How to Plan Candle Inventory for Diwali

What you are actually planning for

Diwali 2026 falls on 8 November 2026. Counting from 15 September, that is 54 days — which sounds generous until you lay the real constraints over it. Soy container candles want 14–21 days of cure before the throw settles, and the buying does not wait for the festival itself: gift-set orders, corporate enquiries and the first wave of retail all land in the two to three weeks before the day. In practical terms, the candles you intend to sell need to be poured by about the third week of October, which leaves roughly five usable pour weeks from today.

That is the whole reason festive planning is an inventory problem rather than a sales problem. You are not deciding what will sell. You are deciding what will exist. A candle you pour on 1 November is a candle nobody can buy as a festive candle, however good it is, because it has not cured and the window has closed around it.

Three demand streams behave differently, and a plan that ignores the difference tends to end up with the wrong stock in the wrong format:

Most small Indian candle brands run all four to some degree. The mix matters because it decides your format split: a plan that is 80% corporate can be one scent in one jar, and a plan that is 80% retail cannot. Write your own rough percentages down before you decide the number — they are the difference between a range that sells out and a range that sells half of everything.

Two honest ways to set your Diwali number

Method A — from last year's sell-through. If you sold festive candles last year, you already own the most reliable number available to you. Take the units you actually sold in the festive window, not the units you made. Adjust for the two things that changed: your audience and your channel mix. Then check that the answer fits in the pour weeks you have.

The stock-out adjustment is the step most makers skip, and it is the one that quietly costs the most. If a scent sold out nine days before the festival, its true demand was not the number you sold — it was somewhere above it. Equally, if a scent sat unsold until December, do not carry it forward at the same weight because you like it.

Method B — from capacity, for a first festive season. With no history, forecast nothing. Build the largest number you can finish comfortably, make it small enough that selling out is plausible, and let the sell-through become next year's Method A input. The arithmetic runs in the other direction: batch size, pours per day, days available, minus slack.

Both methods land in the same place for this page, so the worked plan from here on is 400 candles. If your own arithmetic lands at 120 or at 1,200, every ratio below still holds; only the pack counts change. And if the melter is the constraint rather than your time, that is a fixable one: the 1 litre Mini Electric Wax Melter is ₹2,360.00 and the imported Electric Wax Melter starts at 10 kg capacity, which changes a pour evening completely — but it is a capital decision to make before the season, not during it.

Splitting the number: formats, scents and price points

Four hundred candles in one format and one scent is a production run. Four hundred candles in three formats and six scents is twenty-two separate small batches, each with its own test burn, its own leftover oil and its own chance of being the one that does not sell. The split is where most of the margin and most of the risk live, so decide it deliberately.

Three formats is the practical maximum for a plan of this size, and the reason is not production — it is presentation. Each format needs its own photograph, its own price, its own box and its own stock count. The votive trio is the one worth arguing about: 150 votives sold as 50 sets of three is ₹288.71 of materials per set, and it gives you a gift-shaped product without a new vessel, a new label size or a new photograph beyond the set shot.

On scents, the honest maths is short. A festive range needs enough choice that a buyer feels they chose, and no more. Four scents across 400 candles means an average of 100 candles each, which is a real batch. Six scents means 67 each, three extra bottles bought in full, and two more test burns in a fortnight that has none to spare. Adding a fifth scent to this plan costs ₹1,593.00 in oil alone and produces not one extra candle.

Two things in that table are worth copying into your own plan whatever scents you choose. The first is that oil is bought against wax weight, not against candle count — 140 Sandalwood candles need more oil than 140 Rajnigandha candles because they are bigger candles. The second is that pack ladders differ. On Sandalwood the per-gram rate is ₹5.03 at 100 gm and ₹5.03 at 1 kg, so you can buy exactly what the plan needs without paying for the privilege. On British Rose the rate keeps falling to the top of the ladder — ₹3.19 a gram at 500 gm against ₹3.07 at 1 kg — so if a scent like that is in your range, round the purchase up rather than down.

Two ceilings govern the load in every one of those batches, and the lower one wins. The CSI 464 page states a fragrance load of up to 10% of total wax weight; each oil page states its own candle usage range. The 8% used throughout this plan sits inside both for the oils named here, but check the page of any oil you swap in, because a range that stops at 6% turns your costing and your test burns into different numbers.

Turning 400 candles into one material order

Every festive plan converts to materials the same way, in four steps. Do them in this order and the arithmetic is unambiguous; do them out of order and you end up buying oil against candle count, which is the single most common costing error in a festive run.

The vessel line is ₹29,864.00 of a ₹70,613.04 order — more than the wax and the fragrance together, which is normal for container candles and worth knowing before you choose a jar you cannot photograph. The wax line, at ₹19,788.60, is smaller than most first-time planners expect: a festive season's worth of soy for a 400-candle brand is roughly the cost of one good gifting-jar pack multiplied by sixteen.

Colour and finish are optional lines this plan leaves out on purpose. A festive range often wants them: Gold Mica is ₹234.82 for 20 gm and red Candle Dye Liquid is ₹236.00 for 15 gm, both of which go a long way at the doses used in candles. Add them if the look needs them, but add them as a line with a number rather than as an afterthought at checkout.

The order dates that still work from today

A festive material order is not one order. It is a main order that covers the committed pour, and a top-up order that covers whatever the first two weeks of selling tells you. Splitting them this way is what keeps a plan flexible without risking the season, and the dates below are the ones that still work counting from 15 September 2026.

Notice what is not in that table: a promised delivery time. CSI does not publish delivery timelines and this page will not estimate one. What the store does publish is stock, and what a message on WhatsApp gets you is confirmation of the lines you are about to build a season on. At festive time that confirmation is worth more than a day saved, because every line on the plan above is a line that other candle makers are ordering in the same fortnight.

Safety stock, sell-through and what happens on 9 November

Two questions decide whether a festive season ends well: how much stock you hold back for the last week, and what happens to whatever is unsold the morning after. Both are answered at planning time, not in November.

On safety stock, the useful rule is to hold the buffer in your best-selling format rather than spreading it across the range. A brand that keeps 30 gifting jars back for the final week can fill a last-minute corporate top-up, replace a breakage on a courier delivery, and still sell the remainder at full price on the day. A brand that keeps three of everything back has a shelf of samples and nothing to sell.

That last row is the whole argument for buying materials rather than building stock. Three kilograms of CSI 464 and 250 g of oil held unpoured is roughly 23 more gifting jars you can produce if a corporate enquiry lands on 10 October — and if nothing lands, it is wax and oil you use in December, in January and for wedding-season orders in the new year. The same money spent on 23 finished candles in a festive-red jar is 23 candles you will be discounting in the week after the lamps come down.

On leftovers, the honest answer is that some scents survive the festival and some do not. Sandalwood, oud, vanilla and rose sell year round in India; they simply sell as candles rather than as Diwali candles once the lamps come down. Anything tied to a festive-only look — a jar with a Diwali motif, a label with a year on it, a set boxed as a festive set — has a much shorter shelf. That argues for a plain vessel and a festive outer box rather than a festive vessel: the box is your figure, the jar is your inventory.

One last piece of planning arithmetic, clearly labelled illustrative because retail prices are yours to set. If the 150 gifting jars sold at ₹749.00, the 50 votive trios at ₹899.00 and the 100 tins at ₹349.00, the plan would gross ₹1,92,200.00 against ₹70,613.04 of CSI materials — a gap of ₹1,21,586.96 before a single rupee of packaging, courier, stall fee, platform commission or labour comes out of it. Those are not profit figures and this page will not pretend they are. They are the reason the blank rows in the table above matter as much as the priced ones.

The festive lines CSI cannot price for you

CSI sells wax, fragrance, wicks, vessels, dyes and mica, finishing items, tools and equipment. It does not sell gift boxes, printed labels, ribbon, tissue, shrink wrap, mailers or courier services, and publishes no rates for freight, labour, electricity, stall rent, photography or advertising. At festive time several of those are bigger decisions than the wax. Give each one a row, a quantity and a real quote from whoever supplies it.

The row that decides the season is usually the gift box. A candle in a printed box sells at a gifting price; the same candle in a bubble-wrapped mailer sells at a candle price. That is a packaging decision with a margin attached, and it has a long lead time of its own — printers want artwork weeks in advance in October, because every small brand in India is printing something. Get the quotes while you are ordering materials, not after the candles have cured.

The row that most often gets forgotten is labour. Five pour weeks, a fortnight of finishing and labelling, and then the selling itself is a serious amount of somebody's time. Price it. A festive season that only worked because nobody was paid is a season you cannot repeat and cannot hand to anyone else — which is exactly the trap a growing candle brand needs to avoid before it takes on a corporate order it has to fill twice.

Finally, a sanity check on the finished plan. Does every material line trace to a pack on a product page. Is fragrance calculated from wax weight rather than candle count. Are the 5% and 4% allowances written down as assumptions rather than buried. Is every vessel line confirmed for depth before you photograph the range. And does the sheet end in two totals — ₹70,613.04 of CSI materials and your own rows underneath. A festive plan that ends in one number has an invented figure in it somewhere, and November is an expensive month to discover which one.

Frequently asked questions