I Sell 300 Candles a Month but December Sales Can Suddenly Reach 1,000 — How Much Soy Wax and Fragrance Inventory Should I Keep Without Overstocking?

Two demand streams, not one bigger number

The question almost always arrives in the wrong shape: how much should I keep? There is no single answer, because you do not have one pattern of demand. You have two, and they behave nothing like each other. One is a steady draw of roughly twelve candles a working day that has run for months and will run next month. The other is a short, dated, partly speculative block that appears once a year, peaks in a few weeks and then vanishes.

Inventory maths only works when it is applied to one stream at a time. A reorder point is a sensible instrument for a stable draw: you know the daily rate, you know your lead time, you set a trigger and the shelf revolves. A reorder point is a terrible instrument for a spike, because by the time consumption tells you the spike is here, the pour window has closed. Conversely, a one-off speculative purchase is a reasonable way to handle December and a catastrophic way to run February — that is exactly how lakhs of rupees end up as wax on a shelf.

So separate them on paper before you separate them on the shelf. Write the baseline stream as a rate — 2.22 kg of wax and 177.6 g of oil per working day — and manage it with a trigger. Write the festive stream as a quantity with a date — 129.5 kg of wax and 10.36 kg of oil, in hand by the first week of November — and manage it with a tranche plan. The two numbers never touch, and no decision about one is allowed to be made with the other's money.

The baseline hold, in kilograms and weeks

Start from the candle, not from the month. A 200 g-class candle in a 200 ml-class jar on a 185 g wax fill with fragrance dosed at 8% of wax weight takes 185 g of wax and 14.8 g of oil — 199.8 g poured. If you prefer to express load as a share of the finished candle, the same dose is 7.41% of 199.8 g; both conventions exist and the arithmetic below is unaffected as long as you pick one and label it. Whichever you use, weigh the jar you actually fill: the 200 ml figure on a jar page is volume, not grams.

Now scale it. Three hundred candles a month is 55.5 kg of wax and 4.44 kg of oil. On 25 working days that is 2.22 kg of wax and 177.6 g of oil a day, and on a six-day week 13.32 kg of wax and 1.066 kg of oil a week. Those four figures are the entire basis of the hold decision, and they are yours, not ours — change the fill or the load and every row below moves with them.

What 1,000 candles in December really consumes

Now the second stream. A thousand candles at the same fill and load is 185 kg of wax, 14.8 kg of oil, 1,000 wicks and 1,000 jars. Spread across 25 working days that is 7.4 kg of wax and 592 g of oil a day — your baseline daily rate multiplied by 3.33. Read that figure twice, because it is the one that breaks plans: at peak pace, 74 kg of wax covers only ten days. The 33.3 kg that comfortably protects your baseline is four and a half days of December.

That is the whole reason a spike cannot be handled by a trigger. If you wait for consumption to pull the shelf down to 33.3 kg in the middle of a December run and only then order, you have a ten-day hole in the middle of your best month on your own lead time. Worse, soy container candles want a cure before they are sold — 14 to 21 days is standard practice — so the pour has to finish well before the sale. Work backwards from the dates and the order date lands much earlier than instinct suggests.

Two honest caveats about that table. First, 1 kg is the largest listed fragrance pack at CSI, so 10.36 kg of oil is eleven bottles, not one drum; recurring volumes above the listed packs are quoted directly rather than guessed at. Second, allow a planning margin of about 3–5% of wax for spills, top-ups and rejects — on 129.5 kg that is another 4 to 6.5 kg, which is why thirteen 10 kg bags (130 kg) is a tidier buy than twelve bags and a part-pack.

What to order for each stream

Three cards: one wax for the revolving baseline, one wax for the festive block where the per-kilo arithmetic differs, and the oil pack ladder that decides how much fragrance you commit. Each table shows every listed pack with its price, the per-kilo or per-piece rate, and how many 200 g-class candles the pack covers at this fill and load.

Staging the festive buy in three tranches

You do not know that December will reach 1,000. You know it can. The difference between those two sentences is worth about ₹45,000 of inventory, and a tranche plan is how you keep the option without paying for the certainty. The principle is simple: commit only the volume you have already sold in a past December, and release the rest as sell-through becomes visible.

The split below is 50 / 30 / 20. That is a choice, not a rule, and a business with three years of its own December figures should weight the first tranche much more heavily than one guessing from a single good month. The quantities assume the 700 extra candles above baseline; your revolving 33.3 kg trigger carries on untouched beside them.

Look at what the staging buys you. If December lands at 560 candles instead of 1,000, you stopped after tranche two and carried roughly 25 kg of wax and 2 kg of oil into January rather than 130 kg and 10.36 kg. If it lands at 1,000, you placed three orders instead of one and paid the same listed per-kilo price, because on CSI 464 the rate is flat from 1 kg to 10 kg. The only real cost of staging is ordering effort and the risk that a specific scent or jar is unavailable later — which is exactly why wax and wicks go in tranche one and the speculative scents go last.

What overstocking actually costs you

"Without overstocking" is the hardest half of the question, because the cost is invisible until the money is gone. Price it properly and the discipline becomes easy. At the figures above, one unsold 200 g-class candle's materials are 185 g of wax, 14.8 g of oil, one wick and one jar. On CSI 464 at ₹507.40/kg, Lavender at ₹5.221/g, an Eco Candle Wick at ₹5.90 and a 200 ml Salsa jar at ₹29.50 in the 100-piece pack, that is ₹206.54 of materials per candle.

Notice that the leftover wax in row three is not a write-off — it is a month of baseline production you have already paid for, and soy wax kept sealed, cool and dark is still wax in February. That is why wax is the safest thing to over-buy and the fragrance oil, the seasonal jar and the single-design mould are the dangerous ones: they are tied to one scent, one colour or one shape, and if that collection does not repeat, the material has no second home. If you must be wrong in one direction, be wrong on the material that every candle you make uses.

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