I Sell 500 Candles a Month and Make ₹250 Contribution Per Candle — How Much Money Is Available to Cover Salaries, Rent, Marketing and Reinvestment?

What the pool is, and what it has already paid

Your two figures give the answer in one multiplication: 500 candles a month at ₹250.00 of contribution each is ₹1,25,000.00. Those are your numbers and this page uses them exactly as written. Spread across a 30-day month that is ₹4,166.67 a day and ₹29,166.67 a week; held for twelve months at the same run rate it is ₹15,00,000.00. That single figure is the entire budget for everything in your business that is not a candle.

The definition is doing real work here, so it is worth being exact. Contribution is the selling price minus every cost that moves with the unit — the wax, the fragrance oil, the vessel, the wick, the label, the carton and insert, the courier that takes that candle to that customer, and the payment-gateway or marketplace fee on that sale. Anything that would not have been spent if the candle had not been made and sold belongs inside the ₹250.00. That is why the allocation below has no materials row: the wax has already been bought and paid for before the pool exists. Putting it back in is double counting, and it is the error that makes an otherwise healthy month look unsurvivable.

The mirror of that definition is equally important. Fixed costs are the ones that do not care how many candles you sell: rent, your own salary and anybody else's, insurance, software subscriptions, a retainer, a studio, brand photography, the annual accounts. They arrive whether you sell 400 candles or 600. The pool exists to cover them, and whatever survives is the only figure in this whole page that deserves to be called profit.

The four claims on the pool, and why each stays blank

Your question names four claims on the money: salaries, rent, marketing and reinvestment. Here is the sheet for them, with every line empty. This is not evasion. CSI sells wax, fragrance, vessels, wicks and equipment, so those can be priced from a live store to the paisa. Nothing else on the list is something CSI sells or publishes a rate for, and a made-up rent figure that travels into your pricing is more dangerous than an obvious gap. Copy the table, fill it in from your own bank statement rather than from an article, and total it.

One structural point about that table before you fill it in, because it is where most allocations go wrong. Marketing is frequently two different costs wearing one name. Spend that scales with orders — a performance campaign charged per sale, an influencer paid on commission, a marketplace listing fee — is a variable cost and belongs inside your ₹250.00, not in this table. Spend that is the same whether you sell 400 or 600 candles — a retainer, a brand shoot, a stall booking — is fixed and belongs here. If you put per-order ad spend in the fixed table you will overstate your contribution and understate your fixed costs at the same time, and the two errors will hide each other.

Reading the residual without inventing your costs

Because this page will not estimate your fixed costs, the honest way to show you what the residual depends on is to run the pool against a range of illustrative totals and let you find the row nearest your own. The four totals below are scales, not claims: nothing here suggests that ₹60,000.00 is normal, or that ₹1,00,000.00 is too much. They exist so you can see how quickly the residual moves, and so you can read the per-candle allocation, which is the figure most makers have never calculated and the one that changes pricing decisions.

Two readings of that table are worth carrying away. The first is the per-candle column: once your fixed costs reach ₹1,00,000.00, every candle you make is carrying ₹200.00 of overhead on top of its own materials, and only ₹50.00 of your ₹250.00 is actually yours. That figure is the honest answer to "why does a business with a good margin feel tight". The second is the days column: ₹80,000.00 of fixed cost is 19.2 days of the month sold purely to keep the lights on, which means the money you actually keep is made in the last 10.8 days. Neither reading requires knowing anybody else's numbers.

Tracing the ₹250.00 back to a candle you can buy

₹1,25,000.00 rests entirely on ₹250.00 being true. It is worth an hour to check, and the check has two halves: what the materials actually cost, and what else is meant to be inside the contribution. Here is the materials half, built from live CSI stock in September 2026 — 140 g of Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 at ₹507.40 a kilogram, 11.2 g of Honeydew Melon at ₹3.40 a gram at 8% of wax weight, an Maroon/ Deep Red Matte Glass Jar at ₹70.80 a piece in the ten pack, and an Eco Candle Wicks Thin (C1) at ₹5.90. The 140 g is a fill you measure yourself, not a capacity read off a listing, and the vessel is priced per piece with no claim about what it holds. On the series convention the load is a percentage of wax weight, so 140 g of wax at 8% carries 11.2 g of oil and 151.2 g goes into the vessel.

Read the last row slowly, because it is the whole check. At an illustrative ₹499.00 price, this candle leaves ₹313.20 after CSI materials. For your contribution to be the ₹250.00 the pool is built on, everything else that varies with the unit — label, printing, carton, insert, the courier that carries it to your customer and the gateway or marketplace fee on the sale — has to come to ₹63.20 or less. That is a real constraint and it is checkable. Across 500 candles it is ₹31,600.96 a month of room, and if your own variable lines exceed it then your true contribution is below ₹250.00 and the pool at the top of this page is overstated.

The materials half is reassuringly stable at this volume. ₹185.80 a candle is ₹92,899.04 of CSI materials across 500 candles a month — a real purchase order rather than an abstraction, and one worth a conversation about pack sizes on WhatsApp. The scented wax in it works out at ₹0.72 a gram, which is the figure to reuse when you cost a second size rather than starting again.

Why the pool moves faster than the costs it covers

This is the part of the arithmetic that decides how much fixed cost you can safely carry. Your pool moves with volume: ₹25,000.00 for every hundred candles, ₹12,500.00 for a ten per cent swing either way. Your fixed costs do not move at all. So the residual absorbs the entire swing, in both directions. The table below holds an illustrative fixed-cost total of ₹80,000.00 steady and moves only the volume, which is exactly what a slow monsoon month or a strong festive one does to you.

The lesson is not "avoid fixed costs". A business that refuses every fixed commitment never buys the melter that doubles its pouring rate, and at 500 candles a month that is a real cost. The lesson is to know the swing before you sign. If a 400-candle month is a realistic bad month for you, then your fixed costs have to be survivable against a pool of ₹1,00,000.00, not against ₹1,25,000.00. Set the ceiling against the bad month and the good months look after themselves. And keep the two sides of reinvestment separate: equipment is a fixed decision, while buying deeper stock ahead of a festive run is cash tied up in a warehouse rather than a cost in this table at all.

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