My ₹699 Candle Costs ₹200 to Make and a Retailer Wants to Buy It at ₹350 — How Do I Calculate Whether the Wholesale Order Is Worthwhile?

Two contributions, and the ratio between them

Start by refusing the percentage. The offer is often described as "half price" — ₹350.00 is 50.07% of ₹699.00 — and that framing makes the decision feel like a loss before any arithmetic happens. The useful figure is not the share of your price the shop is paying; it is the number of rupees each channel leaves in your hands after the candle is paid for. That figure is contribution, and you already have everything needed to compute it.

On the figures in your question: the retailer's ₹350.00 minus your ₹200.00 cost is ₹150.00. Your own ₹699.00 minus the same ₹200.00 is ₹499.00. As contribution margins that is 42.86% wholesale against 71.39% direct. Both are comfortably positive, which is the first thing worth saying plainly: on materials alone, nothing in this offer loses money. A candle sold at ₹350.00 is not a candle sold at a loss. It is a candle sold at a third of the reward.

The number to write down is the ratio. ₹499.00 ÷ ₹150.00 = 3.33. Three and a third wholesale candles earn what one of your own sales earns. Every judgement that follows is a judgement about whether you can actually make and move 3.33 candles through the shop in the time it takes to make and move one through your own channel — and whether the shop's customer would ever have found you.

What the ₹349.00 gap actually has to cover

The ₹499.00 and the ₹150.00 are not like for like, and the honest version of this page has to say why before it says anything else. Your ₹200.00 is a materials cost. It sits under both channels unchanged — the candle does not get cheaper because a shop is buying it. What differs is everything that happens after the candle is made, and that is where the direct sale gives back a large part of its advantage.

A direct sale carries a printed label and an outer box, a courier leg to a consumer's door, a payment gateway or marketplace fee, and whatever it cost to find that customer in the first place. A wholesale order of a hundred candles carries one set of outer packing, usually one delivery leg to one address, often a bank transfer rather than a gateway, and no acquisition cost at all beyond the conversation that won the account. None of those are CSI products, so this page will not put a number in any of them. What it will do is give you the threshold to test them against.

The threshold is the gap itself: ₹349.00. If the costs that only the direct channel carries — acquisition, gateway, outbound courier to a consumer, consumer-grade packing — add up to more than ₹349.00 a candle, then the wholesale order is the better sale per unit even before you count the convenience of it. If they add up to less, the direct sale still wins per unit. Most makers have never computed that figure and are therefore arguing about the price instead.

The question that decides it: whose sale is it?

Everything above assumes the hundred candles the shop sells are a hundred candles you would never have sold yourself. That assumption is doing enormous work, and it is worth costing rather than believing. Call the share of the shop's sales that would otherwise have been yours the cannibalisation rate. Every cannibalised candle does not earn you ₹150.00 — it earns you ₹150.00 instead of ₹499.00, so it costs you ₹349.00.

That gives the arithmetic its shape. On a 100-candle order the hundred candles earn ₹15,000.00 between them, and you give up ₹499.00 for every one of the shop's sales you would have made yourself. Set the two against each other and the break-even cannibalisation rate is ₹150.00 ÷ ₹499.00 = 30.06%. Thirty of the hundred can be your own customers before the order stops paying for itself. The thirty-first starts costing you money, and by the time half the shop's sales are people who would have bought from you, the order has cost ₹9,950.00 of contribution rather than earning anything.

Thirty per cent sounds generous until you picture the shop. A boutique four kilometres from you, selling to the same city, posting the same candle to the same Instagram audience, will cannibalise heavily — and you will not be able to measure it, because the customer who buys from the shelf never appears in your own numbers as a lost sale. A shop in a city you do not ship to often, or one selling to walk-in tourists, or an airport and hotel gifting counter, cannibalises close to nothing. The same ₹350.00 is a good price in one case and an expensive one in the other, and the price never changed.

What ₹200.00 of materials actually buys

Your ₹200.00 is the load-bearing number in this whole decision — it appears in both contributions, so an error in it moves the ratio and the break-even share together. It is worth checking against something buyable rather than trusting a figure from a spreadsheet written eighteen months ago. Here is a 200 g candle at an 8% fragrance load, built entirely from CSI stock in September 2026.

The wax is Eco Soy CSI 400, bought as the 1 kg pack at ₹399.00, which is ₹399.00 a kilogram. The candle uses 200 g of it. A fragrance load is a percentage of wax weight, so 8% of 200 g is 16 g of oil and 216 g goes into the vessel — that is the reading this page carries throughout. The fragrance is Eucalyptus Spearmint, bought as the 1 kg pack at ₹3,068.00, which is ₹3.07 a gram; its page states soy use up to 10% of total wax weight, a flash point of 199°C and 0% vanillin. The Eco Soy CSI 400 page does not publish a maximum fragrance load, so on this pairing the oil page's 10% is the only published limit and 8% sits inside it. If you need the wax figure, ask on WhatsApp.

₹205.59 against your ₹200.00 is a difference of ₹5.59, which is 2.80% — close enough that your figure is doing its job. Run the whole test again on it and almost nothing moves: contribution becomes ₹493.41 direct and ₹144.41 wholesale, the trade ratio becomes 3.42 instead of 3.33, and the break-even cannibalisation share falls from 30.06% to 29.27%. A hundred-candle order is worth ₹14,441.20 rather than ₹15,000.00. The decision does not change. That is the useful result: this test is not sensitive to small errors in your cost, which means you can answer the shop without a week of recosting.

It is sensitive to errors in the other direction. If your ₹200.00 has quietly left out the vessel, or is a figure from before your last fragrance price change, and the real cost is ₹260.00, then the wholesale contribution is ₹90.00 and the trade ratio is 4.88 — a different conversation entirely. Weigh what actually goes into your jar, price the vessel per piece from a live listing, and add the wick even though it feels too small to matter. Those three habits are worth more than any negotiating tactic.

Testing the offer on your own figures, step by step

One more sum worth doing before you reply, because it is the one that decides whether you can physically take the order. A hundred candles at 200 g of wax each is 20 kg of wax and 1.6 kg of fragrance oil, and it has to be poured, cured and packed alongside whatever you already sell. Soy throw keeps developing well past a first test burn — the Luxury Soy Wax Chunks page itself says ideally one to two weeks — and 14 to 21 days is normal practice for a soy container candle. If the shop wants the order in ten days, you are not deciding about ₹350.00; you are deciding whether to ship a candle before it is ready.

What to negotiate when the price will not move

Suppose the shop will not go above ₹350.00. That is common and it is not always a bluff — the retailer is solving their own margin problem and a fixed shelf price leaves them very little room. The useful move is to stop pushing the one number that is locked and start pushing the ones that are not. Each of the levers below either raises your contribution or lowers your cost, and none of them asks the shop for more money.

A different size. This is the largest lever you have and the only one that touches the cost side. A candle poured at 150 g of wax instead of 200 g uses 12 g of oil instead of 16 g; on the CSI stack above the scented wax falls from ₹128.89 to ₹96.67. Keep the same vessel and wick and the candle costs ₹173.37, which lifts the wholesale contribution from ₹144.41 to ₹176.63 — a bigger gain than talking the shop up to ₹380.00 would produce. It also makes the shop's candle visibly different from yours, which pushes the cannibalisation rate down.

An exclusive scent. Costs nothing if the oil is priced similarly and removes the direct comparison your own customers would otherwise make. Plainer packing. A wholesale candle does not need the consumer-facing box; that is one of your blank rows and it shrinks. Payment terms. Advance or part-advance on a first order converts an unknown risk into a known one, and costs the shop nothing if they were always going to pay. A firm shelf price. Free to give, protects your ₹699.00. Order size and lead time. A hundred candles in one consignment with three weeks' notice lets you buy materials in one order rather than three, and a single inbound parcel is materially cheaper than several.

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