Lavender Sells 120 Units a Month While Oud Sells Only 20 — Why Should I Not Keep the Same Amount of Fragrance Oil for Both?

From units sold to grams consumed

Start with the conversion, because every number later in this guide is built on it. A 200 g-class container candle on a 185 g wax fill at an 8% load takes 14.8 g of fragrance oil (185 × 0.08). That is the convention used throughout this series: load as a percentage of total wax weight, which is how the Luxury Soy Wax Chunks page phrases its own 8–13% band. If you prefer to calculate load as a share of the finished candle, the same candle at 8% is 184 g of wax and 16 g of oil — a 1.2 g difference per candle that matters at 1,000 candles and not at all at ten. Pick one convention, write it on the sheet, and never mix them inside one calculation.

Now apply it to the two scents in the question. One hundred and twenty lavender candles is 1,776 g of oil a month. Twenty oud candles is 296 g. Divide each by a 30-day month and you get the only two numbers you will use again: 59.2 g/day of lavender and 9.87 g/day of oud. (A 30-day month is the right divisor for cover, because customers buy on Sundays. If you plan production around 26 working days instead, your daily production draw is higher — 68.3 g/day of lavender — and your cover figures fall accordingly. State which one you used.)

Read the last row carefully. The ratio is constant at 6.0× because it is the same ratio expressed in four different units. That is precisely why equal purchasing feels fair and behaves unfairly: the symmetry you are protecting exists only in the bottle column, which is the one column that has no operational meaning. Nothing in your workshop consumes bottles. It consumes grams, at a rate set by what customers actually order.

What an equal buy actually does

Equal purchasing is not a decision most people make deliberately. It happens because the order form has a quantity box next to each scent and "1 kg" is the easiest thing to type twice. So it is worth seeing exactly what that habit produces, in rupees and in days, against two alternatives built from the same live price list.

Basket B is the one worth staring at. It costs ₹11.84 less than the equal buy. It is not a trade-off, a compromise or a cash-flow sacrifice — it is the same order, re-weighted. The lavender line went up by 600 g and the oud line came down by 700 g, and the business got ten more days of its best-selling scent for no money. This is the single most common free improvement available to a candle business with more than three fragrances, and it requires no supplier negotiation, no forecasting software and no change in what you sell.

One honest caveat before the method. The 120 and the 20 in this question are your figures, taken from your own sales — nobody can tell you from the outside which scents move in your shop, and this guide makes no claim about what sells in India. What the arithmetic does settle is that whatever your two numbers are, the ratio between them belongs on the purchase order. If lavender were 40 a month and oud 35, the right answer would be two nearly equal buys. The equal buy is not wrong because it is equal. It is wrong when the demand behind it is not.

The three-step cover calculation

Here is the whole method, done on a notebook page in under ten minutes for any number of scents. Run it once a month, on the day you place the fragrance order, using last month's actual unit sales rather than a target.

Which pack for which speed

Three cards, three speeds. Each shows every listed pack, the price per kilo at that pack, and roughly how many 200 g-class candles the pack pours at 14.8 g of oil each. Read the per-kg column before you read the price column — it is the one that tells you whether the big bottle is actually a bargain.

What the pack ladder says about a slow scent

The usual objection to small packs is that they carry a per-gram penalty, and that the penalty eventually outweighs whatever the surplus costs you. That is a fair argument and it must be settled with the actual ladder, not with a general belief about bulk buying. So here are six CSI oils with their listed price per gram at three pack sizes, and the one figure that decides a slow scent's pack: what the 1 kg bottle costs against two 500 gm bottles of the same oil.

Four of the six ladders give a slow scent no reason whatever to buy the kilo, and one of them actively punishes it. Only Cinnamon offers a reward big enough to debate — ₹0.59 a gram, about 10% — and even there the question is whether a 10% saving justifies holding six or seven months of a single scent. That trade-off, and the arithmetic for settling it, is the subject of should I stop buying 1 kg bottles of my slowest scent. For now the practical instruction is simply: look the ladder up before you assume. It takes one click on the product page and it is different on almost every oil.

The real price of the oud you didn't need

It is worth putting a figure on the surplus, because "dead stock" is a phrase that lets people off. In basket A, the oud kilo covers 101.4 days. If your cover target is 30 days, 704 g of that bottle — ₹3,190 at ₹4.5312/g — is money you did not have to spend this month. It is not lost money; the oil will almost certainly get used. But it is money that spent two and a half months unable to be lavender, unable to be jars, and unable to be the wax that a confirmed order needed.

Three costs follow from that, and only the first is obvious. The opportunity cost is the ₹3,190 itself, idle. The substitution cost is what you do when lavender runs out on day 17 — pour the oud instead and hope the customer is flexible, buy lavender at a smaller pack's per-gram price in a hurry, or pause the line. The commitment cost is the one that catches growing businesses: if you have accepted an order for 80 lavender candles, 1,184 g of your lavender is already committed, and an inventory figure that ignores that has oversold the shelf. Available stock is on-hand minus committed, and it is a different number from the one on the weighing scale.

Basket B's lavender line is short by 176 g, and that is not a rounding error I am hiding — it is the honest consequence of matching a budget rather than a requirement. If you want both scents to clear a full month, basket C is the answer and it costs ₹2,049.16 more than the equal buy. The choice between B and C is a cash-flow decision, and it is a legitimate one. The choice between A and either of them is not a decision at all; A is simply worse on both axes.

Two scents, two reorder rules

The last step is to turn this month's correction into a standing rule, so the equal buy does not creep back the next time somebody fills in the order form. A fast scent and a slow scent want genuinely different policies, and writing both down takes four lines.

Note what the oud row does not say. It does not say stop stocking oud. A 20-a-month scent at ₹67.06 of oil per candle may be the most profitable line you have, and a premium scent that a customer comes back for is worth keeping on the shelf even at low volume. The policy change is about how much of it sits there, not whether it exists. Deciding which slow scents genuinely earn their slot, and which are only there because you once bought a kilo, is the subject of identifying dead fragrance inventory before buying new scents.

One more thing to carry forward. Everything above assumed a stable 120 and 20. If your sales are growing, a reorder point written today quietly becomes a stock-out in four months, because the grams-per-day figure it was built on has moved. Recalculate the two numbers — not the whole policy, just the two numbers — on the first of every month, from last month's actual units. It takes two minutes and it is the difference between a rule that works and a rule that worked.

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