I'm Starting a Home Candle Business with No Sales History — How Much Wax Should I Keep in Stock Before I Begin Marketing?

The three jobs your wax has to do

Most wax-stock advice assumes a sales rate: sell so many a week, hold so many weeks. A home business before its first marketing push does not have one, and inventing one produces either a cupboard of wax or a sold-out launch week. A better approach is to count the candles that must exist before any sale happens, plus a modest cushion for the first orders. Those are knowable.

Each job is a candle count, and a candle count converts to wax with one line of arithmetic. At an 8% load, a 200 g candle is 16 g of oil and 184 g of wax. Add a 5% allowance for pour loss, test burns and the odd rejected pour — a working assumption; plan 3–5% — and each candle needs 193.2 g. Six tests take 1.16 kg, thirty launch candles 5.80 kg and a fifteen-candle reserve 2.90 kg: 9.85 kg in total.

Wax by candle size and count

If your candle is not 200 g, or your count is different, the table below does the conversion. Every figure includes the 5% allowance and uses an 8% load. The cheapest combination of Luxury Soy Wax Chunks packs is shown; because the Chunks are priced flat, the cheapest combination is simply the one that wastes the least.

Two patterns stand out. At 50 candles of 200 g the answer is two 5 kg bags (₹5,990.00), not one 10 kg (₹5,999.00): on the listed prices the 10 kg is fractionally dearer. And small formats need far less wax than people expect: fifty Golden Aluminium Tins (85 g listed fill) take about 4.1 kg. The 300 g row is illustrative; weigh your own jar's fill before you plan by it. Which jar size to start with covers that choice.

Why the reserve stays as wax

The most important decision in this guide is not how much wax to hold but what form to hold it in. Before your first sale, you do not know which of your scents customers will prefer. If you pour all 51 candles' worth into finished candles — seventeen of each scent — and one scent sells out in a week while another sits, you are holding cured candles you cannot change, and short of the one people want. If you hold the reserve as wax, you pour it into whichever scent the first orders ask for.

A finished candle ties up ₹281.32 of materials in one scent and one jar; the same candle's worth of plain wax ties up ₹110.22 and can become anything. That is why the launch stock — which must be poured early to cure — is kept to what launch day needs, and the reserve is not poured at all. Hold the reserve's oil in bottles, not in wax: an opened 100 g bottle can still go to any candle in that scent, and an unopened one can wait for the next order. The lean three-month inventory applies the same logic after launch.

Which wax, and which bag

Three container soy waxes suit a first stock, and the choice changes the bill more than the bag size does. Luxury Soy Wax Chunks are rated up to 13% fragrance load and cost ₹599.00 a kilo at every size. Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 is rated up to 10% and costs ₹507.40 a kilo from 1 kg up. Natural Soy Pearl Wax costs ₹450.00 at 1 kg and ₹424.80 a kilo from 5 kg — the only one of the three with a bulk break — but no fragrance ceiling is quoted for it in our data, so check the product page or ask on WhatsApp before planning a load.

Checking the number before you buy

Two checks keep a pre-marketing wax figure honest. The first is time. The launch stock must be poured and cured before marketing starts; cure times are not published in our data, so test yours, but plan the launch date backward from the pour date rather than the other way round. If marketing starts in three weeks, the launch stock has to be poured this week.

The second is reorder speed. The reserve only needs to last until a reorder arrives. Delivery times are not published; ask CSI on WhatsApp when you place the first order, and size the reserve to cover that period at a rate you would be pleased with. If a fresh bag reaches you quickly, a 15-candle reserve is generous; if it takes longer, or if your launch lands close to Diwali on 8 November, hold more. Setting a reorder point from consumption and lead time formalises this once you have sales.

Once the business has four to six weeks of sales, stop using this method. You will have a real rate, and how much wax to order at once and one, two or three months of wax take over. Until then, the three-job count is the most reliable number you have.

The pre-marketing list

The example stock below covers 6 tests, 30 launch candles in three scents and a 15-candle reserve of plain wax. Oils are bought for the tests (a 15 g tester per scent, one test candle each) and the launch stock (two 100 g per scent: 200 g covers ten launch candles and a second test candle at 16 g each, with 24 g left towards the reserve). One honest oddity: Saffron Cedarwood's 500 g is listed at ₹2,584.20 (₹5.17/g), cheaper per gram than its 100 g (₹6.96/g) and its 1 kg (₹6.87/g). It is tempting, but it is 300 g more of an unproven scent; buy it only once Saffron Cedarwood sells.

Jars are bought for the 36 candles you will actually pour before launch (tests plus launch stock), not for the reserve: the reserve's jars can be ordered with the reorder, in whatever quantity the first orders suggest. If you already own tools, take ₹1,239.00 off. The ₹50,000 opening inventory scales this approach up to a full opening stock, bulk vs trial explains why wax is the one material safe to hold in quantity, and sharing materials with wax melts shows how a reserve of wax can also become melts.

Frequently asked questions