I Received an Order for 1,000 Candles — How Do I Calculate Raw Materials, Wastage, Production Time and My Final Quotation?

Lock the specification before you put a number on anything

A 1,000-candle enquiry usually arrives loosely worded: a wedding planner wants favours, a company wants Diwali gifting, a hotel wants room candles. Loose words are fine in a conversation and fatal in a quotation. Before you cost anything, settle six things and write them into the quotation itself, because each of them changes the total by thousands of rupees.

The wick line deserves a sentence of its own. CSI does not publish wick-size tables by diameter on the wick pages, so the right wick for your jar is settled by a test burn, not by a chart — the wick guide by diameter sets out how to run one. If your formula is already proven in this exact jar, you can quote today. If it is not, the honest answer to the buyer is that you need 14–21 days of cure plus a burn week before you can promise anything, and that period sits before the 33 days below, not inside them.

The material list, in the packs CSI actually sells

Start with the honest per-candle figure, because you will need it again when you price. At a 150 g fill of CSI 464 bought at the 10 kg rate, British Rose at 8% of wax weight from a 1 kg pack, one jar, one wick, one wick sticker and one care sticker, a single candle is ₹216.55 of CSI materials. Multiply by 1,000 and you get ₹2,16,552.00. That number is useful and wrong, in that order.

Now add the allowances and buy in the packs that exist. CSI lists CSI 464 to 10 kg on the store, oil to 1 kg, Eco wicks in tens up to 1,000, jars in tens, wick stickers in sheets of 40 and care stickers in rolls of 500. You cannot buy 162.2 kg of wax; you buy 17 packs of 10 kg. For a single consignment larger than the listed pack ladder, ask on WhatsApp — bulk pricing is quoted there rather than printed on the page.

Two things fall out of that basket that a per-candle sum never shows you. The first is the ₹21,971.00 gap between ₹2,16,552.00 and ₹2,38,523.00 — ₹15,806.54 of it is the allowances, ₹6,164.46 of it is pack rounding. The second is what you are left holding when the run ends: about 7.8 kg of wax, 269 g of oil, 8 jars and 39 wicks. That leftover is not waste — it is the start of your next batch — but it is cash sitting on a shelf, and if the buyer never repeats, it is cash sitting on a shelf for a long time.

Wastage, rejects and the pack-rounding gap

Wastage on a candle run is three different things wearing one word, and they behave differently. Process loss is material you buy and never pour: wax congealed in the melter and pitcher, oil clinging to the beaker and the bottle neck, a wick pulled out crooked. Rejects are finished candles that fail your own check — off-centre wick, sunken top, a chipped rim, a smudged surface. Pack rounding is not waste at all; it is the difference between what you need and what the store sells. Separate them in your costing or you will double-count one and forget another.

None of those percentages is CSI data, and none of them should survive your first run. Count what you actually reject, weigh what is left in the pitcher, and replace every figure above with your own. What matters right now is that a reject is not a small loss: the wax can be re-melted, but the jar, the wick and the stickers cannot, and the oil in it is gone. A rejected candle costs about ₹140.44 — 65% of the candle — and 30 of them is ₹4,213.26.

How long 1,000 candles actually take

The calendar, not the cost, is where most 1,000-candle orders go wrong. The pouring is the short part. The cure is the long part, and it is not negotiable: soy keeps developing its throw for days after it is solid, and a candle dispatched three days after pouring will reach the buyer smelling weaker than the sample that won you the order. The 14-day cure guide sets out the mechanism; for a paid order, take the long end.

Add it up and a 1,000-candle order occupies about 33 days of your workshop, plus supplier lead time going in and transit going out. That has an obvious festive consequence. Diwali 2026 falls on 8 November 2026; working back 33 days plus transit from a delivery that must land comfortably before it, an order accepted in the first week of October is tight and an order accepted after that cannot be cured properly. An enquiry that arrives on 11 September 2026 and is confirmed the same week dispatches around the middle of October, which is comfortable. The same enquiry confirmed a month later is a different conversation, and the honest answer is a shorter cure or a smaller quantity, said out loud.

The costs CSI cannot price for you

CSI sells raw materials. It does not sell outer cartons, printed labels, ribbon, bubble wrap, mailers or courier services, and it does not publish freight rates, minimum orders or delivery times. So none of those can appear as a number on this page, and none of them should appear as a guess in your quotation either. What they need is a row, a label and a figure you have actually been charged.

Two of those rows deserve special attention on a big order. Inbound freight is the one makers forget entirely, and 170 kg of wax plus 1,080 glass jars is a heavy consignment — more than one CSI reviewer has said plainly that delivery charges are high enough to change what they order, which is a fair thing to say and a fair thing to plan for. And breakage in transit is not the same as breakage in your workshop: it happens after you have spent every rupee on the candle, so a broken jar at the buyer's end costs the full ₹216.55 plus whatever it costs to send a replacement. Give it a row.

Building the number you send

Margin is taken out of the selling price, not added to the cost. If you want to keep 50% and your cost is ₹100.00, you do not quote ₹150.00; you quote ₹200.00, because ₹100.00 is half of it. The formula is: price per candle = (CSI materials + your own costs) ÷ (1 − your margin). Everything else is bookkeeping.

You can only fill half of that formula from this page, so here is what the CSI half alone produces. Read it as a floor, not a quotation: it is the price that would return the stated margin if boxes, labels, freight and labour cost nothing, which they do not. Your real quote is this figure plus your own costs divided by the same factor. The retail figures below are illustrative arithmetic, not a recommended price.

Two sanity checks before you send anything. First, compare the floor with what you sell the same candle for retail: if your usual retail price is below the 50% floor here, the order is not a bulk order, it is a discount you are about to fund. Second, look at the order value column. At a 50% margin on materials alone the order is worth ₹4,77,046.00, and your own costs push the real number higher — that is a large enough sum that a written scope and an agreed payment schedule are ordinary business hygiene rather than distrust. For how the tax side of an order that size should be handled, use your own accountant; CSI issues GST invoices on request but cannot advise on your position.

What the quotation should actually say

A one-line price invites a negotiation about the price. A quotation that describes the candle invites a decision about the candle. Write it so that a buyer who reads it twice cannot later be surprised, and so that you can point at a line rather than an argument.

The changes after confirmation line is the one that earns its place. A buyer who changes the scent after the wax is bought has cost you nothing much; a buyer who changes it after the candles are poured has cost you ₹1,52,265.00 of unrecoverable material, because wax can be re-melted and jars can be washed, but oil and labels cannot be un-used. Write the line before you need it.

Five ways a 1,000-candle order loses money

1. Quoting before the wick is proven

A wick that tunnels in a 150 gram jar does not announce itself until the second burn, by which time the buyer has 1,000 of them. Re-wicking a poured candle is not a repair; it is a re-pour, and it costs the jar, the wick, the stickers and all the oil — about ₹140.44 a candle, or ₹1,40,442.00 if it is the whole order. Prove the wick before you quote, or quote a start date that includes proving it.

2. Buying the spec you like instead of the spec you sold

Midway through pouring, the temptation to upgrade is strong. Moving the same 150 g fill from CSI 464 at ₹76.11 to Premium Coconut Soy CSI 468 at ₹95.55 adds ₹19.44 a candle — ₹19,440.00 across the order — and the buyer will never know, because they approved the sample, not the invoice. Luxury Soy Wax Chunks at ₹89.99 and Eco Soy CSI 400 at ₹59.88 sit either side of it. Pick the grade before you quote, and pour the grade you quoted.

3. Forgetting that the vessel is the biggest line

On this order the jars are 43% of the entire material spend — more than wax and fragrance combined. That is the line to negotiate, the line to ask about in bulk, and the line where a change of mind is most expensive. It is also why a 70 g votive at ₹31.86 or a tin at 85 gram is a different business proposition entirely, not just a smaller candle.

4. Absorbing freight because it felt rude to charge it

Inbound freight on 170 kg of wax and 1,080 glass jars, and outbound freight on a consignment of glass, are both real and both yours. They are not CSI costs and no figure for them appears anywhere on this page, which is precisely why they have to appear on your quotation. A maker who absorbs both on a large order can turn a healthy margin into a thin one without a single line item changing.

5. Agreeing a date that assumes no cure

Twenty-one of the 33 days are waiting. A buyer who wants delivery in two weeks is asking for an uncured candle, and an uncured soy candle is a weaker candle than the sample they approved. The honest options are a later date, a smaller quantity, or a frank conversation about a shorter cure and what it costs in throw. Quietly shipping early is not on the list.

Do those five things right and the order behaves. ₹2,38,523.00 of materials, ₹238.52 a candle, your own costs added honestly on top, 33 days of calendar, and a quotation a buyer can read twice without finding a surprise. That is a job worth taking. A 1,000-candle order taken on optimism is the fastest way a profitable small candle business discovers it has been working for free.

Frequently asked questions