I Want to Launch Both Candles and Wax Melts Using the Same Fragrances — How Should I Calculate Combined Fragrance-Oil Purchasing?

The rule: two loads, one bottle

Combined fragrance purchasing has exactly one trap and one opportunity. The trap is treating the two product lines as one: multiplying everything by a single load, or by a single allowance, when a melt and a candle are made differently. The opportunity is the opposite mistake avoided: rounding each line to bottles separately, so you end up with two half-empty bottle sets of the same oil, when one combined order would have landed on a cheaper per-gram pack.

So the method has three steps and they must stay in this order. First, calculate each product line's oil on its own terms — its own unit weight, its own load, its own tests, rejects and pour loss. Second, add the two lines together per scent, in grams. Third, round that per-scent total to real in-stock CSI bottles, once. Wax, containers and wicks are calculated alongside but are not part of the oil maths; if your two lines use different waxes, as on this page, the waxes are rounded separately too.

The plan this page works through

Three scents, chosen because each one has a real per-gram step in its bigger bottles: Mango Coconut (1 kg ₹3.96/g against ₹5.00 at 100 g), Honeydew Melon (₹3.40 against ₹4.35) and Verbena (₹4.72 against ₹5.90). Those are among the 24 oils in CSI's list where the 1 kg is at least 5% cheaper per gram than the 100 g; for most of the other oils the per-gram price is nearly flat above 100 g, and combining saves bottles rather than rupees.

The candles are poured in 200 ml Salsa Glass Jars (sold with a golden lug cap). 200 ml is the brim volume, not a fill weight, and CSI does not publish the fill; this page uses an illustrative 170 g candle — weigh a test pour and replace it. They are made in Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468 at 8% (its page states up to 13%). The melts are Wax Melts Containers at an illustrative 60 g a pack, in Luxury Soy Wax Chunks at 10% (page: up to 13%). The volumes are the reader's plan, used as an example.

Each column is built the same way: (tests + saleable ÷ (1 − reject rate)) × oil per unit × 1.05. For Mango Coconut's candles that is (2 + 60 ÷ 0.97) × 13.6 g × 1.05 = 911.9 g; for its melts, (2 + 80 ÷ 0.95) × 6.0 g × 1.05 = 543.1 g. The candle and melt allowances are different because the products fail differently — a jar can crack or a wick can lean; a melt container can be underfilled or a top can pit — and they are both labelled examples.

Step 3: round once per scent — what it saves

Here is what happens when you round each product line to bottles separately and then buy both, against adding the grams first and rounding once. Every combination below is the cheapest in-stock CSI bottle mix that covers the need, computed, not guessed.

Combining saves ₹945.02 across the three scents, and it saves it in two different ways. Part of it is simply less overbuy: two separate roundings each leave a remainder, and one rounding leaves one. The bigger part is tier-crossing. Honeydew Melon's candle line alone needs 617.4 g, which rounds to bottles at the 100 g and 50 g rate; combined with the melts it needs 1,027.9 g, which lands on a 1 kg bottle at ₹3.40 a gram. The same oil, a cheaper rate, only because the two lines were added first.

When the melt load changes

The melt load is the least certain number in the plan, because only a warmer test can set it. CSI publishes no melt dosage. Chunks' page states a ceiling of 13%, so 8%, 10% and 12% are all inside it. Here is the combined order per scent at each, with the candle line held at 8%:

Two things follow. The combined order is sensitive to the melt load in steps, not smoothly — a load change that pushes a scent across a bottle boundary changes the order by a whole bottle. And it is one more reason to run the warmer test before you buy production oil: the test costs a few small bottles; guessing the load wrong costs a bottle per scent. The wax-melt post has the six-pack warmer test in full.

Buy now, buy after the tests

Per scent, the test stage is two candles and six melt packs (two each at 8%, 10% and 12%). That is a small amount of oil, bought in the smallest sensible bottles. The production order is the combined requirement minus what the test bottles leave over, rounded once.

Splitting costs ₹654.74 more than buying the combined order blind. That premium buys the right to change the melt load — and to drop a scent entirely if its tests fail — before you own a kilo of it. On a plan this size, one wrong scent would cost far more than the premium. Buying the full fragrance before a client approves weighs the same trade-off for a single large order.

The full priced order for both product lines

The oil is the point of this page, but the order is not complete without the rest. In this plan the two lines use different waxes, so the waxes are rounded separately; the shared-materials post shows the alternative of one wax for both. Jars carry a labelled 2% breakage allowance; wicks get 3 spares per scent; melt containers carry no breakage.

Wick size for the Salsa jar is not published: confirm it in the two test candles per scent before you buy the full wick pack. The jars come with a lug cap, so there is no separate lid line. The salsa jar's 50- and 100-packs are ₹29.50 a jar — the same per-unit price as a melt container, which is a coincidence of the list, not a rule.

Related questions in this cluster

If you are deciding which materials beyond the oil can be shared — one wax, one dye, one scale — the shared-materials post goes line by line. If you are dropping candles for melts, what you can eliminate comes first. For collections, 15 SKUs without overbuying applies the add-then-round rule across sizes, and five scents on shared wax and jars keeps fragrance separate while sharing the rest. Beyond this cluster, one fragrance across three products and 1.3 kg against 500 g and 1 kg packs take the bottle-choice maths further, and requirements smaller than the smallest pack covers scents whose combined need is still tiny.

Frequently asked questions