I Use 10 Kg of Fragrance Oil Every Month Across Several Scents — How Do I Determine How Much Total Fragrance Inventory Is Reasonable?

Why "10 kg" is the wrong unit

Aggregate fragrance figures are useful for exactly one thing: a budget. Ten kilos a month tells your accountant roughly what to expect and tells your production planner nothing at all. The reason is structural rather than a matter of discipline, and it is worth stating plainly because it changes how the whole calculation is set up.

Wax, wicks and jars are usually shared materials. The same soy wax goes into every candle you pour, so a kilogram of it is interchangeable across your whole range and a single cover figure genuinely describes your exposure. Fragrance is the opposite: each oil is dedicated to the SKUs that use it. A kilogram of Sandalwood cannot rescue a Lavender order. So the aggregate is not just imprecise, it is structurally incapable of telling you when to reorder — and this is why the answer to "how much total fragrance" is always "the sum of the parts, computed separately".

Here is the failure in numbers. Take the same approximate budget and spend it two ways on the same six scents.

For ₹2,016.80 more — three per cent — the per-scent plan more than doubles the cover on the line that would actually stop production, and clears nearly five months of dead stock out of the tail. That is the entire argument of this page in one table. The money is not the variable; the allocation is.

One framing note before the arithmetic. The six-scent split on this page is an illustration of a shape, not a claim about what sells. We do not know and do not assert which oils are popular, in India or anywhere else — the split you should use is the one in your own sales records, and if your range is four scents or fourteen the method is identical.

Per-scent cover, scent by scent

Four steps per scent, and the only judgement call is the cover target. Everything else is division. The table below runs the full calculation on six real in-stock CSI oils so the pack decisions and prices are the ones you would actually face.

A cover target of 1.25 months is used here for a reason worth saying out loud: one month of pipeline-plus-buffer on a dedicated material is a reasonable starting point because a fragrance stock-out stops one scent rather than the whole workshop, so it deserves less cover than your shared wax. If your own observed lead time is long, raise it; if you reorder weekly and your deliveries never vary, 1.1 months may be enough. It is a choice, named as a choice, not an industry standard.

Three things in that table repay a second look. The cover column never lands exactly on 1.25, and it cannot, because oil comes in 15 g, 50 g, 100 g, 500 g and 1 kg bottles rather than in whatever you calculated. Rounding up is the right default — being 0.14 months over on Lavender costs ₹2,610.50 of extra bottle; being 0.14 months under costs you four days of your bestseller.

The pack choice changes between rows for reasons that are not about size. Woody Oud is held as two 500 g bottles rather than one kilo because on that oil the two prices are identical — 500 g at ₹2,265.60 doubles to exactly the ₹4,531.20 that the kilo costs — so there is no premium at all for the flexibility of two bottles, and two bottles let you stop after one if the scent slows. Sage and Cedarwood is held as a single 500 g bottle because its kilo is actively dearer. Apple Cinnamon takes a kilo plus a half because its ladder is flat per gram at both sizes.

And the total is an output. Thirteen kilograms is what the six calculations happen to add up to. Change your split — drop a scent, add two, shift volume between them — and the sum moves, which is exactly as it should be. Anyone who tells you a candle business should hold a particular total quantity of fragrance is describing their own scent mix, not yours.

The pack-ladder audit on every oil

Before you commit 13 kg of anything, spend ten minutes on the ladder. The exercise is simple: for each oil you buy, compare the 1 kg price against twice the 500 g price. On a well-behaved ladder the kilo wins. On CSI's live pricing the picture is mixed, and knowing which oils are which is worth real money at this volume.

Five of those nine ladders are exactly flat — the kilo is precisely twice the half, to the paisa. Three step down by amounts between ₹19 and ₹590. One steps up, and it steps up by ₹1,699.20, which at a 300 g-a-month consumption is more than a whole month's worth of the oil thrown away for nothing.

The practical consequence is liberating rather than annoying. Where the ladder is flat, you are free to buy the pack size that matches your cover calculation instead of the pack size that chases a discount — and that is precisely what the per-scent method asks you to do. A slow scent can be held in 500 g bottles with no per-gram penalty whatsoever, which means the usual tension between "the right quantity" and "the right price" simply does not exist on most of this range.

Three oils, three pack strategies

The three cards below are not a recommendation about which scents to sell — that is your market's decision. They are three different positions on the scent list, each of which calls for a different pack strategy. Every card shows every listed size with the per-100 g rate and how many candles each bottle makes at 14.8 g of oil.

What 10 kg of oil commits you to

A fragrance holding is a promise to the rest of your bench. Ten kilos of oil a month is not an isolated purchase; it is a statement about how many candles you intend to pour, and therefore about four other materials that all have to be there on the same day.

At 14.8 g of oil per candle — a 185 g wax fill with fragrance at 8% of wax weight — 10 kg of oil is 676 candles a month. That implies 125 kg of wax, 676 wicks and 676 jars. If any one of those lines is short, your 13 kg of beautifully allocated fragrance sits there while nothing ships, because production stops at whichever material runs out first.

The fourth column is where most businesses at this volume get the balance wrong, and the error is almost always the same: they give every material the same number of weeks because it feels consistent. It is not consistent, it is just uniform. A wick that costs a few rupees and lasts indefinitely on a shelf should be covered much more deeply than an oil you have ordered 4.5 kg of; a jar that can break between the courier and the pour needs its purchase quantity grossed up rather than its cover extended. The material-by-material version of this is laid out in whether each material deserves the same months of cover, and the wax side at this scale in the 100 kg a month guide.

Building the per-scent plan

Five steps, one spreadsheet, about forty minutes the first time and five minutes a month afterwards. Do it from sales records rather than from memory, because memory systematically over-weights the scents you personally like.

Reviewing and retiring scents

A per-scent plan goes stale faster than a wax plan, because scent mixes move and wax mixes do not. Three review triggers, and one decision most businesses postpone too long.

The third row is the uncomfortable one. A 500 g bottle of an oil you have not poured in two months is not a reserve; it is ₹2,000 to ₹5,000 of cash wearing a disguise, and every month you leave it there it is also one row of attention you are spending on a scent that earns nothing. The honest options are both fine: relaunch it deliberately with a reason and a date, or retire it and use up what is left in a bundle, a sample set or a gift line. What is not fine is reordering it out of habit on the next bulk purchase.

The fourth row has a fixed date and a hard constraint. Diwali 2026 is 8 November. Soy container candles are normally cured 14 to 21 days before they are fit to sell, so working backwards from a shelf date through the cure to the pour and then to the order is the only way to get a festive scent's oil on the bench in time. Build those rows up in tranches as sell-through becomes visible rather than in one speculative order — the timing method is set out in how to plan fragrance inventory before the festive season, and the range-discipline side in creating a festive collection without buying too many oils.

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