I Want to Maintain Two Weeks of Safety Stock for My Candle Business — How Do I Calculate the Minimum Quantity of Wax, Fragrance, Wicks and Jars I Should Never Fall Below?

What a two-week floor is — and is not

Three quantities get confused in small candle businesses. The target is the level you top up to — thirty days of stock, say. The reorder point is the level at which you place the next order. The floor, or safety stock, is the level that should still be on the shelf when an on-time delivery arrives. A two-week floor means that if a delivery is late, or sales spike, you can keep pouring for fourteen more days before anything runs out.

Two weeks is a time-based rule. It does not need statistics, which is its strength for a small business: it can be set on day one and checked with a shelf count. Its weakness is that it treats every component the same way. A statistical safety stock sized from how much your sales vary — covered in 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? — can be smaller for steady products and larger for volatile ones. If you have a year of weekly sales, use that method. If you do not, two weeks is a sound, simple starting floor.

Daily usage, component by component

Everything starts from daily usage. Our example business sells 500 candles of 180 g in the White Matte Glass Jar (180 g is the maker's own tested fill; the jar's fill weight is not published) and 250 candles of 85 g in the Golden Aluminium Tin, listed with an 85 g fill. Both are poured at 8% in Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464. The finished weight is 111.25 kg a month: 102.35 kg of wax and 8.90 kg of oil, before loss. These are example figures.

Use calendar days, not production days. Customers buy on Sundays even if you do not pour on Sundays, and a safety stock protects sales, not pouring. Dividing by 30 gives a daily rate that is a little lower than a production-day rate, which is correct for this purpose. If your sales are strongly seasonal, recalculate the daily rate each month from that month's sales, or from the forecast for the months ahead — a floor set in June will be too thin in October.

The floors

Read the pack column as a sense-check, not a shopping list. The wax floor is 4.9 10 kg bags — so if the shelf shows fewer than five full 10 kg bags, you are inside the floor. Lemongrass and Lime's floor is 1,283.4 g: if you hold it in 1 kg bottles, the line is 1 unopened kilo plus 283.4 g left in the open bottle. Peach Melon Berry's floor, 427.8 g, is a little over four 100 g bottles.

Slow scents need a judgement call. A floor below the smallest practical pack still makes sense as a number, but if you only ever hold one bottle of a slow scent, the practical rule becomes "never open the last bottle without reordering". My Fragrance Supplier Takes Two Weeks to Deliver — How Do I Calculate Reorder Points Separately for Fast- and Slow-Selling Candle Fragrances? sets separate reorder points for fast- and slow-selling scents, which is the natural next step once floors are in place.

From floor to reorder point

A floor alone does not tell you when to order. If you wait until the shelf touches the floor and then order, the stock keeps falling while the delivery is on its way, and you arrive inside the floor every time. The reorder point adds the usage during delivery on top: reorder point = floor + daily usage × delivery days.

Delivery times below are example figures — five days for wax, seven for oils and wicks, ten for glass and tins — because they depend on your location, the courier and the order size. CSI does not publish delivery times; replace these with the lead times you actually experience, measured from the day you order to the day stock is on your shelf.

The reorder point for wax is 66.77 kg. Order the moment the shelf reaches that level and, if the five days hold, the delivery arrives with 49.20 kg still on the shelf. If it is three days late, you use 10.54 kg of the floor and carry on pouring. The floor is doing exactly what it is for. My Wax Supplier Takes 10 Days to Deliver — At What Stock Level Should I Reorder if I Produce 50 Candles Every Day? works the same maths for a ten-day wax delivery at 50 candles a day.

The cost of the floor

Every floor is money that never turns into candles unless something goes wrong. At CSI prices the example floors hold ₹24,962.17 of wax, ₹21,544.53 of oil across five scents, ₹2,106.30 of wicks, ₹16,708.80 of White Matte jars and ₹3,510.00 of tins — ₹68,831.80 in all. Oils are valued at their 1 kg price per gram; if you hold them in 100 g bottles, the value is a little higher.

The pattern is typical. Wax and glass jars dominate, because they are heavy per candle or expensive per unit. Wicks are cheap to hold: 357 wicks cost ₹2,106.30, so there is little reason to run them tight — a missing ₹5.90 wick stops a ₹70.80 jar and its wax from becoming a candle. Where cash is short, trim floors on the bulky, slow-moving items first, never on the cheap item that can halt production.

The weekly shelf check

Floors only work if someone looks. Once a week, count every component and compare it with its floor and reorder point. Convert each count into days of cover (stock ÷ daily usage) so every line speaks the same unit. Here is the example business on a Monday count:

This count flags Vanilla Bean as inside its floor: it is ordered today and, if possible, on a faster delivery, because a normal delivery would leave it short. Wax, Honeydew Melon, Peach Melon Berry and White Matte jars are at or under their reorder points and are ordered in the normal way. Lemongrass and Lime, Woody Oud, Wicks and Golden tins wait for next Monday. The check takes fifteen minutes and replaces the guesswork of "we seem low on vanilla".

Revisit the floors every month or whenever sales change by more than a small margin. A floor is a function of daily usage, so it grows and shrinks with the business. I'm Producing 5,000 Candles a Month — How Do I Calculate Monthly Raw-Material Consumption and Set Automatic Reorder Levels for Every Major Component? turns these same floors into automatic reorder levels for a 5,000-candle-a-month operation, and I Want to Know Exactly How Much Candle Raw Material to Purchase Every Month Without Constantly Running Out or Overbuying — How Do I Build a Procurement Model Using Sales, Formula Consumption, Lead Time, Wastage and Safety Stock? builds them into a complete procurement model with lead time and wastage.

Two final practical notes. Keep the floor stock physically rotated — pour from the oldest wax and oil first so the floor itself is not the oldest stock in the building. And record every day a delivery arrives inside the floor; three such days in a quarter is the signal to re-measure your delivery times, or to ask your supplier whether larger, less frequent orders would arrive more reliably. I Have ₹1 Lakh Available for Raw-Material Inventory — How Do I Decide How Much Should Go into Wax, Fragrance Oils, Wicks and Jars Based on Actual Monthly Consumption? covers how to spread a fixed budget across components when you cannot afford every floor at once.

Frequently asked questions