My Five Candle Fragrances Sell at Completely Different Speeds — How Do I Calculate Individual Fragrance-Oil Stock Levels?

Why one stock level cannot serve five scents

A range of five fragrances has one shared production process, one shared wax, one shared jar — and five completely separate consumption rates. Everything that is shared can be planned with a single number. Fragrance cannot, because the thing being consumed is specific to the SKU that sells it. When somebody says "I keep about half a kilo of each scent", what they have actually set is a cover target of 8.4 days on the bestseller and 101.4 days on the slowest line — a twelve-fold spread, created by accident, in the one material where spread is most expensive.

The fix starts with the conversion that makes the five rows comparable. A 200 g-class container candle on a 185 g wax fill at an 8% load takes 14.8 g of oil. That is the convention used across this series — load as a share of total wax weight, the phrasing used on the Luxury Soy Wax Chunks page for its own 8–13% band. Calculated instead as a share of the finished candle, the same 200 g candle at 8% is 16 g of oil on 184 g of wax. Either is defensible; mixing them inside one worksheet is not.

The last column is the cost of a single-number policy, and notice that it fails in both directions at once. The 2.5 kg on that shelf is enough oil in total — 3,996 g is needed and 2,500 g is held, so it is short overall too — but even if you doubled it to 5 kg, lavender would still run out before saffron cedarwood had finished its first bottle. Total fragrance inventory is the wrong aggregate. It is the per-scent rows that stop or start a pour, and a healthy total can hide three empty bottles. The total-inventory question is worth asking separately, and it is taken up in how much total fragrance inventory is reasonable.

The five-row worksheet, filled in

Here is the whole method as five steps and one table. Do it on the day you place the order, with last month's actual unit sales rather than a target, and with the bottles on a scale rather than in your memory.

Cover is judged on the shortest line

After the order above, the five scents sit at 32.4, 30.4, 30.6, 51.9 and 97.3 days. The average is 48.5 days. That average is a useless number, and quoting it is how businesses convince themselves they are well stocked a week before a line stops. Production does not consume an average; it consumes whichever bottle is being poured. The honest figure for the shelf is 30.4 days — the shortest line, because that is the first date on which something you sell becomes unmakeable.

This has a practical consequence for how you spend a limited budget. If you have ₹8,000 rather than ₹10,233.68 this month, the right cut is not a proportional trim across three lines. It is to fund the shortest lines first and let the longest one wait: lavender's ₹7,841 is the whole point of the order, and sandalwood at 27.5 days can run a few more days without stopping anything. Cut from the top of the cover list, never from the bottom. The same binding-constraint logic across different materials — wax against jars, for instance — is the subject of enough wax for 30 days but jars for only 10.

Equal rupees against matched cover

Worth testing the method against the most natural alternative, which is not "equal bottles" but equal money — splitting a fragrance budget five ways because that feels like fairness between scents. Both baskets below start from an empty shelf and stock the same five scents. One is built to a 30-day cover target; the other spends as close to ₹4,210.68 on each scent as the real pack sizes allow.

The equal-rupee basket is ₹2,279.36 cheaper and holds 150 g less oil — so on both of the measures a spreadsheet usually reports, it looks like the better order. It is not. It buys 12.7 days of production instead of 30.4, which means a mid-month lavender stock-out and a second emergency order inside the same month. Meanwhile it has put 141.9 days of Saffron Cedarwood on the shelf at the slowest-selling line in the range. The extra ₹2,279.36 that the matched basket spends is not a premium for being careful; it is the correction of a misallocation the equal split created.

Pack decisions, scent by scent

Four cards for the four scents the worksheet treats differently from lavender. Each lists every pack, the price per kilo at that pack, and roughly how many 200 g-class candles the pack pours at 14.8 g of oil each. The per-kg column is the one that decides the pack; the cover figure decides how many of them.

Reading each ladder before you fill the basket

The last thing to internalise is that the five rows of the worksheet also need five separate price lookups. There is no range-wide rule about bulk buying on this catalogue — the slope from the 100 gm bottle to the kilo is different on almost every oil, and on two it runs the wrong way. Below are the five scents in this guide, expressed as the only comparison that matters: what one kilo of each costs as a single bottle versus as two 500 gm bottles.

Three of the five rewards for buying a kilo are between 0.4% and 3.7% — real, but far smaller than most buyers assume, and comfortably smaller than the cost of holding two extra months of a scent you may reformulate or drop. One row has no reward at all. And one charges you ₹1,699.20 per kilo for the privilege. 1 kg is the largest listed fragrance pack at CSI; there is no listed 5 kg or 10 kg bottle to step up to, so recurring volumes above a kilo a month per scent are quoted on WhatsApp rather than priced on the page — and we will not guess what that quote would be.

Turning the worksheet into a monthly habit

A worksheet done once is an audit. Done on the same day every month it becomes an inventory system, and it needs nothing more than a ruled page or five rows of a spreadsheet. Set the columns up exactly as the table above: scent, grams per day, grams on hand, days of cover, target, gap, packs, cost. Only the grams-on-hand column changes weekly; the grams-per-day column changes when your sales change, which is the thing worth watching.

Two refinements will make it accurate rather than merely tidy. First, add your own observed delivery time to the target: if your last five orders took seven days, a 30-day cover target means reordering when a scent reaches seven days plus whatever buffer you want, not when it reaches zero. CSI publishes no delivery times and this guide invents none — use your own records. Second, recalculate grams per day every month. A range growing 8% a month sees its lavender draw rise from 1,776 g to about 2,610 g inside five months, and a reorder point written in January silently becomes a stock-out in May. The full system, with seasonality and lead time folded in, is built step by step in building a fragrance-oil inventory system.

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