I'm Starting a Candle Business — Should I Buy 100 g, 500 g or 1 Kg of Each Fragrance Oil?

The cover rule that decides it

Every sensible answer here comes from one calculation. A 200 g candle at an 8% load uses 16 g of oil; a 120 g jar uses 9.6 g. So a bottle's usefulness is grams divided by your monthly usage of that scent alone — not of your whole range. A hundred grams is 6.25 × 200 g candles. Five hundred grams is 31.25. A kilo is 62.5. Set those against a monthly figure and the answer stops being a matter of opinion.

Now the rule, stated plainly. At launch, buy the pack that covers four to eight weeks of your honest forecast for that scent. Once a scent has three months of real sales behind it, extend to eight to twelve weeks. The reason the launch window is deliberately short is that your forecast is a guess, and a guess should be funded in small instalments. The reason it is not shorter still is that reordering constantly wastes your time and your delivery charges.

Notice how quickly a kilo stops being absurd. At 40 candles a month of one scent, a kilo is under two months of cover and reordering monthly is normal. At 5 candles a month of the same scent, that kilo is twelve and a half months of cash sitting in a cupboard. The pack size is not the decision; the monthly number is, and most new makers have never written it down.

What being wrong costs at each pack size

Two or three of your launch scents will sell noticeably better than the others. That is not a failure of judgement; it is the normal result of putting products in front of customers for the first time. The question is only how much money is trapped in the ones that do not. Here is the same four-scent range priced at each pack size, with the money exposed per scent.

The last row is the one to sit with. Two wrong calls at 100 g is under ₹900 — annoying, survivable, and you still have usable oil for gifting, wax melts or room sprays. Two wrong calls at 1 kg is up to ₹8,481.60, which for most new Indian candle businesses is the entire first-quarter materials budget. And the oil is not the only thing at risk: every scent you commit to also wants its own jar design, label and photograph.

The three-stage buy

Between "I like the sound of that scent" and "I am ordering a kilo" there are three purchases, and each one answers a different question. Running them in order is what keeps the kilo honest.

A costed 40-candle launch

Here is what ₹1,506.56 of fragrance oil actually turns into: forty 120 g jar candles, ten in each of four scents, poured from one 5 kg bag of wax on one wick size. Every line is a listed CSI price and the arithmetic is shown, so you can swap any item and recalculate.

Per candle, the materials work out at about ₹157.89: ₹66.13 of wax (110.4 g at ₹0.599 a gram), ₹36.16 of oil at the average 100 g price of ₹3.7664 a gram, a ₹47.20 jar, a ₹5.90 wick and a ₹2.50 sticker. Buy the same four oils in kilos instead and the oil line falls to ₹34.52 — a saving of ₹1.64 per candle, or ₹65.60 across the whole launch, in exchange for ₹12,875.04 more cash committed. That trade is the entire argument of this page in one number.

The mixed basket at month six

Three months of sales change the question completely. You now know which scent leads, which follows, and which two you were wrong about — and a single pack size across the range stops making sense. The three oils below show the three positions a scent can occupy in that basket, and what each costs to hold.

The mixed basket is ₹248.20 cheaper than four 500 g bottles and gives you three times as much of the scent customers actually buy. It is also the point at which a bulk conversation becomes worth having: a kilo of one oil every quarter is a pattern, and recurring volumes above the listed packs are quoted on WhatsApp along with GST invoicing and documentation. When to make that move scent by scent is covered in when a candle business should start buying fragrance oil in 1 kg quantities.

Why the rule is cash, not shelf life

Makers often justify buying small on the grounds that oil "goes off". It is worth being precise here, because precision is what a business decision deserves. No CSI fragrance-oil page states a shelf life, an expiry date, a best-before date or a storage temperature — not one of the 107. So this guide does not make a claim in either direction, and neither should anybody else who has not tested it. Keep bottles closed, capped and out of direct sunlight as general good practice, label them with the date you opened them, and let your purchasing be driven by the number you can know: how many candles of that scent you sell in a month.

That matters because the two arguments point the same way but for different reasons. A cash-flow argument says: do not tie up ₹14,381.60 in four untested scents when ₹1,506.56 will prove the range. It is verifiable, it is yours to check, and it holds whether or not fragrance oil changes with age. A shelf-life argument, made without evidence, is a guess dressed as a reason — and if you build a purchasing policy on a guess, you will not know which part of it to revise when it goes wrong.

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