I Sell 500 Candles a Month but Demand Varies by 20% — How Much Safety Stock of Wax Should I Keep Without Tying up Too Much Cash?

What a 20% swing actually means in kilos

Start by turning the swing into kilos. The title does not give a candle size, so this page uses a 150 g candle at an 8% fragrance load, a common size for a 500-a-month seller. Replace it with yours; every figure below scales in proportion. By the CSI convention, load is a share of the finished weight, so each candle is 12 g of oil and 138 g of wax. With a 3% allowance for pour loss and test burns, that is 142.14 g of wax per candle.

Look at the last column. Over a seven-day delivery, the difference between an average month and a busy one is 3.32 kg of wax. That is the size of the risk while an order is in transit: not 14 kg, not a month, but a little over three kilos. The quiet month needs no buffer at all. If sales run 20% low, your stock simply lasts longer and the next order goes in a few days later. A reorder-point system corrects the low side on its own. Only the high side needs cover.

Sizing the buffer

Safety stock has to last from the moment you could have noticed the busy month until the next delivery lands. That window has two parts. The first is the supplier's lead time, here seven days, which is the reader's own figure; CSI does not publish delivery times. The second is how long you go between looks at the shelf. If you watch stock at every pour, the second part is zero. If you check on Mondays, it is seven days. If you place one order on the 1st of each month, it is thirty. The formula is simple: safety stock = swing × daily use × (lead time + days between checks).

The swing is the same in every row. What changes is how long the buffer must last, and so how much wax sits unused. Moving from a fixed monthly order to a weekly check cuts the buffer from 17.53 kg to 6.63 kg: 10.90 kg less wax, ₹5,529.34 of cash freed, for ten minutes on a Monday. That is the cheapest way to cut safety stock, and it costs nothing at all.

Is 20% the right swing to buffer? That depends on what the number is. If 20% is the worst month you have seen in a year of records, buffering it fully is conservative and sensible. If 20% is a typical month and some months go further, you are covering most months, not all. There is no universal figure. Look at your last twelve months, find the highest one against the average, and use that gap. If you only have three months of records, use the 20% and revisit after six more.

The reorder line

With a weekly check, the line has to cover everything you will use until the next delivery could possibly land. If you look on Monday and decide not to order, the next chance is the following Monday, and that order then takes seven days. So the line covers 14 days of average use plus the buffer: 33.17 kg + 6.63 kg = 39.80 kg. If you watch stock at every pour and order the day it crosses, the line is only 7 days of use plus the smaller buffer: 16.58 kg + 3.32 kg = 19.90 kg.

The fixed monthly order works differently. You do not have a reorder line. Instead, on the 1st of every month you order enough to bring the shelf up to 37 days of average use plus the buffer, which is 105.18 kg, minus whatever is already there. If the shelf holds 20 kg on the 1st, you order about 85.18 kg. The more you have left, the less you order. That rule protects you in a busy month and stops stock piling up in a quiet one.

What the buffer costs to hold

"Tying up cash" has a real cost, but it is smaller than most makers fear, and it should be weighed against what a stockout costs. The table below uses an example cost of money of 1.5% a month: the interest you pay on a loan, or the return you give up. Replace it with your own figure. It also uses an example gross margin of ₹150.00 per candle to price three days without wax. That figure is illustrative only; use your own margin.

On those example figures, the weekly-check buffer costs about ₹50.49 a month to hold. Three days without wax at 16.67 candles a day is 50 candles not made, and at an example ₹150.00 margin that is ₹7,500.00 of margin not earned, before counting a lost wholesale customer. Seen that way, a few kilos of buffer is the cheapest insurance in the business. What does tie up real cash is the extra-month habit: ₹36,060.92 sitting still, which costs about ₹540.91 a month at the same example rate and gives no more protection against a 20% swing.

Holding it as real packs

A buffer is easiest to protect if it is physically separate: sealed bags on their own shelf, opened only when the working stock has run out. For the weekly-check plan, 6.63 kg rounds up to 1 × 5 kg + 2 × 1 kg of CSI 464 for ₹3,551.80. The working stock arrives as a monthly order of 7 × 10 kg + 1 × 1 kg + 1 × 500 g, ₹36,285.40. Those 10 kg bags are CSI 464's largest listed pack; for more than about 100 kg in one order, ask on WhatsApp for a quote. No volume discount figure is published, so do not assume one.

Natural Soy Pearl Wax is the one wax on CSI's list with a real per-kilo break: ₹450.00 at 1 kg against ₹424.80 from 5 kg, a 5.6% saving, and it is the only wax listed at 50 kg. That makes it the cheapest kilo to hold if it is already your wax. It is not a reason to switch. A different wax is a different formula: test throw, adhesion and burn in your jars before any change, and treat its fragrance ceiling as unpublished here (check the product page or ask on WhatsApp).

The same rule for fragrance

The swing applies to fragrance too, with one twist: it lands on individual scents, not on the total. Across all scents, 500 candles at 12 g of oil (12.36 g with allowance) use 6.18 kg a month, 206.00 g a day. On a weekly check with a 7-day delivery, the total fragrance buffer for a 20% swing is 20% × 206.00 g × 14 = 576.80 g, and the total reorder line is 3.46 kg. But you do not reorder "fragrance"; you reorder Lavender or Sandalwood. One scent can run 50% over while another runs flat. The buffer has to be split scent by scent, weighted by how fast each sells and how much each one swings.

That split is its own calculation, with a real complication: slow sellers need a buffer that can be larger than their average month, because a bottle is the smallest thing you can buy. Fragrance inventory across 10 scents builds the per-scent table, and fast and slow scents on a two-week lead sets the reorder line for each. For the base model with one fragrance, see the hub page for 100 candles a month.

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