I Want to Make a 200 g Luxury Lavender Soy Candle in Frosted Glass — What Exact Raw Materials Do I Need Before Starting Development?

Write the product brief before you buy anything

"A 200 g luxury lavender soy candle in frosted glass" sounds specific, but four of its words still hide decisions. 200 g — of what: wax, or the finished candle? Luxury — does that mean a higher fragrance load, a dearer oil, a heavier jar, or packaging? Soy — which soy wax, at what ceiling? Frosted glass — which jar, and does it actually hold 200 g at the fill line you want? Until each of those is a number or a named product, any order you place is a guess, and guesses are expensive in the one material that cannot be returned once opened: fragrance oil.

So the first document is a one-page product brief. It fixes what is decided and names what is still a variable. This page uses CSI's convention throughout: fragrance load is a share of the finished candle weight, so a 200 g candle at an 8% working load is 16 g of oil and 184 g of wax. The 8% is a working assumption, not a recommendation for lavender in particular — CSI publishes no per-oil dosage or throw data, so the load is one of the things the development kit tests.

Two lines in that brief deserve a second look. The jar is fixed but its fill is not: CSI does not publish the fill weight of the White Matte Glass Jar, so the 200 g target has to be confirmed by weighing before the kit is poured (the method is two sections down). And colour is deliberately left out. A pastel or deep colour is a third variable that interacts with both wick and load — the pastel-pink rose post and the black oud post build that into their kits. A white candle in a white matte jar is the cleanest first test.

Confirm the frosted jar actually holds 200 g

Frosted glass, in CSI's range, means the White Matte Glass Jar: ₹354.00 for 5 or ₹708.00 for 10, ₹70.80 a jar either way. Its fill weight is not published, and neither is its internal diameter. That matters twice. If the jar holds less than 200 g at a sensible fill line, every number below changes and the label is wrong. And the wick choice depends on the melt-pool diameter, which depends on the jar's internal diameter — which is why three wick candidates go into the kit rather than one.

The development kit: what goes in, and why

The development kit exists to answer three open lines in the brief — wax, wick and load — with as few candles as possible. Testing every combination at once (2 waxes × 3 wicks × 2 loads, three candles each) would take 36 candles. A two-stage kit does it in 20: first a wick screen at 8% in both waxes, then a load step to 10% using only the wick that passed. That is the same method the product-idea-to-BOM post generalises for any candle.

Stage A uses two candles per wax–wick pair because its job is elimination, not proof: a wick that tunnels badly or flares and soots in both of its candles is out. Stage B then uses three candles per wax at the 10% step, which is the commonly used working minimum for a comparison you intend to act on. CSI 464's page states a fragrance load of up to 10%, so its stage-B candles sit exactly at its published ceiling; Luxury Soy Wax Chunks' page states up to 13%, so Chunks has headroom above the step. Neither ceiling is a target — the vanilla hot-throw post shows when a load ladder past 10% is worth buying.

Three pack details are worth knowing before you click. Chunks are cheapest here as four 500 g bags (₹299.00 each, ₹598.00 a kilo), a rupee a kilo less than the 1 kg bag; CSI 464 runs the other way, two 1 kg bags at ₹507.40 beat four 500 g bags at ₹260.00. The oil is bought as 3 × 100 g + 1 × 50 g + 1 × 15 g because Lavender's 50 g and 100 g are both ₹5.40 a gram while its 15 g is ₹7.00 a gram — the 15 g only closes a small gap. And the Eco Thin C1 10-pack is out of stock on the 4 October re-check, so the smallest Thin pack is 20 at ₹118.00.

The 8 wicks for stage B and the shelf candles are deliberately not in the kit as a separate line: they come out of the leftover wicks of whichever type wins stage A. If Eco Thin C1 wins, the 20-pack has 16 left — enough. If Thick C2 or Cotton Braided wins, each has 6 left, so you top up after stage A with one more 10-pack (₹94.40 or ₹120.00). Buying it in advance would mean buying production-style quantities of two wicks that will lose.

Running the kit: what to record so the production list writes itself

A development kit is only worth its price if the results can be read by someone else. Number every candle on the base (wax, wick, load, pour date), weigh it to 0.1 g, and keep one sheet per stage. The test conventions below are labelled working practice, not a standard; the oud large-room post adds a room-size throw protocol, and the three-wick 500 g post shows how much longer the same tests take in a bigger candle.

Safety is a knock-out, never a trade. CSI publishes no flame-height or jar-temperature limit; the acceptance line is "no worse than the other candidates, within your jar supplier's guidance and the recognised candle fire-safety standard you work to" (ASTM F2417 is a commonly cited US standard — read it for its own requirements). A wick that throws better but runs the jar hotter has failed, and more lavender will not buy it back.

The production list, written after the kit

Once a wax, a wick and a load have passed, the brief becomes a bill of materials and the BOM becomes a purchase order. The example below is a first production run of 50 candles — a labelled example, not a forecast — at the 8% load, with Eco Thin C1 as the example winning wick. The allowance stack follows the series order: whole test candles first, then rejects, then pour loss on wax and oil only, then breakage on glass only, then rounding to real CSI packs. The 2 QC candles, 3% rejects, 5% pour loss and 2% breakage are labelled working assumptions; replace them with your own figures after the kit.

Note what does not stack. Pour loss is applied to wax and oil only — you do not lose 5% of a jar when you pour. Breakage is applied to glass only — wax does not break in transit. And the reject allowance is applied once, to consumables and jars alike, because a rejected candle uses a full set of everything. Applying a percentage twice, or rounding before adding allowances, is how a 50-candle order quietly becomes a 60-candle order. The 105-or-110-pieces post and the glass-versus-wax buffer post go deeper on both.

Read the two orders together and the wax decision is worth ₹955.00 on this run — real money, but smaller than the oil line, which is ₹4,885.02 either way. The oil is bought as 1 × 500 g + 4 × 100 g + 1 × 15 g for ₹4,885.02, cheaper than the 1 kg pack at ₹5,221.00 because the need is 900.6 g, just over 900 g. For the wax, 2 × 5 kg + 1 × 500 g of Chunks costs ₹6,289.00; twenty-one 500 g bags would be ₹6,279.00, ten rupees cheaper, but twenty-one bags to open, label and track. That is a real per-kilo quirk, and it is the kind the minimum-leftover post works through.

Buy now, buy after the kit: the split

The rule for the whole series is that production quantities of the wick — and of anything that a test could still change — are bought only after the test candles pass. Materials that are the same whichever candidate wins can be ordered early. For this product that gives a clean split.

If the jar itself is still in doubt — the weighed pour in the fill check came out far from 200 g, or you are still choosing between frosted and clear glass — move the jars into the "after" row as well. The point of the split is not a rule about jars; it is to hold back anything a test can still change.

What one finished candle costs in materials

With the 5 kg Chunks rate (₹0.60/g), Lavender at its 1 kg rate (₹5.22/g), Eco Thin C1 at ₹5.90, the White Matte jar at ₹70.80 and one sticker at ₹2.50, the material cost of one 200 g candle is ₹272.95; with CSI 464 at ₹0.51/g it is ₹256.10. That excludes labour, packaging, freight and GST, and the lid, label and box above. At 10% load in Chunks it rises to ₹291.44: each extra point of load in a 200 g candle adds 2 g of lavender, ₹10.44.

The CSI products on this shopping list

Which product brief in this cluster is yours

This page is the hub for the "product brief → exact raw-material list" cluster. Every post below starts from one product idea and ends in the same three documents — a brief, a priced development kit and a production list — but each one carries a different difficulty: an oil with no small pack, a dye that changes the wick, a jar CSI does not list, a format that needs three wicks.

The other three clusters in the series start from a different place. If you already know how many candles you need, the exact-quantity calculator cluster starts from 100 × 200 g lavender. If a customer order is driving the purchase, the large-order cluster starts from 500 wedding candles. If the budget is the fixed number, the budget cluster starts from ₹10,000. And once the formula is final, the formula-to-purchase-order cluster turns it into a 30-day production order.

Frequently asked questions