Room first: what ₹599.00 leaves at your target

The sequence matters more than the arithmetic. Price, then margin, then allocation. Your ₹599.00 is fixed — it is your figure, used exactly as given, and CSI supplies raw materials rather than setting retail prices. Your target gross margin is a decision only you can make. Room = price × (1 − target). At an illustrative 60% target that is ₹599.00 × 0.40 = ₹239.60, and that is the figure everything else on this page is carved out of.

The 60% is illustrative and is worked through the page only so the allocation can be followed end to end. It is not a recommendation and it is not a CSI figure. The portable version is ₹5.99 of room per percentage point, which is your price divided by a hundred: at a 50% target the room is ₹299.50, at 65% it is ₹209.65, and at 70% it is ₹179.70. Substitute your own target and every budget below scales with it.

One point of vocabulary that saves a lot of confusion later. The room is not the materials budget. It is the whole of what sits below the gross margin line, and packaging is in it — boxes, printed labels, inserts, ribbon. Makers who allocate materials first and discover packaging afterwards end up quietly eating the difference out of the margin they said they wanted. Reserve the packaging share before you open a product page, not after.

The split, and why it is weighted this way

Wax, 30% — ₹71.88. Wax is the largest weight in the candle and the cheapest thing in it per gram, and it is the line that decides how big the product feels in the hand. Giving it the largest share is not generosity; it is the only way to buy size. At Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464's ₹507.40 a kilogram, ₹71.88 is about 142 g of wax, which is a comfortable mid-size container candle rather than a votive.

Fragrance, 25% — ₹59.90. This is the line that looks wrong on a spreadsheet and right in a room. At 8% of wax weight, a 140 g pour carries 11.2 g of oil — one-twelfth the weight of the wax — and still takes nearly as much money, because fragrance oil is the most expensive material in the candle per gram by a wide margin. It is also the only line the customer experiences before they light anything. Starve it and you have made a cheaper candle that smells like one.

Vessel, 15% — ₹35.94. A vessel is a fixed per-piece cost. Pour twice as much wax into it and it still costs the same, which makes it the line where shopping hard pays every single time and where an expensive choice compounds across every unit you ever make. Hold it to a small share and buy it in the pack size you can actually turn over.

Wick and finishing, 5% — ₹11.98. The smallest share and the one nobody budgets for, which is why the wick so often gets left out of a cost sheet entirely. It belongs there, and so does anything you stick on the candle before it ships. Packaging, 25% — ₹59.90. Reserved, never filled here. CSI does not sell mailers, printed labels, inserts or ribbon, so there is no honest CSI figure for any of them, and a guess in this row would travel straight into your product decisions.

What each line budget buys at CSI rates

Take the four budgets to the store. The fill reading this page carries: 140 g of wax at 8% of wax weight, which is 11.2 g of fragrance oil and 151.2 g in the jar. That is stated because a fragrance load is a percentage of wax weight, so a wax weight and a fill weight are different numbers and the budgets depend on which one you mean. The 140 g is chosen to sit just inside the ₹71.88 wax budget, which at Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464's ₹507.40 a kilogram stretches to about 142 g.

Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 is ₹507.40 for the one-kilogram pack, ₹507.40 a kilogram, and the same rate at the five- and ten-kilogram packs; the 500 g pack is ₹520.00 a kilogram, so the step down happens at the bottom of the ladder and not the top. The product page gives 80–90°C as the working range for melting and pouring, a stated maximum fragrance load of 10% of total wax weight, and a shelf life of 60 months in cool, dry storage.

The fragrance budget is where allocation becomes a shopping list. ₹59.90 has to cover 11.2 g, which is anything up to about ₹5.35 a gram. That is a real constraint and it is worth seeing as a list of names rather than a rate. The table below prices the same 11.2 g across seven live CSI oils, each at the pack size named, and says plainly which ones the budget reaches.

Read the last column as carefully as the money. Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 states a maximum of 10% of total wax weight and Ylang Ylang Flower Fragrance Oil states up to 10% for soy wax, so on that pairing the two published limits land in the same place and 8% sits comfortably inside either. Where a wax ceiling and an oil range differ, the lower one governs, and where an oil page publishes nothing at all the wax grade's stated maximum is the only published limit. The Vanilla Bean Fragrance Oil page states 2.5% vanillin and notes potential discolouration, which is cosmetic rather than a performance problem but matters if your candle is white and your photographs are not.

The whole candle, checked against its budget

Here is the candle the allocation produces, line by line, with each budget beside each actual cost. Everything in the CSI column is live stock in September 2026 and every figure is a rate you can check on the product page. The packaging row carries a budget and no cost, and it will stay that way — putting a typical number in it would be the single most damaging thing this page could do.

The candle fits, and the interesting figure is ₹12.97 — what is left across the four CSI lines once everything is bought. Most of it, ₹6.44, comes from the vessel, and ₹5.25 from the finishing line. Wax and fragrance came in almost exactly on budget, which is what you would expect from lines that were sized against their own rates in the first place. Headroom is not profit and it is not a saving; it is the slack that lets you survive a price change, pour a heavier candle, or move up a fragrance without reopening the pricing conversation.

The packaging line stays yours

₹59.90 of the ₹239.60 is set aside for packaging, and that budget is the only part of the allocation CSI cannot help you spend. Mailer boxes, printed labels, belly bands, tissue, ribbon, void fill and insert cards are not CSI products. Neither is the courier that carries the finished candle to your customer, nor the payment gateway or marketplace fee, nor the advertising that found the order. Each of those gets a row below and each row stays empty.

There is one finishing item CSI does sell, and it is worth naming because it usually sits uncomfortably between the two budgets. A Candle Care Stickers Roll is ₹413.00 for the Pack of 500 (1 inch) roll, which is ₹0.83 a sticker, or ₹699.00 for the Pack of 1000 (1.5 inch) roll at ₹0.70 a sticker. This page puts it in the wick and finishing line rather than in packaging, because it goes on the candle rather than around it. Put it wherever you like; just put it somewhere, because a line nobody owns is a line nobody budgets.

Doing it on your own figures, step by step

What to do with ₹12.97, and what not to do

Pour more wax. At ₹507.40 a kilogram, and carrying its 8% of fragrance at ₹5.31 a gram, a gram of scented wax costs ₹0.93. The ₹12.97 of slack therefore buys about 14 g more wax and its oil — taking a 140 g pour to roughly 154 g, if the vessel takes it. Measure the vessel with water before you assume it does.

Move up a fragrance. The slack added to the fragrance line takes the available rate from about ₹5.35 a gram to about ₹6.51 a gram on an 11.2 g pour, which on the table above brings Bergamot Amber Fragrance Oil inside the budget and still leaves Vanilla Bean Fragrance Oil outside it. Whether that is worth more than the extra 14 g of scented wax the same slack buys is a judgement about your customer, not an arithmetic problem.

Or keep it. Every cost on this page is a September 2026 figure and the linked product pages are authoritative if anything changes. Slack is what absorbs a change without forcing you to reprice a ₹599.00 candle, and repricing is far more expensive than it looks once listings, photographs and a customer's memory are involved. A materials budget that lands exactly on its ceiling has no answer to a bad month.

Two things the headroom will not buy, and it is worth being blunt about both. The first is a quantity discount on the rate per kilogram. Run on the products this page names: Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 is ₹520.00 a kilogram in the 500 g pack and ₹507.40 in the one-, five- and ten-kilogram packs, so the only step is at the bottom of the ladder; Ylang Ylang Flower Fragrance Oil falls from ₹7.08 a gram at 15 gm through ₹5.90 at 100 gm to ₹5.31 at the largest pack. CSI publishes no quantity-discount ladder. The published spend-based codes are real and are a different thing: HAPPY5 at 5% over ₹5,000, BIZWIZ8 at 8% over ₹12,000 and YAY10 at 10% over ₹20,000 turn on the basket total, not the pack size. One review on the store asks for a discount on bulk buys; that is a fair request and the honest answer is to ask on WhatsApp for a large consignment rather than to assume a ladder exists.

The second is free delivery, which the store does not offer. Delivery is charged as published flat bands by weight, and the weight that bills is the stored packed weight of the variant. The five-kilogram pack of Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 stores 6.0 kg and the cheapest published band covering it in September 2026 is ₹630.00 on Standard Shipping, which across the 36 candles that pack pours at 140 g is ₹17.64 a candle. The one-kilogram Ylang Ylang Flower Fragrance Oil pack stores 2.0 kg at ₹180.00, which across 89 candles is ₹2.02 a candle. Together that is ₹19.66 a candle, or 8.20% of the whole ₹239.60 of room, and it belongs inside your wax and fragrance lines rather than beside them. A review on the store says the delivery charges are high enough to restrict how much the customer buys; that is fair comment, and the arithmetic answer is to consolidate orders rather than to leave the cost out of the budget.

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