I Have 30 Candle Fragrances but Most Sales Come from 10 — How Should I Change My Fragrance Oil Purchasing Quantities Based on Actual Demand?

Rank the 30 by candles, not by feel

The reason is memory. You remember the scent a customer praised, the one you reordered in a panic and the one you love pouring. None of that is demand. The only reliable signal is finished candles sold per scent, counted from your order records over the last 90 days and divided by three. Ninety days is long enough to smooth out one big gifting order and short enough to reflect this season's taste. If you sell through several channels, add them together before you rank. A scent that is quiet online can be the backbone of your market stall.

Here is the example we use throughout this page. It is illustrative, not CSI sales data: a maker producing 400 candles a month across 30 scents, all in a 200 g container at an 8% load. The top ten sell 295 candles between them, the next ten 84 and the last ten 21. Your split will differ. Almost everyone's has the same shape, though: a short head that carries most of the volume and a long tail that carries most of the SKUs.

The tier boundaries do not have to fall at ten and twenty. Draw them where the sales curve bends. A useful test is to ask, for each scent, whether its monthly oil use is closer to a 1 kg pack or to a 50 g pack. Anything using more than about 330 g a month behaves like a production scent. Anything using less than about 50 g a month is still behaving like a test. The middle is where most indecision lives, and 100 g is the size that suits indecision.

From candles to grams to packs

Once a scent has a monthly figure, the purchase is arithmetic. Multiply candles by the oil in one candle. At 200 g and 8% that is 16 g, the working load for this series. Luxury Soy Wax Chunks are rated up to 13% and CSI 464 up to 10%, so 8% sits comfortably inside both. Add a wastage allowance, and plan 3–5% for pour loss and test burns as a working assumption. We use 4%. Then decide how many months one order should cover. We use about six weeks (1.5 months), which keeps one order in hand while the next is on its way without parking a season of oil on the shelf. Round up to the nearest listed pack:

Read the last two columns together. Under the old habit of buying 500 g of everything, the top four scents ran dry in less than a month. Lavender lasted 0.75 of a month, about three weeks. That is where the emergency orders come from. Under the demand plan, every A-tier scent gets between one and just under two months of cover. The four biggest move to the kilo and the next six stay at 500 g. The ten A-tier packs cost ₹30,778.40, against ₹22,970.40 for ten 500 g packs. You spend more on the head, and you should.

Does the kilo save money on these oils? Mostly it saves trips, not rupees. Using CSI's listed prices: Lavender's 1 kg is ₹5,221.00 against ₹5,240.00 for two 500 g packs, a ₹19.00 difference. British Rose's is ₹3,068.00 against ₹3,186.00, which saves ₹118.00. For Fresh Strawberries the two routes cost exactly the same, ₹3,540.00. Jasmine's kilo, at ₹3,923.00, is ₹1.00 dearer than two 500 g packs at ₹3,922.00. The real price step on the catalogue is at the other end. The 15 g carries a median 23.1% premium per gram over the same oil's 100 g. Above 100 g, most oils are priced in a straight line. For a top-five-only version of this decision, I Have 20 Fragrances but Only Five Are Bestsellers — Should I Buy 1 Kg Fragrance Oils Only for Those Five and Keep Smaller Quantities of the Rest? goes deeper.

What equal buying really costs

Now price the whole range both ways. For the A tier we use the real CSI prices above. For the B and C tiers we use the catalogue medians rather than naming twenty more oils: the median in-stock 500 g is ₹2,781.50, the median 100 g ₹629.00 and the median 50 g ₹342.20. These are medians across different sets of oils, so treat them as an order-of-magnitude figure for the tail rather than a quote for any one scent.

The demand plan holds 9.9 kg of oil instead of 15.0 kg and releases ₹29,304.00. More important is where the oil sits. Under equal buying, a C-tier scent selling two candles a month gets 500 g, which is 15 months of stock. That oil ages on the shelf while your Lavender customers wait. Under the demand plan the same scent gets 50 g, about six weeks, and the rupees go to the scents that turn over.

Your own total will not match ours, because your tail oils are not the medians. The direction will match, though. The money you free is roughly the price of the oil you were buying for scents that could not use it. If you want to know how much of that freed cash to keep as cash rather than put into wax or jars, Should I Keep More Money in Cash or Use It to Buy Larger Quantities of Candle Raw Materials at Better Prices? and My Candle Business Is Growing but All My Cash Keeps Going Back into Wax, Fragrance Oils and Jars — How Much Raw-Material Inventory Should I Actually Hold? work through the holding decision.

The B and C tiers

The middle tier is where most of the judgement lives. These scents sell steadily but slowly: in our example 6 to 12 candles a month, or roughly 100 g to 200 g of oil. Six weeks of that is 150 g to 300 g, so two or three 100 g bottles per order. Why not a 500 g pack? At 6 candles a month, 500 g lasts five months. At 12 a month it still lasts two and a half. The 500 g would lower the price per gram only for the minority of oils with a real break above 100 g, and it would triple the time the oil waits.

Buying 100 g multiples also keeps a door open. If a B-tier scent climbs into the top ten, the next order moves up a size. If it slides into the tail, you have not already bought three months of it. Several bottles of the same batch also let you open one at a time, so the rest stay sealed. That is a sensible habit with any fragrance oil, though CSI does not publish a shelf-life figure. Check the oil's product page or ask on WhatsApp if you plan to hold stock for a long period.

The tail is simpler. A scent selling one to three candles a month uses 16.6 g to 49.9 g of oil. Buy the 50 g, which costs the same per gram as the 100 g for most oils (median difference 0.0%), or the 15 g where a scent sells about one candle a month and a 15 g is listed. The 15 g costs more per gram, a median 23.1% premium over 100 g. At one candle a month, though, paying ₹20 or so extra per bottle is cheaper than holding oil you may never pour.

Seasonal scents are the main exception. A cinnamon or pumpkin profile might sit in the tail from March to August and then jump to the head in October. Rank seasonal scents against their own season, not against the whole year. If you are planning festive quantities now, My Candle Sales Double During Diwali — How Early Should I Start Increasing Wax, Fragrance Oil, Wick and Jar Inventory Before the Season? works back from Diwali on 8 November 2026 to the dates each order has to be placed.

The monthly re-rank

The plan only works if the ranking moves with your sales. Once a month, which can be the day you do your accounts, run this routine. It takes about half an hour with a spreadsheet, and it replaces most of the guesswork in your fragrance purchasing.

Setting the order size is not the same as setting the point at which you reorder. The re-rank tells you how much to buy. When to buy depends on how fast each scent falls and how long delivery takes, and fast and slow scents need different trigger levels. My Candle Business Uses 20 Different Fragrance Oils — How Do I Set Separate Reorder Levels for Fast-Selling and Slow-Selling Scents? and I'm Growing Quickly but Don't Want to Run Out of Wax — How Do I Set a Reorder Point Based on Monthly Consumption and Supplier Lead Time? cover that half of the system.

When your sales data lies

Stockouts hide demand. A scent you could not sell for three weeks looks weaker than it is. Adjust for selling days before you rank, or your best scent can fall to the middle and be under-bought again.

One big order distorts a quarter. A 60-candle corporate order in one scent can lift a tail scent into the top ten for three months. Strip one-off bulk orders out of the ranking and buy for them separately. A Customer Wants 500 Custom Candles — How Much Wax, Fragrance Oil, Wick and Jar Inventory Should I Buy Before Starting Production? covers the order-specific purchase.

New launches have no history. A scent launched six weeks ago has half a data set. Give new scents their own provisional tier and buy them in 100 g until they have a full 90 days. I'm Launching New Fragrances Every Month — How Do I Prevent Fragrance Oil Inventory from Becoming Too Fragmented as the Catalogue Grows? sets out the launch discipline that stops this becoming 40 scents instead of 30.

Gift sets blur the signal. If most of a scent's sales come inside a mixed box, it may be riding on the set rather than pulling its own weight. Count it, but look at its single-candle sales before promoting it to the kilo.

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