Candle Making Raw Material List for a ₹10,000 Budget

The ₹10,000.00 raw material list, line by line

This list makes fifty 150 g scented soy candles in two scents. Every item is a live CSI pack at September 2026 pricing, and the basket totals ₹9,514.20, leaving ₹485.80 of the ₹10,000.00 unspent on purpose. The unspent part is not slack: it is the money you need on the day a wick fails a burn test or one scent sells out and the other does not.

The working candle is 150 g of wax with 12 g of fragrance oil — a load of 8% of wax weight, the starting point the Luxury Soy Wax Chunks page gives and comfortably inside the 10% maximum stated on the Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 page. Where a wax ceiling and an oil page’s stated range differ, the lower figure governs. Wax and oil together are 70.7% of the list; the wicks everyone worries about are 3.5%.

One number in that table is an assumption and you should treat it as one: the salsa jar page states a 200 ml capacity, not a fill weight in grams. A 150 g soy fill leaves sensible headroom under the lug cap, but confirm it on jar one by weighing what you actually pour before you commit the batch. Vessels with a published gram fill — the Clear Glass Votive Jar at 70 g, the Clear Glass Jar with Golden Lid at 150 g, the Tin Containers at 85 g and 135 g — take that guesswork away, at a different price.

The six pack-size decisions hiding inside the list

1 · Wax: buy the 1 kg rate, never the 500 g rate

Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 costs ₹507.40 a kilogram at 1 kg, 5 kg and 10 kg alike. The only pack that costs more per kilogram is the 500 g at ₹260.00 — ₹520.00 a kilogram. So the 5 kg pack is not a discount, it is a convenience; the reason this list buys one 5 kg plus three 1 kg packs rather than eight 1 kg packs is nothing but fewer bags to open. If you would rather hold less wax, buy 1 kg packs and spend the difference on jars.

Grade matters more than pack size here. Eco Soy CSI 400 is ₹399.00 a kilogram — ₹59.85 of wax in a 150 g candle against ₹76.11 for CSI 464, a ₹16.26 saving per candle and ₹813.00 across the fifty. Its page does not publish a fragrance ceiling, so you would be testing your 8% load without a stated maximum to work to; ask on WhatsApp before you build a range on it. Going the other way, Luxury Soy Wax Chunks at ₹599.00 a kilogram adds ₹13.74 per candle and buys you a page-stated ceiling of 13% if you later want a heavier load.

2 · Fragrance oil: the 500 gm pack is the first honest step up

British Rose is ₹3.42/g in the 100 gm pack, ₹3.19/g in the 500 gm and ₹3.07/g at 1 kg. Buying the 300 g this list actually pours as three 100 gm packs costs ₹1,026.60; the same 300 g out of a 500 gm pack costs ₹955.80. That is a 6.9% cut in the rate — real, but it works out at under two rupees a candle. The stronger argument for the 500 gm pack is that it leaves 200 g on the shelf, which is the next 16 candles without a new order.

The scent you pick moves the number far more than the pack you pick. At 12 g a candle, Citrus Lemon at ₹2.84/g costs ₹34.08 and British Rose at ₹3.19/g costs ₹38.23. CSI stocks oils across a wide range of per-gram rates, from under three rupees a gram to several times that, so a single choice on the oils page can change your candle cost by more than every pack-size decision on this page put together.

3 · Wicks: pack size changes nothing at all

Eco Candle Wicks Thin (C1) are ₹5.90 each in the 10-pack, the 50-pack, the 100-pack and the 1000-pack. There is no volume rate to chase, so buy the number you will use plus a burn-testing margin — here, a 50-pack (₹295.00) plus a 10-pack (₹59.00). Thick (C2) is ₹9.44 each on the same flat basis. CSI does not publish wick sizes by jar diameter, so plan to burn two or three test candles before you pour fifty; the live wick guide by diameter gives starting points and the rest is your own burn test.

4 · Vessels: the one line where bulk genuinely pays

The 200ml Salsa Glass Jar is ₹40.12 each in the 5-pack and ₹29.50 each in the 50-pack — a 26.5% cut, the largest pack-size saving in this basket. Fifty jars bought five at a time would cost ₹2,006.00 instead of ₹1,475.00. The 100-pack is the same ₹29.50 each, so there is nothing further to gain by doubling up; buy 50 and keep the cash.

5 · Stickers: small money, and the wick sticker is not optional

Candle Wick Stickers are ₹2.50 each in the sheet of 40. A wick that lifts off the base mid-pour ruins a candle you have already paid ₹153.07 to make, so two sheets is the cheap insurance in this list. Candle Care Stickers are ₹0.83 each at 500 and ₹0.70 each at 1000; the 500 roll is enough for this batch and the next.

6 · Colour: leave it out at this budget

A 50 gm Candle Dye Liquid is ₹472.00 — about five per cent of the whole budget, spent on something that changes nothing about how the candle burns or smells. At ₹10,000.00, uncoloured natural soy is a defensible look and the money buys ten more jars instead. Add colour at the next budget, once you know which of your two scents sells.

Cost per candle has two right answers

Consumed cost is what actually goes into one candle: the grams of wax, the grams of oil, one wick, one wick sticker, one jar, one care label. Basket cost is the whole list divided by the candles it produced. They differ because packs do not divide neatly into candles, and the gap is not waste — it is stock sitting on your shelf.

Twenty-five of each scent consumes ₹7,549.60 of the basket. The other ₹1,964.60 is still in your workroom: ₹253.70 of wax, ₹637.20 and ₹568.00 of the two oils, ₹59.00 of wicks, ₹75.00 of wick stickers and ₹371.70 of care labels. Divide the basket by fifty and you get ₹190.28 a candle; divide the full ₹10,000.00 by fifty and you get ₹200.00. Neither is wrong, and neither is the number to cost your product on.

For deciding what a candle costs to make, use the consumed figure — ₹153.07 with British Rose, ₹148.92 with Citrus Lemon. For deciding whether this month worked, use the basket figure and then subtract the ₹1,964.60 of stock you still hold. The pricing calculator guide takes it from there; this page stops at materials, because retail pricing depends on costs CSI does not sell you.

The composition is worth sitting with. In this candle, wax is 50% of the consumed cost, fragrance oil 25%, and the jar 19%. Move to the Clear Glass Jar with Golden Lid at ₹94.40 each and the jar alone becomes 43% of a ₹217.97 candle. The vessel, not the wax, is what a budget candle business is really buying.

The vessel decides the yield: 45 to 105 candles for the same ₹10,000.00

The table below holds everything else constant — CSI 464, British Rose at 8% of wax weight, an Eco C1 wick, one wick sticker and one care label — and swaps only the vessel and the fill it is built for. The candle counts are the budget divided by the consumed cost and rounded down; they are illustrative arithmetic, not a promise, because pack quantities and your own breakages will move them.

Read the last column honestly. The votive gets you 105 candles because it is a 70 g candle, not because it is efficient: you are selling less wax and less fragrance in a smaller object, and the buyer knows it. The premium glass jar gets you 45 because ₹94.40 of the ₹217.97 consumed cost is the jar and its lid. Neither is right or wrong until you know what you can sell, which is why this decision belongs before the shopping list, not after it.

There is a fifth option the table leaves out on purpose. Tea Lights Aluminium are ₹6.49 each in the 100-pack, and a filled tealight is a few grams of wax and a small wick. They are a legitimate way to turn leftover wax into saleable stock, and a poor way to build a brand as your only product — a point the live container versus pillar guide takes further.

What ₹10,000.00 of raw materials does not include

This page prices materials that CSI sells, from CSI product pages. It does not price equipment, and it does not price the things that turn a poured candle into a delivered order — because CSI does not sell those and will not invent a number for them. Put your own figures in the second table below before you call the ₹10,000.00 a plan.

The equipment gap is the bigger surprise. You still need a way to melt wax, a way to read its temperature and a way to weigh it. CSI stocks all three, and they are deliberately absent from this basket: at ₹10,000.00 the choice is fifty candles with borrowed kitchen equipment, or twenty-five candles with a melter. The companion full-startup guide at this budget covers that trade-off; this page assumes you already have a double boiler, a scale and somewhere to pour.

Two of those rows tend to be underestimated by first-time makers, and both are glass. A 150 g filled candle plus jar and carton is heavier than it looks, and Indian courier pricing rewards fewer, larger consignments — which is an argument for ordering this list once rather than in three instalments. The second is breakage: assume a small percentage of jars will arrive or leave imperfect. This page uses a 5% allowance in the spare wax, wicks and stickers above; that is an assumption for planning, not measured data.

On tax and registration, ask your own adviser. CSI issues GST invoices and its prices are inclusive of taxes, as stated on the Luxury Soy Wax Chunks page. What you must charge, register for, or claim back is a question for a professional who knows your turnover and state — not for a supplier and not for a blog.

Turning the list into fifty candles: a four-step plan

What is left on the shelf, and what to buy first next time

After fifty candles you still hold ₹1,964.60 of materials: 500 g of wax, 400 g of fragrance oil across two scents, ten wicks, thirty wick stickers and 450 care labels. Only one line is fully consumed — the jars. That shape repeats for most small candle makers: vessels run out first, fragrance oil runs out last, and the fastest way to waste a budget is to re-order in the same proportions as the first list.

Two of those oils will not sell equally, and that is the useful part of a two-scent list. Whichever moves faster earns the 500 gm or 1 kg pack next time — British Rose drops from ₹3.19/g to ₹3.07/g at 1 kg (₹3,068.00), Citrus Lemon from ₹2.84/g to ₹2.83/g. Whichever moves slower gets bought in the 100 gm pack, or dropped. That is the entire discipline of a small range: let the batch decide the pack size, not the other way round.

When you do step up, step up on the jar before the wax. The wax rate does not improve above 1 kg on CSI 464, so a 10 kg pack at ₹5,074.00 buys stock cover and nothing else. The jar rate improved 26.5% between the 5-pack and the 50-pack and then stopped. For anything beyond the pack sizes shown on the product pages, bulk pricing is a WhatsApp conversation — we do not publish a bulk rate card, and you should not plan a budget on a discount nobody has quoted you.

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