I Need to Produce 1,000 Corporate Candles While Continuing Normal Website Sales — How Do I Calculate My True Available Production Capacity?

Your order and your week, as numbers

The corporate candle in this example is a 160 g fill in the clear 200 ml Salsa jar at 8% Apple Cinnamon: 12.8 g of oil and 147.2 g of wax (load on total weight). Your website keeps selling its usual range in 200 g jars. The workshop is one maker six days a week and a helper three days, with one melter. If your set-up differs, the method holds; only the inputs change.

Two inputs decide most of the answer, and both are usually guessed. The first is the website figure: use the busiest of your last eight weeks, because the week you commit corporate capacity is not the week you find out demand jumped. The second is the minutes per website candle: time a real morning of website dispatch, not a production run. Single parcels, bubble wrap, courier labels and customer messages are slow, and they never show up in a candles-per-day count.

Total − website − buffer, in minutes

Here is the formula, step by step, for the worked example. Each line removes something you have already promised to someone else, or to the bad day that always comes.

Now compare that with the two sums most makers do first. The trap gives the order every minute: 3,672 ÷ 5.5 = 667 a week, and 1,050 pours "fit in under two weeks". The half-trap counts candles: "I can make 667 a week and the website takes 120, so 547 are free", about 1.9 weeks. Both forget that website candles cost more minutes than corporate ones, that the website has bad weeks, and that something always goes wrong. The true figure, 317 a week, is 58% of the half-trap figure.

Check the machines and racks too

Minutes are usually the binding limit for a two-person workshop, but check the other two quickly. Melt: the corporate run needs about 50.7 kg of mix a week and the website about 30.0 kg; one 10 kg melter at two or three melts a day covers both with room to spare. CSI's 10 kgs WAX MELTER page claims it "can melt 10 kg of soy wax in approximately 30 minutes at 100°C"; treat that as the page's claim, and melt to CSI 464's stated 80°C–90°C pour range, checked with a thermometer. Racks: corporate candles sit 72 hours before cartoning, so about 212 positions on top of your website racks. The station-by-station version is the maximum-capacity post.

Week by week: when the 1,000 are ready

Lay the order onto real weeks. Days 1–3 are set-up: the client signs the sample, the PO and advance arrive, materials come in and are lot-checked. Website production runs throughout. Corporate pouring starts on day 4.

Two things in that table matter more than the totals. First, the 367 buffer minutes are not scheduled: they sit in every week waiting for the remake or the broken day, and if a week goes cleanly you finish early. Second, in an average website week you will have reserved 150 but only sold about 120, which frees about 240 minutes (43 corporate candles). Use that slack to get ahead; never promise it to the client.

The working-day count is 3 + 20 + 3 = 26; on a 6-day week starting Monday that is calendar day 30. The naive plan would have said about 18 working days. Pack daily from the first 72-hour mark rather than at the end, or the last week becomes a packing week.

Three ways to free capacity, and their price

If the client needs the candles before day 30, you have three levers. Each one is priced below with labelled worked-example inputs; the method is what transfers.

Scenario B: the cost of displaced website sales

Capping the website at 60 a week (pausing slow scents, showing a longer dispatch time) frees 720 minutes a week. Against your average demand of 120, you turn away or delay about 120−60 = 60 candles a week for the 15 production days, 150 candles in all. At a worked-example contribution of ₹260.00 a website candle (your price minus materials, packing and platform fees), that is ₹39,000.00: ₹39.00 per corporate candle. If about half of those customers simply wait and buy later, the real cost is nearer ₹19.50 a candle, but you won't know which half, and a regular who meets "dispatch in 10 days" may not wait.

Scenario C: buying labour instead

Putting the helper on six days instead of three adds 1,224 minutes a week. Over the 19 working days of the shorter order window that is about 10 extra days at a worked-example ₹700.00: ₹7,000.00, or ₹7.00 per corporate candle. That is far cheaper than scenario B, if the person is already trained. A new hire in week 1 slows you down before they speed you up; train them on website orders, which are more forgiving, and keep your experienced hands on the corporate pours.

One option is missing from the table on purpose: cutting the buffer. Dropping it to zero would add 67 corporate candles a week and bring the date in by a couple of days, and it is the option that turns one bad Tuesday into a missed delivery. If the date only works with no buffer, the date does not work.

Two stocks, one shelf each

Capacity has a materials twin. If both your website candles and the corporate candle use CSI 464, the wax on your shelf is one pile serving two masters, and the website, with its daily small pours, always gets to it first. So the corporate order gets its own purchase sheet and its own labelled shelf; the website keeps its normal reorder routine, recalculated for the higher draw. The full method for keeping the two apart is the reserved-materials post; whether to reserve everything up front is the reserve-before-batch-one post.

₹189.48 per saleable candle is CSI materials only, buffers included; it excludes labour, freight, the client's packaging, GST and marketing. The oil line is a judgement call: Apple Cinnamon is priced flat from 50 g to 1 kg, so 13 × 1 kg + 500 g + 100 g (13.6 kg, ₹64,512.96) covers 13.5744 kg at the lowest spend, with 25.6 g to spare. That is thin. The 14 kg option costs ₹1,897.44 more and buys 425.6 g of slack and one tidy order line. Running short of oil on day 22 and receiving a second lot is a bigger problem than ₹1,897.44.

The website side: same weeks, its own maths

While the corporate run is on, the website at its committed 150 a week (200 g at 8%) still draws about 27.6 kg of wax a week, 110.4 kg over four weeks. Add the corporate 157 kg and the workshop moves 267.4 kg of wax in four weeks against a normal 88.32 kg: about 3.0× the usual draw. Your normal reorder point was set for the normal draw; recalculate it for the website alone, and never let the corporate shelf count as "stock on hand" in that sum. Bought to the kilo, the website's four weeks of CSI 464 would be 111 kg, ₹56,321.40, if it all came from new stock.

The decision rule, and what never gets squeezed

The settling number in this worked example is day 30 with the website as normal; the floor, with a full-time helper, is day 22. A split delivery is often the easy middle: at 317 a week, about 600 saleable corporate candles are ready, set and cartoned by around day 20, and many corporate clients distribute in waves anyway.

What the capacity sum must never borrow from

The burn test on the corporate candle. The corporate candle here is a 160 g fill in a Salsa jar with Apple Cinnamon. If that exact jar, fill, wick and oil have not been burned to the end, it is a new candle, and development comes first: the new-fragrance development post and the never-skip post. The capacity sum above assumes a proven formula.

The 72-hour set and the burn checks. Apple Cinnamon's page states "cure 48-72 hours" for soy; the plan holds 72 hours before cartoning, a judgement, not a rule. Burn-check candles pulled from week 1 melts are burned during week 3 against the approved sample. That is calendar time, and it costs few minutes, so there is no capacity reason to cut it (standardising cure before QC burns).

The website's promise. Your website customers were promised a dispatch time before the corporate client arrived. If you cap the website, change the promise on the site first; do not let the corporate run quietly break it.

What to buy for the corporate run

Five items, chosen on page statements, price and stock on 7 October 2026, for a corporate candle the worked example assumes is already proven. CSI publishes no burn or throw data, so nothing is ranked on performance. Each card says when not to buy.

Skip for now: a second melter (the bottleneck here is minutes, not melting), any new oil for the corporate candle that has not been burned in the Salsa jar, and extra website stock "while you're at it". Argued against our own interest: do not buy the corporate 157 kg until the client has signed the sample and paid the advance. A capacity plan with no signed sample is a plan for wax sitting on your floor.

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