I Need 500 Bubble Candles for Wedding Favours — How Much Pillar Wax Should I Purchase After Accounting for Failed Unmoulding and Broken Candles?

Working backwards from the favour box

Bubble candles lose units at two points that jar candles do not. The first is release. The mould's deep folds grip the wax, so a cube can tear, pit or keep a sliver of a bubble behind. The second is handling. The raised bubbles are the first thing to chip when candles are packed, boxed, driven to a venue and unpacked by a decorator. Each loss happens at a different stage, so apply them in reverse order, starting from what must arrive.

Why divide rather than add a percentage? Because the loss applies to what goes into each stage, not to what comes out. If 4% of pours fail, 500 pours give you 480 good candles, not 500. To get 511 good candles, you need 511 ÷ 0.96 pours. Adding 4% to 511 gives 532, which is close here but drifts lower than the true figure as failure rates rise. At a 10% failure rate the gap is several candles. Round up at every step. A fraction of a candle is a whole pour.

Remelt credit: two ways to plan the wax

A failed bubble candle is not wasted wax. Pull the wick, and the candle can usually go back into the melter. Remelting failed pours is common practice with pillar and mould candles. Test that the remelted batch still meets your colour and scent standard, because repeated heating can dull both. That gives you two honest ways to plan. In Plan A, you buy for every pour and treat failures as lost. In Plan B, you credit back the wax you expect to recover from the 33 failed and broken candles. We use 80% recovery as a labelled assumption, allowing for the wick, the dust on broken pieces and the melter residue.

The gap between the two plans is 4,350.72 g of scented wax, which is small next to the whole order. The decision is really about time. Plan B assumes you will melt down the failures and re-pour them before the deadline. For a wedding favour order, due in a fixed week of the November–February season, the safe choice is usually Plan A for the first order. Remelt the failures anyway and treat the recovered wax as stock for the next job. Once you have a failure record on this mould, Plan B is a fair way to trim a repeat order.

The bubble weight you have not measured yet

CSI does not publish the fill weight of the Big Bubble mould, and this page does not guess it. Everything above uses an illustrative 160 g finished candle. Here is how the order moves if your weighed candle comes out lighter or heavier. Every row keeps the same pour count, loss and load.

Each 20 g on the finished candle moves the order by about 11,082.80 g, roughly a 10 kg bag. So pour and weigh a test candle before you order, not after. Water-weighing the mould first gives you a planning estimate. My Silicone Mould Holds 240 g of Water — How Do I Estimate How Much Pillar Wax Is Required for Each Finished Candle? explains the 0.86–0.90 factor for that. The deep folds of a bubble mould trap air and water, though, so trust the weighed, trimmed candle over the water reading.

Scented or not? Many wedding favours go out unscented, so that a table of two hundred does not become one strong smell. If so, the oil column is zero and all 88,662.40 g is wax: 8 × 10 kg + 1 × 5 kg + 4 × 1 kg, ₹53,400.00. If they are scented, keep the load modest and test it. No fragrance ceiling for Soy Pillar Wax is published in our data, and a bubble's large surface shows any seeping oil at once. The 6% here is a labelled test value, not a recommendation.

Moulds, not wax, set the deadline

One Big Bubble mould makes one candle per cycle: pour, set, top up if needed, release. How many cycles you get a day depends on the wax, the room and the candle size, and it is not published anywhere. Time your test candle. The table assumes 2 releases per mould per day as a labelled working figure. Replace it with your own timing.

The wax for this order is ₹50,100.00, and it barely changes whatever your deadline. The mould line runs from ₹10,620.00 for five moulds to ₹53,100.00 for twenty-five. That swing is ten times the whole difference between Plan A and Plan B, and at twenty-five moulds it approaches the wax bill itself. That is why the mould count is the real procurement decision on a bubble-favour order. Work back from the wedding date: cure time, packing, delivery, then pouring days. Pick the smallest mould count that fits. The moulds stay with you for the next order, but silicone mould lifespan is not published, so do not count on a set number of cycles.

The priced order

The wick line assumes 12 cm of braided wick per pour. That is a labelled working length, so measure your mould's height plus what you need to tie off and trim. 2 rolls of 61 m cover 538 pours with room to spare. Wick size for the Big Bubble candle is not published. Burn-test your test candle and check that the pool reaches across without the bubbles collapsing into the flame. Favour boxes, ribbons, tags and freight are your own suppliers' quotes and are not included.

For jar-style favours, where breakage is about glass rather than bubbles, I Need 1,000 × 60 g Wedding Favours — How Much Wax Should I Buy When I Also Need 50 Additional Candles for Samples, Replacements and Breakage? runs the same backup maths. I Need 1,000 Decorative Mould Candles with No Fragrance — How Much Pillar Wax Should I Buy if Each Finished Candle Weighs 120 g? covers a thousand unscented decorative mould candles, and I'm Producing Several Different Mould Candle Designs — How Do I Calculate the Combined Wax Requirement When Every Mould Has a Different Fill Weight? combines several mould designs, each with its own failure rate, into one wax order.

Wedding orders bring their own procurement questions. I Have a Wedding Order for 300 × 80 g Candles — How Much Wax, Fragrance Oil, Wick and How Many Jars Should I Order Including Backup Units? prices a full 300-favour wedding order with backups. A Client Wants 1,000 Candles but Expects 20 Samples Before Final Production — Should the Sample Raw Materials be Included in My Procurement Calculation? asks whether client samples belong in the procurement, and My Client May Increase a 1,000-Candle Order by 20% at the Last Minute — Should I Buy Additional Raw Materials Now or Wait for Confirmation? deals with a client who may add 20% at the last minute. For the scented version with trimming, see I Need 1,000 Fragranced Mould Candles — How Do I Calculate Wax and Fragrance When Each Candle Loses a Small Amount During Trimming and Finishing?, and to go from a fixed quantity of pillar wax to a count you can promise, I Have 25 Kg of Pillar Wax — How Many 150 g Mould Candles Can I Realistically Produce After Accounting for Spills and Trimming Waste?.

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