I Want to Launch 10 Candle Fragrances but Only Have ₹30,000 for Raw Materials — Should I Reduce the Number of Fragrances or Buy Smaller Fragrance Oil Quantities?

The budget fixes the candle count

Start from the materials every candle shares. A 200 g candle at an 8% load needs 184 g of wax, one wick and one jar. At CSI's prices, Luxury Soy Wax Chunks at ₹599.00 a kilo, an Eco Thin C1 wick at ₹5.90 and a White Matte Glass Jar at ₹70.80 add up to ₹186.92 before any fragrance. Add around ₹75 to ₹110 of oil at 100 g rates and each candle is roughly ₹260 to ₹300 in materials. Divide ₹30,000 by that, allow for testing and a small reserve, and you get about 80 candles. That number does not change when you change the number of scents.

That is 60.1% of the budget before a gram of fragrance. It assumes you already own the buy-once tools (scale, thermometer, jug, stirring sticks and wick centering devices, ₹1,475.00 at CSI's prices), since the title's ₹30,000 is for raw materials. Notice the wax line: three 5 kg packs rather than one 10 kg and one 5 kg, because on CSI's listing the 10 kg Chunks (₹5,999.00) cost ₹9.00 more than two 5 kg packs (₹5,990.00). Wax is ₹599.00 a kilo at 1 kg and 5 kg; there is no bulk break on this wax.

The small-pack penalty, oil by oil

"Buy smaller quantities" sounds like the cautious answer, but it only saves money if small packs are not dearer per gram. On CSI's catalogue the answer depends on the pack and the oil. Across the 55 oils that list both 15 g and 100 g, the 15 g carries a median 23.1% premium per gram. Between 50 g and 100 g the median difference is zero. Here is how that plays out for the ten scents in this launch.

Three groups appear. For Royal Apricot, Spicy Raspberry, Palo Santo and Autumn, the 50 g costs the same per gram as the 100 g, so buying smaller is free. For Saffron Cedarwood and Neroli, the 50 g is a few percent dearer. For Pomegranate Splash, Mahogany Shea, Love Spell and Ylang Ylang Flower, the 50 g carries a real premium, from 10.9% to 35.3%. Mahogany Shea is the extreme case: ₹6.61 a gram at 50 g, ₹4.89 at 100 g, and ₹10.93 at 15 g. The 15 g is dearer per gram than the 100 g for every oil here that lists one except Saffron Cedarwood, whose 15 g (₹6.92 a gram) is fractionally cheaper than its 100 g (₹6.96). For the rest, the tester premium is fine for a test and wasteful for production.

Ten scents vs six, fully priced

Both options below use the same shared materials and the same testing. Oil is bought as the cheapest combination of in-stock 50 g and 100 g packs that covers each scent's candles plus 3% for pour loss, a working assumption. The 35 g left in each 50 g tester is credited first. Option B assumes the test drops Royal Apricot, Palo Santo, Neroli and Autumn; that is an assumption for the maths, not a verdict on those oils.

The two totals are within ₹130.10 of each other. Option B pours 78 candles and leaves two spare jars; Option A pours 80. On money alone, there is no strong case either way. The case for B is statistical and practical. With 8 candles a scent, one gift order of four can make a scent look like a leader. With 13, the gap between a scent that sells 11 and one that sells 4 is hard to mistake. Material cost per candle ranges from ₹245.64 (Royal Apricot) to ₹298.31 (Saffron Cedarwood) at 100 g rates, excluding labour, packaging, freight and GST.

The per-scent costs nobody prices

CSI's catalogue does not include labels, printing or photography, so we cannot price them. What we can say is that they are per-scent costs: they rise with the number of scents whether you sell eight candles of each or eighty. As an example only, if a label design and first print run cost ₹500.00 per scent (replace with your printer's quote), ten scents cost ₹5,000.00 and six cost ₹3,000.00. That ₹2,000.00 difference, at example rates, is larger than the entire difference in oil cost between the two options.

What happens to the four you cut

Cutting four scents from the launch does not waste their tests. It gives you a bench: four scents that have already passed a burn test in your jar and are ready to launch the moment a slot opens. For the three that start at 50 g, you also hold 35 g each, enough for two more candles.

If you are set on ten, there is a middle way: launch ten, but as a smaller "discovery" candle for the four bench scents in a cheaper container, and full-size candles for the six. Testing containers before standardising one and the smallest practical test quantities cover the container side. For the purchasing pattern once leaders emerge, see I'm Starting a Candle Business and Want 10 Fragrances — Which Materials Should I Buy in Bulk and Which Should I Buy in Small Trial Quantities? and the ₹1 lakh tranche plan. What a ₹25,000 start should buy first and buying 1 kg only for your bestsellers cover the budget and bulk sides of the same decision.

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