Two dates decide the whole plan: 18 October and 25 October

Diwali 2026 falls on 8 November 2026. Count back the cure and you get the only two deadlines that matter. A 21-day cure puts your last pour on 18 October. A 14-day cure buys you a week more and puts the hard stop on 25 October. Those are pour dates, not order dates, and the gap between them is the difference between a comfortable plan and a tense one.

Why 14 to 21 days at all, when some oil pages say a candle is ready in 24 to 48 hours? Both are true about different things. Forty-eight hours is roughly when a soy candle is stable enough to test-burn — the wax has set, the surface has settled, you can light it and read the pool. Throw is a slower story: the Luxury Soy Wax Chunks page itself asks for a minimum of 48 hours and says ideally one to two weeks, and 14–21 days by fragrance family is standard practice for soy container candles. If you burn a festive candle on day three and judge it weak, you will be tempted to raise the load on 400 candles for a problem that cure would have solved by itself (see why your candle needs a 14-day cure and how cure time changes the smell of different fragrance families).

Work the rest of the calendar backwards from 18 October. The pour itself takes days, not hours, at any real volume: 400 candles at 200 g is 80 kg of wax, and a 1 litre melter or a double boiler turns that into a week of sessions. Before the pour you need the oil in hand, weighed and confirmed against a jar you have already burned. Before that, any new scent needs its own 14-day test cure, which is why a new scent sampled after about the third week of September is a post-festival launch, not a festive one.

Turning a candle target into grams of oil

Fragrance load on CSI product pages is a percentage of wax weight, so the sum is simple: oil grams = wax grams × load. At this series' default unit — 200 g of wax at 8% — one candle takes 16 g of oil. Run that across a plan and the numbers stop being vague: 100 candles is 1,600 g, 400 candles is 6,400 g, 1,000 candles is 16 kg. Note that this is a different sum from a percentage of the finished candle; if you work that way, 8% of a 216 g finished candle is 17.28 g, and on 400 candles the difference is 512 g of oil. Pick one convention and write it on the batch sheet.

Then check the load against two ceilings and use the lower one. Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 states up to 10% of total wax weight; Luxury Soy Wax Chunks states up to 13% with 8% as a starting point and 10% recommended. On the oil side, the Apple Cinnamon page gives soy 6–10%, Sandalwood up to 10% for soy, Rajnigandha 6–10%, Dark Vanilla Oud 6–10% and British Rose up to 10% for soy. At 8% in CSI 464 every one of those sits inside both limits, which is exactly why 8% is a sane festive planning number: it leaves you room to move up on one scent after a burn test without redoing the order.

The weighting is the judgement call, and it is yours, not ours. Two anchors carrying 60% of the run is a common festive shape: warm spice and an Indian floral both read as festival scents, and both are easy to photograph in a gift set. The three supporting scents at 62 candles each exist so that a customer browsing your shelf has a choice, not so that they sell equally. If your own last-season numbers say otherwise, follow them — the arithmetic in this table works with any split as long as the grams land on the pack ladder.

Buy to the pack ladder, not to the forecast

CSI oils come in 15 gm, 50 gm, 100 gm, 500 gm and 1 kg packs, and not every oil offers every size. A forecast of 1,920 g has no pack that fits it, so you either buy 2 kg and carry 80 g of slack or buy 1.5 kg and stop pouring 26 candles short. Deciding that in advance, scent by scent, is most of what festive stock planning actually is.

Round up, and round up on the anchors first. The two scents carrying 120 candles each get 2 kg; the three supporting scents get 1 kg each. That is 7 kg against 6,400 g needed — a 600 g buffer, or 9.4%, which is close to the 10% that pitcher residue, bottle cling, weighing drift, a spilled pour and two or three test jars will quietly consume. A buffer is not optimism. It is the reorder you cannot place after 18 October.

Per-gram rates reward the bigger pack on some oils and not on others, which changes how you round. British Rose moves from ₹6.29 a gram at 15 gm to ₹3.07 at 1 kg — a 51% drop, so rounding up costs you almost nothing per gram. Apple Cinnamon is ₹4.74 a gram at 50 gm and still ₹4.74 at 1 kg, so the bigger pack buys you convenience and buffer rather than a discount. Check the ladder on each product page before you decide which scent to round up.

The four-step order sheet

Two small habits make this sheet worth keeping. Write the batch code on the bottom of every jar as you pour — scent, load, date — because in the first week of November someone will ask which candle was which and you will not remember. And keep the order sheet itself: next September, your actual sell-through against this plan is worth more than any general advice about festive scents, including ours.

If you are reading this in October

Most festive planning advice assumes you started in August. If you are opening this page later, the honest answer is that fewer options remain, not none — and the options that remain are the ones with short, certain lead times. The table below is what is still achievable on each start date, with what has to be dropped in exchange.

The last row is the one worth arguing with yourself about. It is against our interest to say it, but a candle poured on 1 November and sold on 6 November is a candle a customer will burn at about five days of cure. It will smell thinner than the same candle poured three weeks earlier, and the person who buys it will conclude that your brand is thin, not that your calendar was. Selling out is a better outcome than shipping candles that undersell your own fragrance.

What the order ties up, and for how long

The 400-candle plan commits ₹1,13,495.00 of materials, of which ₹32,193.00 — 28.4% — is fragrance oil. Per candle that is ₹283.74: ₹101.48 of CSI 464, ₹75.90 of Apple Cinnamon at 8%, ₹94.40 of jar and ₹5.90 of wick. Fragrance is the second-largest line after the jar, and it is the line that moves most with your load decision, which is why the load belongs in the plan rather than being decided at the melter.

Two honest caveats. First, the jar is the biggest single line here, so if the plan is too heavy for your working capital, the fix is usually a smaller candle rather than a cheaper fragrance: a 100 g votive halves the wax and the oil at the same load. Second, the ₹32,193.00 of oil is committed roughly five weeks before the festival, and it is the least liquid line in the stack — wax and jars keep for a long time, while an opened bottle of oil that has been through a warm October is a different proposition in April. Buy the anchors deep and the experiments shallow.

9 November: what to do with the leftovers

Assume you finish the festival with 400 to 600 g of oil spread across five bottles, plus whatever a scent that undersold left behind. Weigh each bottle, write the figure and the date on it, and close it properly — headspace and warmth are what age an opened oil, and CSI's oil pages do not publish a shelf life, so ask on WhatsApp rather than assuming a number. Store them out of sunlight, away from a window that gets afternoon heat, and off the floor if you are anywhere that floods in the monsoon.

Then put the remainders to work in the season that follows rather than saving them for next Diwali. Wedding orders run from November into February in most of India, and warm spice, sandalwood and tuberose all sit comfortably in that brief; a 400 g remainder is 25 candles at 16 g, which is a wedding-favour tray or a small corporate box. Christmas is another natural home for the spiced anchors. The oil that does not have a home in the next 90 days is the oil you over-bought, and writing that sentence into the next plan is worth more than the two or three thousand rupees of oil it represents.

Finally, record the actual sell-through against the plan while it is fresh: candles poured, candles sold by scent, how many days of cure each batch got, and which scent customers asked for and you did not have. Next September that sheet is the single most useful document you own, and it is far more specific to your customers than any list of festive bestsellers — including the ones we publish, such as five Diwali candle fragrances that can become bestsellers and best candle fragrance oils for Diwali collections.

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