I Have ₹20,000 and Want to Launch Vanilla, Coffee and Lavender Candles — How Should I Divide the Budget Between Wax, Fragrance Oils, Jars, Wicks and Testing Materials?

The ₹20,000 split for vanilla, coffee and lavender

When you launch three named fragrances, the temptation is to divide the money into three equal piles and buy a little of everything in each. That duplicates wax, jars and wicks that every scent shares, and it hides the one real difference between your three candles: what the oil costs. The plan below buys the shared materials once, for the total candle count, and splits only the fragrance line by scent. Every price is a listed, in-stock CSI pack, and the lines close exactly on ₹20,000 with a labelled reserve.

By group: tools ₹1,239.00, testing ₹330.40, wax ₹6,289.00, fragrance ₹5,160.00, jars ₹3,894.00, production wicks and stickers ₹495.00, reserve ₹2,592.60. The fragrance line is 25.8% of the budget, and inside it vanilla alone is ₹2,370.00 — more than coffee and lavender's ₹1,170.00 and ₹1,620.00 would suggest if you had assumed all oils cost about the same. The example uses Dark Vanilla for vanilla (position 4 in CSI's best-selling sort), Roasted Coffee for coffee (position 3) and Lavender (position 1). CSI also lists Vanilla Bean at the same price as Dark Vanilla; which vanilla you launch is your call.

The jar is the White Matte Glass Jar at ₹70.80 each. CSI does not publish its fill weight, so the 200 g candle used throughout is an illustrative fill: weigh one test pour to the line you want before you trust any figure below. If your jar holds 180 g, every candle count rises and every oil line falls slightly — the actual-wax-weight post shows the recalculation.

Three ways to divide the fragrance money

With ₹5,160.00 for fragrance, there are three sensible ways to divide it. Each one is shown with real CSI packs, the grams it buys and the candles those grams make at 16 g per candle plus 3% pour loss.

Method A looks fair on paper and is the one most people reach for. In practice it gives you 25 coffee candles and only 13 vanilla — 56 in all, more than the 55 jars can hold — so the stock levels are decided by the price list, not by you, and some coffee oil sits idle. Method B, the one this plan uses, gives every scent the same 18 candles and lets the fragrance cost differ: you pay ₹1,200.00 more for the vanilla shelf than the coffee shelf, and you know exactly why. Method C is for a reader who has a reason — a market, a gift order, a café client — to lead with one scent. Lavender is only the example; choose your own lead, and note that even then the jars and wax do not change, because the candle count is the same 54.

Nothing on this page says which of the three will sell best. CSI publishes no sales data beyond the order its collection sorts in, and a launch with equal stock is the only way to find out for your own customers. The ₹75,000 post is about what to do once you know: whether to put the next money into bigger packs or keep it for reordering the scents that proved themselves.

The bill of materials, scent by scent

Each 200 g candle at a working 8% is 16 g of oil and 184 g of wax. Luxury Soy Wax Chunks' product page states a maximum fragrance load of 13%, so 8% sits well inside it and leaves room to test higher if you decide to. The allowance stack runs in the series' fixed order: test candles counted as whole candles, then pour loss on wax and oil only, then breakage on glass only, then rounding up to real packs.

The wax rounding has a quirk worth knowing. Chunks are listed at ₹299.00 for 500 g — ₹598.00 a kilo — which is a rupee a kilo cheaper than the 1 kg and 5 kg bags. Twenty-one 500 g bags would cover the need for ₹6,279.00; two 5 kg bags and one 500 g bag cost ₹6,289.00. The plan takes the three-bag option and pays ₹10.00 for not handling twenty-one bags. The 10 kg bag (₹5,999.00) would cost more than two 5 kg bags (₹5,990.00), so it never wins here.

The oil rounding is tidier: 296.64 g per scent rounds to three 100 g bottles, leaving 3.36 g of each. On all three oils the 100 g bottle costs the same per gram as the 50 g or very close to it, while the 15 g carries the premium — Dark Vanilla is ₹8.67 a gram at 15 g against ₹7.90 at 100 g. Three 100 g bottles are both the cheapest way to buy 300 g and the easiest to keep track of. The 1.3 kg fragrance post covers the bigger version of this rounding problem.

What each scent costs per candle — and what load does to it

Here is the per-candle material cost at the prices this basket actually pays: Chunks at ₹598.95 a kilo (blended across the three bags), oils at their 100 g price, Eco Thin C1 at ₹5.90, a sticker at ₹2.50 and the White Matte jar at ₹70.80. It excludes labour, packaging, freight and GST.

The spread between the dearest and cheapest candle is ₹64.00, and all of it is oil. If you price the three candles the same, the coffee candle quietly carries the vanilla one; if you price them differently, this table is the reason. Moving the whole range from 8% to 10% would add ₹1,520.04 to the fragrance line on this basket (3 × 100 g + 5 × 15 g of vanilla, 4 × 100 g of coffee, 3 × 100 g + 1 × 50 g + 2 × 15 g of lavender) — paid from the reserve, which would then be ₹1,072.56. The 10% fragrance-load post runs that comparison at 100 candles.

The test stage, and what waits for it

The testing line is ₹330.40: a centering device and two small wick packs. Six of the 54 candles are test candles — one per scent on Eco Thin C1, one per scent on Eco Thick C2 — poured from the same wax, oil and jars as production. That is the right test for a three-scent launch because different oils can change how the same wick behaves; testing one scent and assuming the other two follow is the commonest shortcut and the one that most often goes wrong.

CSI publishes no wick-per-diameter chart and no numeric flame or jar-temperature limits. A wick passes when it is no worse than a candle you trust on every safety line and stays within your jar supplier's guidance and the candle fire-safety standard you work to; throw is never bought with a hotter jar. The wick-sample post shows how many sizes to add when the first two both fail.

The priced shopping list

When a three-fragrance launch is the wrong plan

Three scents is a sensible first collection on ₹20,000 because each still gets 18 candles — enough to put in front of customers and learn something. Go to four or five on the same money and each scent drops to a dozen or fewer, and the test stage grows with every oil you add. If your plan is to look like a bigger collection without buying more materials, the ₹20,000 'look large' post shows how far one jar, one wax and different oils can stretch, and the depth-against-breadth post prices the trade-off at ₹50,000.

Where the other budget questions are answered

This page owns the three-named-fragrance version of a ₹20,000 budget. The ₹10,000 hub sets out the four allocation rules; ₹25,000: bulk or small decides which materials deserve bigger packs; ₹30,000 online asks how many fragrances and jar sizes a budget supports; ₹50,000 for five fragrances runs the capacity count at five scents; and 25 lavender, 25 vanilla, 25 coffee and 25 sandalwood is the fixed-count version of this split.

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