I Need 500 Lavender Candles and 500 Vanilla Candles — Should I Calculate Wax as One Combined Requirement While Purchasing Fragrance Separately?

The rule: merge what is interchangeable, separate what is not

That one sentence decides the whole procurement structure for a two-fragrance run. Anything that is physically the same in both candles — the same wax, the same jar, the same wick sticker — can be counted as one requirement and bought as one order, because a unit left over from one SKU is a unit available to the other. Anything that differs between the SKUs — each fragrance oil, and the wick if the two oils end up needing different wicks — has to be calculated, rounded and bought on its own, because a surplus in one cannot cover a shortfall in the other.

The order of work matters as much as the rule. You do not start from "1,000 candles × 150 g" and then split. You build each SKU's own bill of materials first — its own test candles, rejects and pour loss — and then add the interchangeable lines together. That way, if the two SKUs ever differ (a different load, a different reject rate, more trial candles for one fragrance), the combined wax figure is still correct, because it was always the sum of two real requirements.

Each SKU: 500 saleable candles plus 6 trial candles (three per wick candidate), a 2% reject allowance, 3% pour loss on wax and oil, and 2% breakage on the glass. Each needs 73.39 kg of wax, 6,381.8 g of oil, 527 jars and 517 wicks. Because both SKUs share a weight, a load and the same allowances, their figures are identical — but they are still two calculations, and the next sections show why that matters the day one of them changes.

The combined wax order, and what combining actually saves

Add the two wax figures: 73.39 kg + 73.39 kg = 146.78 kg. Rounded once to CSI 468's listed bags, that is 14 × 10 kg + 1 × 5 kg + 2 × 1 kg for ₹93,665.00, leaving 219 g (₹139.35). Now the honest comparison: rounding each SKU's wax separately would mean 7 × 10 kg + 3 × 1 kg + 1 × 500 g twice — 22 bags for ₹93,730.00, with 219 g left over. Combining saves ₹65.00 and 5 bags.

So the money saved by combining is small — ₹65.00 on a ₹93,665.00 wax order — and that is worth saying plainly, because "buy combined to save money" is the usual pitch. The real gains are elsewhere: one wax specification and one set of bags for both SKUs, one lot record instead of two, leftover wax that serves whichever SKU needs a remake, and fewer bags to store. At CSI the per-kilo price barely moves with pack size anyway — CSI 468 is ₹650.00 a kilo at 1 kg and ₹637.00 from 5 kg — so the combination's value is operational, not a price break.

CSI 468 is the example wax here because its page publishes the most complete handling set of any CSI soy wax — a 13% fragrance ceiling, a 50–53°C melting point and a 58–60°C pour temperature — which helps when two fragrances must be poured to one process. That is a specification, not a performance claim; CSI publishes no throw or frosting data for any wax. The one-larger-wax-pack post covers the same combine-or-duplicate question for 100 candles, and the one-BOM-or-many post asks when combining stops being safe.

Why each fragrance is bought on its own

Each SKU needs 6,381.8 g of its oil. Rounded on its own, Lavender is 6 × 1 kg + 4 × 100 g for ₹33,486.00 and Vanilla Bean is 6 × 1 kg + 4 × 100 g for ₹49,036.00, each leaving 18 g. Lavender is ₹5.22 a gram at 1 kg against ₹5.40 at 100 g; Vanilla Bean is ₹7.65 against ₹7.90. Both are small breaks, which is typical: on CSI's listed catalogue most oils are priced close to linearly above 100 g, so the bigger bottle buys fewer bottles more than a lower rate.

The mistake to avoid is treating the oil the way you treat the wax. A combined oil figure of 12,763.6 g means nothing to a supplier, and a rounding done on the combined figure can quietly leave one fragrance short: round the combined figure to whole kilos, split the bottles six and six by eye, and vanilla gets 6,000 g against a need of 6,381.8 g — enough for about 485 candles, not 506. Each oil gets its own need, its own rounding and its own line on the purchase order. The same holds for four or more fragrances — the four-fragrance corporate post and the 40/30/20/10 split post round each oil separately at 1,000 candles.

Jars, stickers and wicks: two merge, one depends on the trial

Both SKUs use the 200 ml Salsa Glass Jar with golden lug cap, so the jars merge: 527 + 527 = 1054, bought as 10 × 100 + 1 × 50 + 1 × 5 for ₹31,175.60 (₹29.50 a jar in the 50 and 100 packs; ₹40.12 in the 5-pack). Bought per SKU it would be ₹31,907.20. The cap comes with the jar, so no separate lid line. CSI does not publish the jar's fill weight: 200 ml is the brim volume, and 150 g of wax at an approximate 0.86–0.90 g per ml (a labelled working figure) occupies about 167–174 ml — weigh a test pour to confirm before ordering a thousand.

Wick stickers merge too: one per wick, 1034 in all, 26 sheets of 40 (₹2,600.00). The wick itself merges only if one wick passes in both fragrances. A fragrance oil can change how a melt pool behaves, so trial each fragrance with each candidate — here Eco Thin C1 and Eco Thick C2, three candles per oil per wick. If the same wick passes in both oils, order 1022 production wicks as one line (1 × 500 + 4 × 100 + 1 × 50 + 4 × 20, ₹6,077.00). If lavender passes on Thin C1 and vanilla needs Thick C2, the wick splits into two orders (₹7,976.80) and the BOM becomes two SKUs at the wick line.

The priced order, split by when to buy

The wax, jars and stickers are shared by both SKUs whatever the trial says, so they are stage one, with a 100 g bottle of each oil and the two trial wick packs. If both fragrances are already in your range and approved, buy the full oil now; if either is new to you, the 100 g bottle covers the 12 trial candles (144 g of oil in all) and the balance follows a passed trial. Production wicks always wait.

Stage one is ₹1,29,077.40; stage two is ₹87,269.00. Without allowances, one candle's material at production rates — 138 g of CSI 468 at the 10 kg rate, 12 g of oil at the 1 kg rate, a ₹5.90 Thin C1 wick and a ₹29.50 Salsa jar with cap — is ₹185.96 for lavender and ₹215.06 for vanilla. The two SKUs share every cost except the oil, which is why their prices can differ while their bills of materials look almost the same. Labels, boxes and courier are your own quotes and are not in the CSI total.

The CSI products in this order

Frequently asked questions