I Want to Know Which Candle SKU Makes Me the Most Money — How Do I Compare Selling Price, Raw-Material Cost, Fragrance Usage, Production Losses and Monthly Sales Volume Across Products?

The five columns, and which four of them are yours

Your question names five things to compare, and it names them in the right order. Selling price, raw-material cost, fragrance usage, production losses, monthly sales volume. What it does not say — and what decides whether the exercise is worth an evening — is that only one of those five can be looked up. The other four have to come out of your own records, and most ranges are ranked wrongly because three of them were estimated from memory.

One convention has to be fixed before any of it works, because it silently changes the fragrance column. Fragrance load on this page is a percentage of wax weight, which is how CSI product pages state it. So a 200 g pour at 8% is 200 g of wax and 16 g of oil, and 216 g goes into the vessel. Read the same sentence as 8% of the finished candle and your oil weight, your oil cost and your ranking all move. Write the convention at the top of your sheet and do not change it between products — a league table whose rows use different conventions is not a league table.

Second convention, and this one is the reason so many ranges are ranked backwards: the loss rate belongs inside the cost. If a format loses 6% between pouring and despatch you have to make 106.4 candles for every 100 you sell, so every sold candle carries 1.064 times a batch candle's materials. Formats do not lose at the same rate — large glass breaks and chips more than small glass, deep pours sink and need topping more often than shallow ones — so a single blanket allowance across a range flatters exactly the products that deserve it least.

Five real specifications, costed line by line

To make the mechanism checkable rather than illustrative, the five rows below are real CSI products at live September 2026 prices, chosen to spread across wax grades, fragrance rate points and vessel sizes the way a real range does. The wax weights are production specifications carried by this page, not published capacities: CSI publishes no fill weight for these vessels, so measure your own by filling to your wax line with water, weighing, and multiplying by about 0.9 for soy. The vessels are priced per piece throughout and no claim is made that any of these pours fits any of these jars.

Three things in that table are worth pausing on before the ranking, because they are where a range's economics actually live. The first is that the vessel is the swing line: it is 32.7% of the votive and 37.1% of the three-wick, and between the Mini Glass Jars at ₹21.24 a piece and the Apothecary Glass Candle Jar at ₹250.00 there is more range than in any other column. The second is that the fragrance share rises with the price point — 21.4% of materials on the votive against 37.3% on the premium candle — because premium ranges buy dearer oil and run it harder. The third is that the wax, the line most makers shop hardest for, is never the biggest number in the row.

On the loads, the discipline is the same as anywhere else in the series and it varies by row. Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 states a maximum of 10% of total wax weight and the Eucalyptus Spearmint page states soy use up to 10%, so the Everyday 150 at 8% sits inside both. Luxury Soy Wax Chunks states up to 13% and the Roasted Coffee page gives soy 6–10%, so the lower figure governs and the Signature 200 at 10% is at the ceiling — test-burn it thoroughly before you scale it. The Mahogany Teakwood page gives a 7–9% load in soy against Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468 at up to 13%, so 9% is the governing limit and the Premium 200 sits on it. Eco Soy CSI 400 does not publish a load, so on the votive the Citronella page's stated up-to-10% is the only published limit and 8% is under it — for the wax's own ceiling, ask on WhatsApp. The Spicy Raspberry page publishes no candle usage range at all, so on the three-wick the wax grade's stated 10% maximum is the only published limit and 8% is inside it.

The loss column, and why it goes inside the cost

Production loss is the column most ranges leave out, and leaving it out does not make the table neutral — it makes it wrong in a predictable direction, in favour of whichever format breaks most. Every candle you throw away was made from materials you paid for, so its cost has to be carried by the candles that do ship. The arithmetic is a division, not a subtraction: materials divided by one minus the loss rate.

Look at the last column rather than the percentages. A 6% loss rate on the three-wick costs ₹42.97 a candle because the candle is dear; a 4% loss rate on the votive costs ₹2.71 because the candle is cheap. The same percentage is worth wildly different money on different rows, which is exactly why one blanket allowance across a range is worse than no allowance at all. If you are going to spend an afternoon measuring one thing before building this table, measure the loss rate on your most expensive format first.

The league table, ranked by total monthly contribution

Contribution per candle is the selling price minus the loss-adjusted materials cost. Total monthly contribution is that figure multiplied by the units you sell. Both stop at materials — they are the money a sale leaves before packaging, courier to your customer, payment fees, advertising, labour and rent, none of which is a CSI cost and none of which this page will invent. The selling prices and volumes below are illustrative, chosen to show the mechanism on a plausible range; put your own in before you act on anything.

The ranking is Everyday 150, Votive 60, Signature 200, Premium 200, Three-wick 400. Everyday 150 earns ₹1,47,651.96 a month, which is 30.8% of the range's entire contribution of ₹4,78,779.17. The bottom two together earn ₹95,899.88, or 20.0%, and one of them is the candle with the highest contribution percentage in the range. If you had to drop a product tomorrow, this column — not the margin percentage — is the one that tells you which.

Re-rank it per candle and the order inverts

Now sort the identical table by contribution per candle instead of by the monthly total, and watch what happens to the order. Nothing about the products has changed — the same materials, the same losses, the same illustrative prices. Only the question has changed, from 'which product earns most' to 'which product earns most each time it sells'.

The inversion is not a quirk of these five numbers — it is structural, and it happens in almost every candle range. Small candles carry a low contribution per unit and a high volume; large premium candles carry a high contribution per unit and a low volume. Rank on one and you conclude that Three-wick 400 is your best product and should get the shelf space, the photography and the next fragrance investment. Rank on the other and you conclude that Everyday 150 is carrying the business and must never go out of stock. Both conclusions are correct, and they are answers to different questions.

Use them like this. Rank by month to decide what must not fail: stock cover, wick supply, production priority, which fragrance you buy a kilogram of. Everyday 150 going out of stock for two weeks costs you about ₹73,825.98 of contribution; Three-wick 400 going out of stock for the same two weeks costs about ₹17,612.52. Rank per candle to decide where growth effort goes: which product deserves the advertising rupee, which one to put in a gift set, which one a wholesale buyer should see first. Selling ten more of Three-wick 400 is worth ₹7,827.79; selling ten more of Votive 60 is worth ₹1,313.37.

Reading the fragrance column as a purchasing plan

The fragrance usage column earns its place in your question because it is the one column that converts straight into a purchase order. Grams per candle multiplied by candles poured is kilograms of oil a month, scent by scent — and that tells you which pack size to buy, where a kilogram is justified and where it would be money sitting on a shelf.

Two findings fall straight out of that table. First, the range's fragrance ranking is different again: Everyday 150 consumes the most oil by weight at 7.42 kg a month, while the largest fragrance cheque belongs to Signature 200 at ₹24,663.09. Grams and rupees rank differently because the rate points differ by a factor of three across the range. Second, three of the five scents do not justify a kilogram at these volumes, and buying one anyway is not a saving — it is a month or more of that scent's stock standing still.

On the ladders themselves, check each oil rather than assuming. Citronella is ₹7.67 a gram at its 100 gm pack and ₹2.89 a gram at 1 kg, a real and large step. Eucalyptus Spearmint runs ₹4.56, ₹4.25, ₹3.54, ₹3.30 and ₹3.07 a gram from 15 gm up to 1 kg. Mahogany Teakwood is ₹8.80 a gram at 50g and ₹8.80 a gram at 1kg — flat at every pack size, so on that scent the kilogram buys you nothing but commitment. Spicy Raspberry is ₹5.98 a gram at 50g against ₹6.00 at 1kg, fractionally the wrong way round. Run the ladder on the oils your own table names and write down what it returns.

Building your own league table in an evening

One caution about re-running it. The table is a snapshot of a month, and a range that sells seasonally will rank differently in October than in February. Rebuild it quarterly rather than reacting to it monthly, and keep the old versions — a product that has slipped three places over a year is telling you something that no single table can.

What the league table cannot decide for you

It stops at materials. Every contribution figure here is before packaging, courier to your own customer, payment and marketplace fees, advertising, labour, electricity and rent. Those are not CSI products, so no number for them exists on this page, and several of them are not equal across a range — a 400 g three-wick in Apothecary Glass Candle Jar costs far more to box and courier than a 60 g votive, and if your outbound courier is charged by weight the real gap between those two rows is wider than the table shows. Add your own courier and packaging figures per row before you act on the ranking.

It is blind to what each product does for the others. A votive at ₹131.34 of contribution may be the sample that sells the ₹999.00 candle, the thing that fills a gift set, or the price point that gets a new customer through the door. A league table cannot see any of that. Before dropping the bottom row, check what share of orders containing it also contain something else.

It is blind to production time. Contribution per candle ranks the money; it says nothing about the hours. If the Three-wick 400 takes four times as long to pour, wick, cure and finish as the votive, its per-candle lead is smaller than it looks. If your constraint is your own hours rather than your cash, add a contribution-per-hour column and rank on that instead — it is a third ordering, and it will differ from both of these.

It is blind to risk. The row with the highest contribution per candle is usually the one with the dearest materials sitting in stock — Mahogany Teakwood at ₹8.80 a gram and Ceramic Jar at ₹129.80 a piece are lovely things to own when they sell and expensive things to own when they do not. Weigh the ranking against how fast each product's materials actually turn.

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