Candles Every Month Across 10 Fragrances — How Do I Calculate Fragrance Inventory When Some Scents Sell Five Times Faster than Others?

Split the thousand by scent

Start with your sales records, not with a guess. Take the last three months, count candles sold per scent, and turn each into a share of the total. The example below is built to match the title: ten scents, 1,000 candles, and the best seller moving exactly five times faster than the slowest. The top three scents take 60% of the volume, which is a very common shape for a candle range. A handful of scents carry the business, and a longer tail keeps the shelf interesting. The scents named are real CSI oils chosen for the example; use your own list.

Every candle uses the same 16 g of oil: 8% of a 200 g finished candle by the CSI convention, where load is a share of the finished weight. Add a 3% allowance for pour loss and test burns, a working assumption, and each candle draws 16.48 g from its scent's bottle. So a scent's monthly oil use is simply its candle count × 16.48 g. The wax is different. All ten scents pour from the same wax, so wax is one pool: 189.52 kg a month for the whole range, planned exactly as in the hub page. Only fragrance has to be split.

The equal-stock trap

The easiest rule for a ten-scent shelf is "keep about the same of each". It feels fair and it is simple to check by eye. Here is what it does. If you add up all ten correct reorder lines and share them out equally, each scent gets 769.07 g. For the fastest scent that is 5.6 days of use, which is less than the 14 days it needs to cover a 7-day delivery and a 7-day buffer. For each slow scent it is 28.0 days, far more than it needs. Same total stock, wrong place.

A kilo of Rose lasts 7.3 days. A kilo of Strawberry lasts 36.4 days. Holding a kilo of each means the scent that earns the most is always on the edge of running out, while six slow scents each tie up a kilo that takes more than a month to use. At CSI's listed 1 kg prices, a kilo of all ten is ₹46,920.40 on the shelf. That is actually a little less than the per-scent plan's average of about ₹51,995.69 on monthly orders, which is the point: the equal-stock shelf does not fail because it holds too much. It fails because it holds it in the wrong scents.

Ten reorder lines

Each scent's reorder line is its daily use × (lead time + buffer days). This page uses a 7-day delivery, the reader's own figure (CSI does not publish delivery times), and a 7-day buffer, a working assumption. Because both are in days, the line for a scent that sells five times faster is automatically five times higher. The order quantity is one month of that scent, rounded up to CSI's listed in-stock bottles of 50 g and above, the smallest practical production sizes.

The reorder lines add up to 7.69 kg across the shelf, 14 days of total use, which is exactly what a single-scent plan would give. The difference is where the grams sit: 4.61 kg of it on the top three scents, 2,307.20 g spread over the six slow ones. For a slow scent, the reorder line of 384.53 g is less than one 500 g bottle. In practice that means: when you open the last 500 g bottle of a slow scent and there are no sealed ones left, order. That simple "last bottle" rule gives almost exactly the right line for any scent selling around 50 candles a month.

Fast scents, slow scents, different orders

A monthly order of 4 × 1 kg + 1 × 100 g + 1 × 50 g of the fastest scent puts 4.15 kg on the shelf in one go. That is fine if you have the space and the cash, but the fast scents are also the ones you can order most often without paying a per-gram penalty, because each order is big enough to use kilo bottles. Ordering the top three every two weeks instead halves their stock on the shelf. The slow scents stay monthly, because a fortnight of a 50-a-month scent is only 412.00 g and would force you into 100 g and 50 g bottles for no benefit.

With the top three on a fortnightly cycle and the rest monthly, the average value of fragrance on the shelf falls from about ₹51,995.69 to about ₹42,651.47, using the rule of thumb average stock = buffer + half an order. The reorder lines do not change: they depend on lead time and speed, not on how often you order. What changes is the height of each delivery.

For slow scents, the pack question is about per-gram price. On CSI's listed catalogue the step from 15 g to 50 g or 100 g is the reliable saving; above 100 g, most oils are priced almost flat per gram. Blue Ocean is ₹4.95 a gram at 100 g and ₹4.96 at 1 kg, so the kilo is fractionally dearer per gram. Dark Vanilla is ₹7.90 at 100 g and ₹7.65 at 1 kg, a 3.2% saving. Buying a slow scent in a kilo to "save money" usually saves very little and can leave a bottle open for four or five months.

The whole fragrance shelf

Put together, a thousand candles across these ten scents use 16.48 kg of oil a month and cost ₹71,246.86 to replenish in real packs, before freight and GST. The shelf never needs to fall below 7.69 kg in total, but that total is only a check: the ordering happens scent by scent. The wax for the same month is one pool of 189.52 kg. In Natural Soy Pearl Wax, the only CSI wax listed at 50 kg, that rounds to 3 × 50 kg + 4 × 10 kg for ₹80,712.00; test any wax change before production, and ask on WhatsApp for quantities beyond the listed sacks.

Re-ranking every month

Scent speeds are not fixed. A slow scent can become a top three after one good review, and a best seller can fade. The reorder lines are only right while the split is right, so the split needs a short monthly review.

Two related pages go further on the same shelf. When one scent is a clear best seller and you want the exact kilogram figure that should trigger its reorder, the 300-units-a-month trigger works it through. When your supplier takes two weeks rather than one, fast and slow scents behave even more differently, and the two-week lead page sets the lines for that case. For sales that swing from month to month, the safety-stock page sizes the buffer from the swing.

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