My Bestseller Uses 8% Fragrance and Sells 500 Units Per Month — How Many Kilograms of That Fragrance Should I Normally Keep Available?

The one number everything hangs on

A 200 g-class container candle on a 185 g wax fill at an 8% load takes 14.8 g of fragrance oil — 185 × 0.08. That is the convention this series uses: load as a percentage of total wax weight, which is how the Luxury Soy Wax Chunks page phrases its own 8–13% band. If you instead calculate load as a share of the finished candle, a 200 g candle at 8% is 16 g of oil on 184 g of wax, and 500 of them need 8 kg rather than 7.4 kg. That is a 600 g difference a month — worth getting right, and worth writing on the sheet so the next person does not switch conventions halfway through.

Then the arithmetic is unglamorous. 500 × 14.8 g = 7,400 g a month. Divided by a 30-day month, 246.67 g a day. Divided by 26 working days instead, 284.6 g per production day — a different and equally valid figure, used when you are planning pours rather than cover. Cover should use calendar days, because demand does not pause at the weekend; production planning should use working days. Label which one you mean every time you write it down.

Why "how many kilograms" has three answers

The question assumes a single stock level, and no working inventory has one. Stock on a consumed material is a sawtooth: it falls at a steady rate, jumps when a delivery lands, and falls again. Asking "how many kilograms do I keep" is like asking what the tide level is — you have to say whether you mean low water, high water or mean.

All three are useful, and each answers a different practical question.

The last row is the trap, and it is an easy one to fall into because "I use 7.4 kg a month, so I keep 7.4 kg" sounds like prudence. Keep a constant 7.4 kg and you are holding 30 days of cover at all times, which means the reorder has to be placed when the shelf is still at 7.4 kg — and since a cycle only consumes 7.4 kg, you end up ordering every month while never drawing the stock down. Average holding climbs toward 11 kg and the extra 5.7 kg of oil, ₹27,038.52 at Apple Cinnamon's ₹4,743.60/kg, sits there permanently for no gain in service level. Where to draw that line in general is worked through in avoiding stock-outs without lakhs on the shelf.

Building the reorder point from your own figures

The reorder point is the only number here that requires information CSI cannot give you, because it depends on how long your deliveries actually take. We publish no delivery times and this guide invents none. Dig out the last five or six orders of this oil, note the days between placing and receiving, and use those.

Where the safety stock actually comes from

There is no standard safety-stock percentage we can honestly quote, and any guide that gives you one has invented it. What there is, is your data: the spread of your monthly sales and the spread of your delivery times. Both are usually sitting in your order records already.

The last column is the honest case for safety stock. A business ordering a flat 7.4 kg every month through this exact run of trading never stocks out — and finishes month six on precisely zero, with no margin for a slow delivery, a breakage or a seventh month at 560 units. Safety stock is not a hedge against the months in the table; it is a hedge against the one that comes next.

Eight bottles — what they do and don't save

Eight kilos a month of one oil is a real production volume, and it is worth being clear about what the pack ladder gives you at that scale. 1 kg is the largest listed fragrance pack at CSI — there is no listed 5 kg or 10 kg bottle — so a month of this bestseller is eight bottles, and that is the end of the listed ladder. Recurring volumes above the listed packs are quoted on WhatsApp rather than priced on a page, and we will not guess at a figure. What we can do is show you exactly what the eight bottles cost today, and whether buying the kilo instead of the half-kilo saves anything at all. On two of the four oils below, it does not.

What changes if the load is not 8%

The load is the one input in this plan that is a formulation decision rather than a sales fact, and it scales everything. Read the table in the first section again and notice that the days of cover do not change at all — 15.2 days at the reorder point and 21.4 days average at every load — while the kilograms change by more than double between 6% and 13%. That is because cover is a time measure and the load affects both the numerator and the denominator equally.

Two honesty points matter here more than the arithmetic. First, the load you may pour is the lower of two stated ceilings: your wax's and your oil's. Luxury Soy Wax Chunks state 8–13% with 10% recommended; Apple Cinnamon states 6–10% for soy wax. On that combination the usable ceiling is 10%, not 13%. Second, those are formulation figures published on the product pages describing how much oil the material will hold — they are not regulatory limits, and they are not a promise of throw. More oil is not reliably more scent, which is the subject of why more fragrance oil doesn't always mean stronger candles.

The practical consequence for inventory is simple and often missed: changing your load changes your reorder point immediately. Moving a 500-unit bestseller from 8% to 10% raises monthly consumption from 7.4 kg to 9.25 kg and the reorder point from 3.75 kg to 4.69 kg. If you reformulate on Monday and leave the tape on the shelf where it was, you have quietly cut your lead-time cover from 15.2 days to 12.2 days. Re-derive the four numbers on the same day you change the recipe, and re-test the burn before you commit a month's oil to the new figure — the retesting discipline is covered in how to compare two fragrance oils using a controlled burn test.

The four numbers to write on the board

Write them where the person pouring can see them, in kilograms rather than grams, and date them. A reorder point without a date is a reorder point nobody will revisit.

One last check worth doing before you adopt the plan: is any of that 5.28 kg already committed? If you have accepted a confirmed order for 300 candles, 4.44 kg of this oil is spoken for and your available stock is 5.28 − 4.44 = 0.84 kg, not 5.28 kg. An inventory figure that ignores confirmed orders will cheerfully let you promise a delivery you cannot pour. Available stock equals on-hand minus committed, and it is the number to check before you say yes to anything.

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