How to Plan Wax, Fragrance, Wick and Jar Inventory for Large Gifting Orders

Buy against the order, not against the hope

Ordinary inventory is bought against an average. You sell roughly 150 candles a month, so you keep roughly six weeks of wax and a sensible pack of each scent, and if one week is slow the stock simply sits. A gifting order works nothing like that. The whole quantity is consumed inside one pour window, the scent and the vessel are fixed by somebody who is not you, and there is no averaging: if you are 40 jars short on pour day, you are 40 candles short on dispatch day.

That single difference changes every buying decision. Quantities stop being estimates and become exact multiples of a promise. Pack sizes stop being about cost per gram and start being about arriving in one consignment. And timing stops being about reorder points and starts being about the buyer’s signature — because the two mistakes that hurt on gifting jobs are buying 126 kg of wax for an order that never confirms, and buying it three days too late to cure.

So work the job as five stages, each with its own spend. The enquiry stage buys samples. The approval stage buys a pilot. The purchase-order stage buys the bulk. The pour stage buys nothing at all, because everything including the spares came with the consignment. The dispatch stage buys nothing either, but it holds something back. The table below prices all five on the 800-piece job.

One honest note about the middle of that ladder. The pilot is the stage most makers skip, because 20 candles feel like a waste of good wax when the buyer has already seen a photograph. They are not a waste. They are the only point at which the fill weight, the wick, the cure and the lid all get tested together on the exact vessel — and they double as the buyer’s approval sample, the photography set and the first two rows of your reserve.

Turn the order into four numbers before you open the shop

Fill weight drives all four. Pick the vessel first, take its published fill capacity, and treat that as the fill weight rather than guessing from the volume. Clear Glass Jar with Golden Lid (150 gram) publishes a 150 g fill capacity and an 8 cm height on its product page; Black Glass Jar with Black Lid (150 gram) publishes the same 150 g. That number, multiplied by the order quantity, is your wax before allowances.

Two things in that table are worth arguing with. The first is the vessel: at ₹94.40 it is the largest single line, bigger than 126 kg of wax. On gifting jobs the vessel is usually chosen by the buyer from a photograph, so it is also the line you have least control over — which is exactly why it should be the first thing you check for stock depth. The second is the oil. Switching the same job to Roasted Coffee at ₹3.74/g would cost ₹37,770.00 instead of ₹45,765.12, a difference of ₹7,995.12 across 800 candles. Scent choice on a large order is a four-figure decision, and it is made at sampling.

Check depth on the exact variant, not the product

This is the check that separates people who have delivered a large gifting order from people who are about to try. Every CSI product page shows the stock position for each variant, and on a catalogue this wide the depth is not evenly spread. A jar sold in a pack of 10 and a pack of 20 can be deep on one and thin on the other. A scent sold from 15 g to 1 kg can have plenty of 100 g packs and only a handful of kilos. Eco Candle Wicks is sold as Thin (C1) and Thick (C2) across six pack sizes, and those twelve variants do not move at the same rate.

So before you put a quantity in an email, open the four product pages and read the variant you actually intend to buy — the pack size, the colour, the wick thickness, the kilo. If the depth on that variant does not cover your order plus spares in one go, you have three honest options: change the pack combination, change the variant, or send the quantity to WhatsApp on +91 7397976926 and ask what can be put together for a dated job. What you must not do is quote the quantity first and find out afterwards.

One more depth question that is easy to miss: your own. A 10 kg pack of flakes and 83 jar packs need somewhere dry to sit for two or three weeks. In a Mumbai or Kochi monsoon that means sealed packs off the floor; in a Delhi or Ahmedabad summer it means away from a west-facing wall. Both wax product pages ask for cool, dry storage away from sunlight and moisture, and a gifting consignment is the largest quantity most small makers will ever have in the house at once.

One consignment or several: what to split and what never to

There is a reasonable argument for staging a large purchase: it spreads the cash, it reduces what you are storing at any one time, and it lets you start pouring before the last line arrives. There is a much stronger argument against staging the three lines that determine how the finished candle looks and smells. A gifting order is the one situation where all your output is seen together, so a difference that nobody would notice across a month of retail sales becomes obvious in a single conference room.

Cash flow is the legitimate reason to stage, and on an 800-piece job it is real money: ₹1,95,745.52 is a large amount to put out before an invoice is settled. The answer is not to split the consignment but to change the terms. Corporate and wedding buyers expect to pay an advance; a common and entirely reasonable position is that the bulk consignment is placed on the day the advance clears. If a buyer will not pay an advance on a custom-scented, custom-vessel order of 800 pieces, that is information about the order, not about your terms.

The other legitimate reason to stage is capacity. If your melter is a Mini Electric Wax Melter at 1 litre, 126 kg of wax is a great many melts, and it will take a fortnight of evenings whether the wax arrives on one day or three. That is a production plan, not a purchasing plan — take the whole consignment, store it properly, and stage the pouring instead.

What to hold back for replacements — and why it must already be cured

Large gifting orders generate replacement requests, and they arrive at the worst moment: the day before the event, after the boxes have been opened at the client’s office, when four lids are dented and one jar is chipped. You cannot answer that with raw material. Soy candles need a cure — the Luxury Soy Wax Chunks page asks for a minimum of 48 hours and ideally one to two weeks, and 14 to 21 days is standard practice for soy container candles — so a pour started on the day of the complaint is useless to the buyer.

So the reserve is finished goods, not inventory. Pour it with the main batch, cure it with the main batch, finish it with the main batch, and then put it in a separate box that does not go out with the order. On 800 pieces, 3% is 24 candles, which is ₹5,615.60 of materials sitting still — and it is the cheapest insurance on the whole job, because the alternative is a discount on an 800-piece invoice.

How large should the percentage be? Three per cent is our working assumption for a glass-vessel gifting order, and it is an assumption rather than measured data. Push it up when the vessel is fragile, when the boxes will be handled by an event team rather than a courier, or when the candles carry personalisation that cannot be redone quickly. Push it down when the vessel is a tin and the order is going to one address. What you should not do is set it at zero on the grounds that nothing went wrong last time.

The order calendar for a dated gifting job

Every gifting order has a fixed end date, and the cure is the part of the schedule that cannot be compressed. Build the calendar backwards from the day the boxes have to leave your table, and put the consignment early enough that a delayed delivery still leaves the cure intact. The version below is written in days before dispatch so you can drop any date into it.

Anchor that to a real festive date and the pressure becomes obvious. Diwali 2026 falls on 8 November 2026, and corporate gift boxes are almost always wanted in the office a clear week or two before the holiday. Work back 30 days from a late-October dispatch and the bulk consignment for a Diwali corporate order is being placed in the second half of September — which is why enquiries that arrive in the third week of October can usually only be served by whatever is already cured on your shelf.

The lines this page deliberately cannot price

CSI sells wax, fragrance oil, wicks, vessels, dyes, finishing items and tools, and every figure above comes from one of those product pages. It does not sell rigid gift boxes, printed sleeves, ribbon, shredded filler, bubble wrap, outer cartons, labels or courier services, and it does not publish freight rates. Putting an invented number against any of those would make this page look more complete and be less useful. So they get blank rows, and the job totals as CSI materials plus your own costs.

Two further points that belong to you rather than to a supplier. Store prices are inclusive of tax, as stated on the Luxury Soy Wax Chunks page, and GST invoicing is available on request — but how your own tax position works on a corporate order is a question for your accountant, not for a candle blog. And documentation matters more on gifting jobs than on retail: corporate buyers increasingly ask for an MSDS for the fragrance oil, and a written record of pour temperatures and batch dates makes a complaint far easier to answer. Both MSDS and IFRA documentation are available on WhatsApp.

Finally, the honest comparison on grade. Running the same 800-piece job on Luxury Soy Wax Chunks at ₹599.00 a kilo instead of Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 would cost ₹75,582.00 rather than ₹63,932.40 — ₹11,649.60 more across the order, or about a rupee a candle once you spread it. Choosing the vessel one tier down does far more: Black Glass Jar with Black Lid (150 gram) at ₹107.00 each would add ₹10,458.00 to the same job. On gifting orders the vessel, not the wax, is where the money is.

Frequently asked questions