I Have a 1,000-Candle Corporate Order — How Much Additional Jar Inventory Should I Keep in Case Some Pieces Arrive Damaged?

Why a corporate order needs a different buffer

A retail run ends when the candles are sold; a wedding ends on the day. A corporate order has a tail. Four things make it different, and each changes the buffer.

Delivery is often to many addresses

Some companies ask for gifts to be couriered to employees' homes rather than handed out at the office. One consignment to one address is one packing job and one handling chain; a thousand parcels are a thousand chains, and some will break. That is why the replacement reserve triples between the two delivery models on this page.

Replacements come in over weeks

Employees open parcels when they get home, on leave, after a festival. Replacement requests arrive over several weeks, not on one day. The reserve therefore has to be held, not just bought, and holding is where the cost questions start.

The candle carries the client's name

A corporate candle usually carries the client's logo or message on the label or box. A replacement must match exactly: same jar, same fragrance, same label. A replacement from a different batch of glass or a reprinted label is noticeable, and it is the client's reputation with its own staff, not yours alone, that is on the table.

There may be a second order

New joiners, a second office, a client who liked it. A small, well-kept reserve in the same batch is also the first stock of a repeat order. Whether that justifies holding more is an inventory question, not a breakage one; the savings-versus-inventory post has the maths.

The buffer for two delivery models

Exactly 1,000 jars would be ₹94,400.00. The buffer costs ₹4,720.00 or ₹6,608.00 on top, and a single replacement you cannot make from matching glass costs a new pack plus a courier trip: in a worked example with an illustrative ₹300.00 parcel, ₹1,244.00 for one employee's candle, before the week it takes.

The percentages are lower than a first run's (see the first-run hub) because a maker taking a 1,000-candle order should already have burned this jar to the bottom and poured it at volume. If this order is your first time with the jar, add a test pack and raise production losses to 3–5%. A table of standing percentages for different order types is the buffer-percentage post's job; the wax side of a 1,000-candle order, including its own extras, is in I'm Making 1,000 Jar Candles for a Corporate Order — How Much Extra Wax Should I Prepare Beyond the Exact Calculated Fill Weight?.

Hold the reserve as jars, poured candles or finished gifts

A replacement reserve is not only a number; it is a form. How far along you take those 30 jars before anyone asks for them decides how fast you can replace and what happens to the leftovers.

A poured replacement locks up about ₹173.86 per unit before oil, label and box: jar ₹94.40 + 138 g of CSI 464 at the 10 kg price ₹70.02 + one C2 wick ₹9.44. Across 30 units that is ₹2,383.84 more cash than holding empty jars, and every rupee of it is only recoverable if the fragrance is one you sell anyway. Costs exclude labour, freight, packaging and GST.

A practical split for model B: 10 finished and labelled, for the first week of requests when speed matters most; 10 poured with the client's fragrance but unlabelled; 10 empty from the same batch. Labels for the unlabelled 10 are printed with the main run and kept flat. By week three, the requests slow and the empty jars are enough.

What holding the buffer really costs

Holding cost is what it costs you to keep spare stock between buying it and using it (or giving up on using it). For a jar buffer it has three parts.

1. Cash tied up

Money spent on spare jars is money not available for anything else. A simple way to price it: spare units × jar price × time held × your cost of money. The diagram adds up the spare jars on hand each week: 70 in the week they arrive, 50 after inspection, 30 from production to the close of the window, drawn down by replacement requests. That totals 273 jar-weeks. At ₹94.40 a jar and an illustrative cost of money of 18% a year (use your own: a loan rate, or what the cash would earn elsewhere), the holding is ₹89.21. Even if all 70 spares sat on the shelf for the full nine weeks, it would be ₹205.86. Small, next to one failed replacement.

2. Space and handling

Seventy jars in their cartons take a shelf, not a room. The cost here is less money than attention: the reserve must be kept apart from general stock, labelled with the client and batch, and not raided for a retail order in week two. Give it a box and a name.

3. Leftovers

This is the part that matters. When the window closes, whatever is left either becomes stock or becomes a write-off. In the worked example, 12 jars remain. In the plain Clear 150 g jar, that is ₹1,132.80 of jars that go straight into your next retail run: no loss at all. In a one-off coloured jar chosen to match the client's brand, 12 Black 150 g jars at ₹107.00 are ₹1,284.00 that may sit for a long time. So the jar choice sets the real holding cost, not the percentage.

Running the replacement window

The reserve only works if the window around it is run deliberately. Six steps, from the day the candles leave to the day the leftovers are absorbed.

What to buy: jars, boxes and labels

Three jars and two consumables, chosen on what their pages state, pack structure and stock on 26 September 2026, not on burn or transit performance: CSI publishes no burn-down, breakage or transit data for these jars.

A corporate Diwali order in 43 days

Diwali falls on 8 November 2026, 43 days after these prices were checked, and many corporate candle orders are Diwali gifts. The replacement window then runs after the festival, when employees open their parcels. Dispatch from Pune and transit times are not published; confirm them on WhatsApp before you promise a delivery date.

Frequently asked questions