I Want to Reduce the Number of Wick SKUs in My Factory — How Do I Determine Whether Nearby Fragrances Can Safely Share One Approved Wick?

The sharing-trial order: seven candles, mostly from stock

The worked example is the cluster's 200 g jar: your own, 8.0 cm across the inside (50.27 cm² of pool; 41.85 cm² if 8 cm is the outside of a 0.35 cm wall), filled to 200 g at 8% (16 g of oil + 184 g of CSI 464). CSI does not list a jar at 8 cm. A factory running this range already holds the oils, the wax and the C2, so the trial is mostly a withdrawal from stock, not a purchase.

Each trial candle costs ₹175.30 (Woody Oud) or ₹162.61 (Roasted Coffee) in materials before the jar. Note the 2 g left in each 50 g bottle: if you are buying the trial oils fresh rather than drawing on stock, there is nothing left for a re-pour, so buy the 100 g if a split cell would need three more candles. Argued against our own interest: if you run these oils, you do not need to buy anything from us for this trial.

What "share safely" means in practice

Three conditions, all labelled as our judgement and all the same ones your standard oils already met. First, the build is copied exactly: same jar batch, wax, load (8% of total weight here, inside both oils' "candles (6-10%)" and CSI 464's "Fragrance Load Up to 10%"), fill, cure and session length. Second, three candles per oil, burned to about 1 cm left; a screen at burn 3 can kill a trial early but cannot pass one. Third, the control candle behaves as its approval did.

Why heavier oils are the hard case: oud, coffee and other dark or resinous oils are commonly linked to needing more wick or to more carbon on the wick, so stepping them down a rung is where sharing trials usually fail. They are also where the money is, because Cotton Braided is the dearer wick. A full SKU consolidation audit, ranking every wick SKU by use, is the SKU-consolidation post; standing behaviour groups with an admission test are the behaviour-groups post. This page prices one trial.

A first full pool in an 8 cm jar takes about 3.2 hours on a very rough hour-per-2.5 cm rule of thumb, so run sessions of about 3–4 hours, and cure first: both trial oils' pages say 48–72 hours for soy before burn testing. Full life for a 200 g candle is several weeks of sessions; your own grams per hour sets the calendar.

Trial cost against the yearly saving

Two things change when Cotton Braided leaves. Every one of those candles carries a cheaper wick, ₹2.56 less each. And the Cotton Braided stock you held for them is freed: in the worked example, about 46 wicks on hand on average (half a month of safety stock plus half a 50-pack), worth ₹552.00. But the same candles now draw on C2, so roughly the same number of C2 sit on your shelf instead (₹434.24). The net freed is ₹117.76. Risk pooling can let one combined SKU carry a little less safety stock than two separate ones; at these volumes we ignore it.

At the example's 40 candles a month the trial repays in about 11.4 months, or 10.2 counting the freed stock. That is fine, not dramatic. The column on the right is the warning: if the SKU you want to drop is below the standard (oils on C1 moving up to C2), every moved candle costs ₹3.54 more in wicks, and the trial never pays back in rupees. Do that consolidation only for what it really buys you (one fewer bin, fewer mix-ups, simpler buying), and only after the moved oils pass on C2 without running hot.

What the table cannot price is the gain that usually justifies the exercise: fewer SKUs mean fewer wrong-wick candles, simpler pour-day picking, and one less reorder point to watch. The whole-business version of this question, dozens of experimental sizes down to three or four, is the rationalisation post.

Four outcomes, four purchases

A partial pass is still worth having: it moves volume to the cheaper wick even if the bin survives. But it is not consolidation, and it is worth saying so in your records so nobody reorders Cotton Braided at the old volume. Whether an odd oil should keep its own wick or change its load instead is the extra-SKU post; how the remaining rungs are sized across a range is the inventory-reference post.

After a pass: the C2 restock and the leftover Cotton Braided

Because C2 is flat per wick, the move to one SKU does not unlock a pack discount: the 1,000-pack is ₹9.44 a wick, exactly what the 10-pack costs. What it unlocks is simpler buying: one quantity, one reorder point, one bin. How to split quantities across sizes for ranges that keep two wicks is the two-wick quantity post.

What to buy, and what to skip

Five items, chosen on page statements, price and stock on 1 October 2026. CSI publishes no wick-performance data, so nothing here is ranked on burn results. Oil candle counts use 16 g per 200 g candle and 12 g per standard 150 g candle.

Skip for a sharing trial: new oils, a new jar or a new wax: each would make the trial a new approval rather than a sharing question. Performance Wooden Wicks (₹590.00 for 10): a different construction is not a neighbouring wick. Eco C1 (₹118.00 for 20): only if your standard is C1 and the trial is moving oils down to it.

Frequently asked questions