I Have ₹1 Lakh to Start a Candle Business — How Much Inventory Should I Buy Before I Know Which Fragrances Will Actually Sell?

Why a big budget needs a small first batch

With ₹10,000, overbuying is limited by the budget itself. With ₹1 lakh it is not, and that is the risk. A new brand with no sales history cannot know which of eight scents will lead. The honest answer to "how much inventory should I buy?" is therefore enough to generate sales data, and then more of whatever the data favours. That means a discovery batch big enough that the differences between scents are real, and small enough that the slow scents cost you little.

The plan on this page uses three tranches. Tranche 1 tests eight scents and pours 120 candles in the six that pass. Tranche 2 is placed only after a first selling window, and each scent's share is set by how many it sold. Tranche 3 moves the proven sellers to larger packs, but only where the larger pack is actually cheaper per gram. Most of the budget is still in your account when you place tranche 3, which is exactly where it should be.

Tranche 1: test and discover

Tranche 1 buys the tools once and never again. The standard set (scale, pen thermometer, pouring jug, stirring sticks, wick centering devices) is ₹1,475.00, as in the ₹10,000 plan. At this budget the Mini Electric Wax Melter (₹2,360.00) earns a place too, because 128 pours from a double boiler is slow and uneven. Melter throughput is not published, so treat it as a steadier heat source rather than a speed promise.

Each discovery scent gets 350 g of oil, bought as three 100 g bottles and one 50 g. Twenty candles at 16 g use 320 g, leaving 30 g per scent, or just under 10%, to cover pour loss and a couple of made-to-order candles. Orchard Pear and Blue Ocean are assumed to drop out at the test stage. That is a choice for the worked example; your burn decides. Wax is CSI 464 at ₹507.40 a kilo, identical at 1 kg, 5 kg and 10 kg, rated up to 10% fragrance by the wax maker. The 8% production load sits comfortably inside that formulation ceiling.

Why 20 candles per scent? Because with five or ten, one friend buying three candles is a trend. With twenty, a scent that sells 17 and a scent that sells 5 are telling you something. Twenty per scent across six scents is also the most this budget should commit before seeing a sale: tranche 1 is 36.4% of the budget, and 3.8% of it is tools you keep regardless.

Tranche 2: the reorder rule

Here is the rule used on this page. For each scent, target stock for the next window = 2 × candles sold in the last window. Subtract the candles still unsold. What remains is what you pour. Oil is then bought for that many candles, less the 30 g already in hand, plus 5% for pour loss, rounded up to the cheapest combination of in-stock packs. The factor of 2 is a working assumption that covers one more window and a buffer. Change it if your windows are long or your supplier lead time is short.

Look at what the rule does. Citrus Lemon and Mango Coconut, the two strongest sellers in the example, get the largest reorders, and for both the cheapest way to cover the need is a single 500 g pack. Cucumber Green Tea sold only 5 of 20 and still has 15 on the shelf, so the rule buys nothing. It does not say drop the scent; it says sell what you have first. The total is 86 more candles and ₹5,266.40 of oil, against the ₹8,682.83 spent evenly across six scents in tranche 1.

Wax, jars and wicks are shared by every scent, so they are the safe place to carry a little extra. Fragrance is not shared, which is why the rule is applied to oil scent by scent. How much oil to buy per scent when launching five and whether to cut scents or buy smaller quantities look at the same problem from the launch side, before any sales exist.

Tranche 3: when a kilo makes sense

Tranche 3 is where the ₹43,074.01 starts to be spent, and only after two windows agree on the leaders. Moving a proven seller to 1 kg is right when two things are true: you will use the kilo within a few months, and the kilo is actually cheaper per gram. On CSI's listed catalogue the second condition is rarer than most makers expect. Of 91 oils that list both 100 g and 1 kg, 52 are within 1% per gram. Only 24 show a saving of 5% or more.

Five of the six discovery scents are among the 24 oils with a 1 kg saving of 5% or more, but the size of the saving varies a lot. Mango Coconut saves 20.7% per gram and Eucalyptus Spearmint 13.3%; for those two, if they keep selling, the kilo saves real money as well as reorders. Citrus Lemon, Cinnamon Vanilla and Cucumber Green Tea save between 5.6% and 5.9%, which is worth having but not worth buying early for. Woody Oud is priced the same per gram at every size from 100 g, so there is no money reason to buy its kilo; buy it only when reorder frequency makes 100 g bottles a nuisance. Per-candle figures use CSI 464, an Eco Thin C1 wick and a White Matte jar, and exclude labour, packaging, freight and GST.

The upfront alternative, priced

For comparison, here is what the same ₹1 lakh looks like if it is spent the way many new brands spend it: a kilo of every scent on day one. The fragrance alone is ₹30,971.60, 31.0% of the budget. At 16 g per candle, each kilo makes 62.5 candles, so eight kilos make 500 candles. Those 500 candles also need about 92 kg of wax and 500 jars, which the budget cannot buy after the oil.

In the example, ₹12,021.60 of that order sits in the two scents that failed the test and the one that sold slowly. The staged plan spent ₹1,433.11 on the same three. That difference, not any per-gram saving, is the real economics of a first inventory. A lean inventory for three months and buying 1 kg only for bestsellers follow the same logic further down the line. Which materials to buy in bulk and which in trial sizes and the order in which a new brand should buy everything fill in the rest of the purchasing sequence.

Frequently asked questions