I Want to Build Retail and Wholesale Price Lists for My Candle Business — How Do I Calculate Prices From Actual COGS Rather Than Simply Copying Competitor Pricing?

Why the sheet starts at cost and not at a competitor's shelf

Most first price lists are built backwards. Somebody opens four Instagram shops, sees 200 g soy candles at some price, picks a number slightly under the cheapest, and works out afterwards whether it pays. That sheet is not a price list. It is a bet that another brand's wax rate, vessel supplier, pack size, batch size, wastage, courier contract and appetite for thin margins are close enough to yours to borrow. Two of those you can check. The rest you cannot see, and one of them — the pack size they buy in — is enough on its own to move a cost by double figures. The Performance Wooden Wicks run at ₹59.00 each in the smallest pack and ₹41.30 each in the largest, a spread of ₹17.70 a candle, which at an illustrative 60% target is ₹44.25 of shelf price. You cannot tell from a photograph which pack a competitor buys.

The sheet that survives contact with a buyer runs the other way. You cost the SKU, you add the lines CSI does not sell and only you know, you divide by one minus the gross margin you need, and the answer is a floor — the price under which that SKU is losing money on its own materials. Then, and only then, you look at what the market pays, and you decide where above the floor to sit. If the market band is below your floor, the answer is not a lower price. It is a cheaper specification, a smaller fill, a different vessel, or a decision not to sell that SKU. Those are three real choices and a competitor screenshot gives you none of them.

This page builds the whole deliverable on three SKUs that exist: a 70 g mini, a 150 g core and a 200 g luxe, each costed from live CSI stock in September 2026, each with a wholesale floor and a retail floor, and each with the blank rows left blank. The wax weights are the maker's own measured fills, not capacities read off a listing, and every vessel is priced per piece without any claim about what it holds. Copy the structure, put your own fills and your own blanks in, and the sheet is yours.

The three SKUs, costed line by line on live stock

Every SKU below is costed as wax, fragrance, vessel, wick, in that order, with the fragrance load taken as a percentage of wax weight — the series convention, and the convention CSI product pages use when they state a maximum. So the 150 g core SKU is 150 g of wax plus 12 g of oil at 8%, and 162 g goes into the vessel, not 150 g. That is the reading this page carries throughout, and it matters for a price list because a sheet built on total-fill weights and a sheet built on wax weights will disagree by several rupees a candle and neither will know why.

Read the three totals side by side before you price anything, because the shape of them is the argument for a real price list. The Mini is ₹84.86, the Core ₹169.59, the Luxe ₹346.08 — the dearest SKU costs a little over four times the cheapest. But the drivers are different at each size. On the Mini, wax and fragrance together are ₹57.72 against ₹27.14 of vessel and wick — the hardware is more than a third of the candle. On the Luxe the same hardware is ₹112.10 and the scented wax is ₹233.98. A fragrance price rise hurts the Luxe; a vessel price rise hurts the Mini. One markup cannot know that.

Turning a cost into a wholesale floor and a retail floor

Gross margin is expressed as a share of the selling price, not of the cost, which is why the arithmetic is a division and not a multiplication. If you want a 60% gross margin, your cost is the other 40% of the price, so price = cost ÷ 0.40. On the Core SKU that is ₹169.59 ÷ 0.40 = ₹423.98. Do the same division at a 35% wholesale target and you get ₹260.91. Both targets on this page are illustrative: they are round numbers chosen to show the method, not a recommendation, and the target you use is yours to set against what your own overheads need.

The reason wholesale gets a lower target is not generosity. It is that a wholesale unit skips a stack of your costs — no individual courier, no gateway fee on a one-candle basket, far less photography and customer service per unit — so a thinner gross margin can still leave the same money behind. The floors are therefore not a discount ladder. They are two separate calculations that happen to share a cost. Keep them on separate sheets, and never send a buyer the retail one.

The price list itself, with the month stamped on it

Here is the deliverable. The materials column is computed from live CSI stock; the second column is deliberately empty because those costs are not CSI products; the two floor columns are the first two columns divided by one minus the illustrative targets — so as long as the blank column stays blank, they are floors on materials alone and your real floors sit above them. The published-price column is the only one this page will not fill in, because nobody but you can decide where above your floor to sit.

Three things about that table are worth saying out loud. First, the gap between the two floors is not a constant: it is ₹81.59 on the Mini, ₹163.07 on the Core and ₹332.77 on the Luxe, because both floors are the same cost divided by two different fractions. The more a SKU costs, the more absolute money a wholesale deal gives away, which is why a flat "wholesale is X% off retail" rule goes wrong across a range. Second, the hundred-candle rows are the numbers to take to a supplier conversation: ₹16,959.00 of materials for a hundred Core candles is a real purchase order, not an abstraction. Third, the blank column is not a formality. If your label, carton and outbound courier come to a figure you have never measured, every floor on the sheet is understated and you will not find out until the year ends.

The update rule: what a rate move does to the shelf

This is the part of a price list people get wrong after they have built it correctly. When a cost rises, raising the price by the same amount does not protect the margin — it protects the rupee gap, which is a different and smaller thing. To hold a 60% gross margin, every rupee of extra cost needs 2.50 rupees of extra price; at a 35% wholesale target it needs 1.54. Multiply your cost change by that figure and you have the new floor without recosting the candle.

Set the trigger before you need it. A workable rule is one line long: re-issue the sheet when any SKU's material cost moves more than a percentage you choose, or on a fixed calendar date, whichever comes first. A 5% move is ₹4.24, ₹8.48 and ₹17.30 on these three SKUs and ₹10.61, ₹21.20 and ₹43.26 on their retail floors — large enough to matter on the Luxe, small enough to ignore on the Mini, which is exactly why the trigger should be a percentage and not a rupee figure. Whatever you choose, write it on the sheet so that next year's version of you does not have to guess.

Two CSI-specific facts belong in your trigger thinking. First, pack size on this store is usually not a lever: run the ladder on the grade you actually buy and write down what it returns. Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 is ₹520.00 a kilogram in the 500 g pack and ₹507.40 a kilogram from 1 kg upward, and Eco Soy CSI 400 is ₹399.00 a kilogram at 1 kg against ₹399.20 at 5 kg. Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468 is the one of the three where the larger pack is genuinely lower, at ₹650.00 a kilogram at 1 kg against ₹637.00 at 5 kg — worth ₹13.00 a kilogram, ₹2.60 on the 200 g Luxe SKU and ₹6.50 on its retail floor. CSI publishes no quantity-discount ladder across the range, so check each grade rather than assuming one. Second, published order-value codes are a different mechanism entirely: HAPPY5 at 5% over ₹5,000, BIZWIZ8 at 8% over ₹12,000 and YAY10 at 10% over ₹20,000 depend on basket value, not on pack size, and they apply to an order rather than to a rate.

Where a competitor price legitimately belongs

None of this means competitor prices are useless. They are the best available evidence about what the market will pay, and ignoring them is as naive as copying them. The discipline is about order of operations. Your floor tells you what you can afford to charge; the market band tells you what you are likely to be able to charge; the price you publish sits in the overlap. When there is no overlap — when your floor is above the band — you have learned something valuable and specific, and the honest responses are all on the cost side of the sheet.

Work the Core SKU through that. Its retail floor on materials alone is ₹423.98. Suppose the band you are selling into sits nearer the Mini's floor of ₹212.14. Matching it means giving up ₹211.83 a candle against your own floor, before a single label or carton is paid for — on a hundred candles a month that is ₹21,183.40 of margin you have decided to donate. The alternatives are concrete: pour less wax, move to a cheaper fragrance, change the vessel, or accept a lower target margin as a considered choice. Each of those is visible on the sheet and can be reversed. A price that simply matched a screenshot cannot be reversed, because nothing on your sheet explains it.

One more thing the sheet quietly does for you: it makes a wholesale negotiation short. When a buyer asks for a better number on the Luxe SKU, you are not guessing. You know it costs ₹346.08 in materials, that your wholesale floor at an illustrative 35% target is ₹532.44, and that every rupee below that is a rupee you have to find somewhere else. You can say no to a number with a reason attached, or you can say yes to a smaller fill with a different cost. Both are better than a discount you regret. Bulk pricing and pack availability on a large order are a conversation for WhatsApp, not an assumption to bake into a floor.

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