I Sell About 100 × 200 g Candles Every Month — How Much Wax and Fragrance Oil Should I Normally Keep in Stock if Supplier Delivery Takes One Week?

The three numbers a stock plan needs

Every stock plan, from a kitchen-table brand to a factory, comes down to three numbers per material. The reorder point tells you when to order. The order quantity tells you how much. The maximum tells you how much shelf space and cash the material will take at its peak. If you know those three for wax and for each fragrance, you know what "normal stock" means. Here they are for a maker selling about 100 × 200 g candles a month, buying from a supplier who delivers in seven days.

Read the table from the top. Daily use comes from your sales, your candle and your formula. Lead-time demand is simply daily use multiplied by the days your supplier takes. Safety stock is a decision, not a fact: here it is set at seven days, so a delivery that takes twice as long still arrives before the shelf is empty. Add those two and you have the reorder point. The order quantity is separate. It decides how often you order, not whether you run out, and here it is one month of use rounded up to the packs you can actually buy. Wax in this plan never needs to go below 4.42 kg and never needs to go above 23.42 kg. Anything outside that band is either a stockout coming or cash sitting on a shelf.

From candles a month to grams a day

The reorder maths is only as good as the consumption figure under it, and the most common mistake sits right here. A 200 g candle is a finished weight. At an 8% load, 8% of that weight is fragrance: 16 g of oil and 184 g of wax. The wax is 200 × (1 − 0.08), not 200. Then add an allowance for what never reaches a customer: wax left in the jug, a spill, the test candle you burn every batch. Here that is 3%, a working assumption to replace with your own figure once you have tracked a few batches.

If your load or size is different, only the first row changes. At 6%, a 200 g candle is 188 g of wax and 12 g of oil. At 10%, it is 180 g and 20 g. Keep the load inside the wax maker's stated ceiling: Luxury Soy Wax Chunks are rated up to 13% and Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 up to 10%. Those are formulation maximums, not targets and not legal limits. Everything below the first row, the reorder point included, then scales in proportion.

The reorder point: lead time plus a buffer

The first job is arithmetic. Your supplier takes seven days, you use 631.73 g of wax a day, so seven days of production need 4.42 kg. If you order with less than that on the shelf, you will stop pouring before the parcel arrives. The second job is judgement. A week's delivery is a promise, and promises slip: a courier delay, an out-of-stock size, a festival week, an order you forgot to send until Monday. Safety stock is how many days of slip you want to survive. The table shows four choices for the same maker.

Seven days is a sensible starting buffer at this size for one reason: it is cheap. A week of wax is 4.42 kg, about ₹2,648.86 of Luxury Soy Wax Chunks, and a week of Lavender is 384.53 g, about ₹2,007.65 at the 1 kg rate. For less than ₹4,656.51 tied up, you survive a delivery that takes twice as long. If your sales swing a lot from month to month, the buffer should be sized from that swing instead of from a round number of days. Safety stock when demand varies by 20% shows how.

The order in real CSI packs

A plan that says "order 18.95 kg" is not an order. Wax comes in bags and oil in bottles, and the order quantity has to round up to packs you can actually add to a cart. For Luxury Soy Wax Chunks the listed packs are 500 g (₹299.00), 1 kg (₹599.00), 5 kg (₹2,995.00) and 10 kg (₹5,999.00). The per-kilo price is almost flat across them: ₹598.00 at 500 g, ₹599.00 at 1 and 5 kg, and ₹599.90 at 10 kg. Bigger bags buy fewer tears in the packaging, not a lower rate. Here is one month's wax in each of three container waxes:

Do not switch wax to save money without testing: each wax behaves differently in your jar with your oil, and a change of wax is a change of formula. The point of the table is the shape of the order. For fragrance, one month of Lavender is 1.65 kg. The cheapest listed way to cover it is 1 × 1 kg + 1 × 500 g + 1 × 100 g + 1 × 50 g, which gives 1.65 kg for ₹8,651.00. A second 1 kg instead of the 500 g, 100 g and 50 g would cost ₹10,442.00 and leave you 352 g ahead, which is fine if the scent is proven and you want fewer reorders. On the listed catalogue Lavender's 1 kg is ₹5.22 a gram against ₹5.40 at 100 g, so the kilo is only 3.3% cheaper. Buy it for convenience, not for a discount.

The wick and jar lines follow the same logic with their own allowances: 5% spare wicks for a crooked set or a test, and 3% spare jars for breakage, rounded to whole packs. The White Matte Glass Jar is shown as an example container; CSI does not publish its fill weight, so pour one with your wax and weigh it before you commit to 200 g. The total excludes freight and GST, and it excludes labels, lids and boxes, which CSI does not price. Your own packaging quotes go on top.

How often to order

Ordering one month at a time is a default, not a rule. Order every two weeks and you carry less stock but place twice as many orders, each with its own freight and admin. Order every two months and you place six orders a year but carry twice the stock. The safety stock and reorder point stay the same in every case, because they depend on lead time, not on order size. Only the top of the sawtooth moves.

Going from fortnightly to two-monthly orders adds about ₹15,182.88 of average stock on the shelf and saves about 20 orders a year. Neither buys a lower price per gram on the listed packs, so the choice is about convenience, shelf space and cash, not about a discount. The one number that moves a lot is the count of orders a year. If each order costs you freight and an hour of admin, monthly is a sensible middle. Two-monthly makes sense for wax, which does not change, and less sense for a fragrance you might drop. If you are unsure whether a larger buy is worth it, the 100 kg against 25 kg wax decision and the 5 kg fragrance break-even pages work through the arithmetic.

The weekly stock check

A reorder point only works if someone looks at the shelf. At this size, a ten-minute check once a week is enough. Do it on the same day every week, before you plan that week's pours.

Where each harder case is solved

This page assumes steady sales, one wax, one main fragrance and a reliable one-week delivery. Real businesses break those assumptions one at a time, and each break has its own page in this cluster:

If your sales swing by 20% month to month, the safety-stock page sizes the buffer from that swing instead of a round number of days. If you sell ten fragrances and one sells five times faster than another, the multi-fragrance page sets a separate reorder line for each. For a single bestseller, the fragrance reorder trigger for 300 units a month turns the rule into a kilogram figure. If you are looking at what is left rather than what to buy, 4 kg of oil left and 30 kg of wax in stock count the candles and orders remaining. Longer deliveries get their own treatment: a 10-day wax lead at 50 candles a day and a two-week fragrance lead for fast and slow scents. Seasonal and growth planning sit in I'm Entering Diwali with Average Sales of 100 Candles a Week but Expect Demand to Triple — How Much Wax and Fragrance Should I Secure Beforehand? and the 200-to-500 growth page.

Frequently asked questions