My Candle Business Uses 20 Different Fragrance Oils — How Do I Set Separate Reorder Levels for Fast-Selling and Slow-Selling Scents?

Rank the twenty by spend

The first job is a list. For each scent, write down the grams of oil used last month (candles poured × grams of oil per candle; a 200 g candle at 8% holds 16 g) and the price per gram you pay, then multiply. That is the scent's monthly spend. Sort the list from highest to lowest and add a running total. The example below is a reader-style month of 6,252 g across twenty in-stock CSI oils, about 391 candles, with each oil priced at its 100 g rate. The usage figures are illustrative; the prices are real.

Why rank by spend rather than by grams? Because the point of the exercise is where your cash and attention should go, and a slow scent at ₹7 a gram can matter more than a faster one at ₹3.42. In this example the two rankings are almost identical. British Rose is the exception: third by grams, fourth by spend, because it is one of the cheapest oils per gram in the catalogue. If your range mixes budget and designer-inspired oils, the two rankings will differ more, and spend is the one to use.

The cut-offs used here are about 75% of spend for A and about 91% cumulative for B. Those are working choices. Some businesses use 70/90, some 80/95. What matters is that the classes are different enough to deserve different rules, and that you keep the same cut-offs month to month so scents move between classes for real reasons. The ranking reflects your sales, not a market fact: the best-selling sort on CSI's own collection is a separate thing, and your A-class may look nothing like it.

One rule per class

Each class gets a rule that suits how fast it moves, how much a stock-out hurts, and how big the smallest sensible bottle is compared with a month's use.

A scents are where stock-outs cost the most, because a customer who wanted your best seller may not accept a substitute. They get the full treatment: a reorder point with a week of safety stock, and orders of a month's supply in whatever pack mix is cheapest. Dark Vanilla uses 30 g a day in the example, so its reorder point is 420 g and its monthly order is 1 × 500 g + 4 × 100 g for ₹7,000.00.

B scents sell steadily but in smaller amounts. The same formula applies, but rounding to 100 g bottles is enough, and a weekly stock check is fine because a B stock-out is annoying rather than serious. The monthly order is usually one to three 100 g bottles.

C scents are where most makers overthink. Palo Santo in the example uses 32 g a month, about one gram a day. Its reorder point with a 7-day lead time is 7 g, which is less than any bottle you can buy. So the formula collapses into a rule: always have one sealed bottle. When you break the seal, order another. The sealed bottle is your safety stock and your reorder signal in one.

All twenty scents, worked

Here is every scent in the example, sorted by monthly spend, with its class, reorder point, the cheapest pack mix for one month, and the average weeks of cover the rule leaves on the shelf.

Read the last column. A and B scents sit at about three to four weeks of average cover: a week of safety stock plus half a month's order. The C scents sit higher, between five and ten weeks, because a single bottle is still more than they need. That is the cost of a long tail, and it is much smaller than it would be under a uniform rule. Across all twenty, the ABC rules keep about ₹26,246.52 of oil on the shelf on average: A scents ₹16,685.94, B ₹4,702.35, C ₹4,858.23.

Which pack for which class

On CSI's listed prices the reliable per-gram step is from 15 g up to 50 g or 100 g. Above 100 g most oils are priced almost flat, and of 91 oils listing both, only 24 show a 1 kg saving of 5% or more. So the pack question for each class is mostly about handling and reorder frequency, with one exception: check your A scents against the kilo.

Mango Coconut is the stand-out: 20.7% cheaper per gram at 1 kg, which is why its cheapest monthly order in the table above is built around the kilo even though it uses only 400 g a month. British Rose and Jasmine also save on the kilo. Lavender and Sandalwood barely move, and Dark Vanilla saves about 3%. For those, choose the pack that matches your order cycle. C scents should never be in kilos: at 32 g a month, a kilo of Palo Santo is years of stock for a scent that may not last the season. A 1 Kg Fragrance Oil Is Much Cheaper per Gram than 100 g — How Quickly Should I be Using a Fragrance Before Moving to the Larger Pack? works out how fast a scent must sell before the kilo makes sense.

Keeping the classes honest

Classes drift. A scent that was A in March may be C by August, and a C scent can take off after one good review or a festive gift order. The rules only work if the ranking is redone regularly, and the easiest cadence is the first of every month, when you already count stock for your wax reorder point.

Two moves need care. When a scent rises into A, do not jump straight to kilo stock; give it one month at the new class with 500 g orders, then decide. When a scent falls into C, stop reordering in large packs immediately, use up what you have, and keep only the sealed-bottle rule. If it stays at the bottom for several months, it may be time to retire it; I Want to Discontinue a Slow-Selling Candle — How Do I Use the Remaining Fragrance Oil, Wax, Jars and Packaging Without Wasting Inventory? covers using up the remaining oil, wax and jars without waste, and I Have 30 Candle Fragrances but Most Sales Come from 10 — How Should I Change My Fragrance Oil Purchasing Quantities Based on Actual Demand? covers reshaping purchasing when most sales come from a third of the range.

New launches are a special case. A scent with no sales history has no rank. Treat every launch as C until it has a month of real data, buying the smallest sensible bottle, and let the numbers promote it. I'm Launching New Fragrances Every Month — How Do I Prevent Fragrance Oil Inventory from Becoming Too Fragmented as the Catalogue Grows? sets out a launch pipeline that stops a monthly new scent from turning into twenty half-used bottles.

Finally, the classes are for fragrance only. Wax, wicks and jars are shared by every candle, so they are always A materials in effect, whichever scent is poured. My Candle Business Is Growing but All My Cash Keeps Going Back into Wax, Fragrance Oils and Jars — How Much Raw-Material Inventory Should I Actually Hold? covers those, and I'm Scaling Candle Production but Don't Have Enough Cash to Bulk-Buy Everything — Which Raw Materials Should Receive Purchasing Priority? decides which material gets the cash first when there is not enough to go round.

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