My Candle Sales Have Grown From 100 to 500 Pieces a Month — How Much Wax and Fragrance Oil Should I Keep in Inventory?

What actually changed when you went from 100 to 500

At 100 candles a month you could hold two months of everything without thinking about it, because two months of everything was a few shelves and a manageable sum. Carry that same eight-week rule to 500 and the arithmetic turns hostile: eight weeks of wax plus eight weeks of one lead fragrance moves from about ₹20,863.84 to ₹1,04,321.25. Nothing about the policy got worse. Your volume simply made its cost visible.

Three things change in practice. First, cover has to differ by material, because wax and a slow fifth scent are not the same kind of risk. Second, the pack ladder starts to bind: at 100 a month a 500 g oil pack was an over-buy on every scent, and at 500 a month the same pack is under three weeks of your lead scent and over four of your fifth. Third, a stockout now costs real money — a pour day with no wax at 500 candles a month is roughly ₹8,788.68 of production that does not happen that week, not counting the orders it delays.

Start from grams a week, not candles a month

Everything on this page runs off four numbers. At a 150 g fill of Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 and an 8% of wax weight fragrance load (12 g a candle), 500 candles a month is 75 kg of wax and 6,000 g of oil a month, which is 17.3 kg and 1386 g a week. Use 4.33 weeks to a month rather than four; over a year the difference is a fortnight of stock, and a fortnight of stock at this output is real money.

A note on the load, because it changes the oil line more than anything else you can decide. The CSI 464 page states a fragrance ceiling of up to 10% of wax weight; Luxury Soy Wax Chunks publish up to 13% and CSI 468 up to 13%. Your oils have their own published ranges — British Rose up to 10% for soy, Roasted Coffee 6–10%, Mango Coconut 6–10%, Woody Oud 6–10%, Jasmine up to 10% — and where the wax ceiling and the oil range differ, the lower figure governs. Moving from 8% to 10% adds 1,500 g a month to your oil consumption and about ₹4,602.00 a month at your lead scent's rate. Decide the load on throw, but know what it does to the shelf.

How much wax to hold, and why five weeks

Four reasons wax earns a deeper holding than anything else in your workshop. It is used by every product you make, so it can never be stranded by a change of scent. It is the highest-volume line, so a stockout stops production completely rather than narrowing your range. CSI 464 publishes a 60 month shelf life in cool, dry storage, so time is not working against it. And it costs ₹507.40 a kilo whether you buy 1 kg or 10 kg, so holding more of it carries no price penalty and no price reward — the decision is purely about cash and space.

Five weeks is the target used here, and it is an assumption rather than a rule: one full production month plus a week of buffer for a consignment that arrives late or a pour day that runs long. At 17.3 kg a week that is 86.6 kg, and since the deepest published pack is 10 kg you round to 90 kg — nine packs, ₹45,666.00, 5.2 weeks of cover. If you want more than 10 kg in a single consignment, that is a WhatsApp conversation rather than a checkout, and it is worth having before a festive run rather than during one.

The per-scent split, and the pack ladder that overrules it

Most five-scent ranges sell on a curve, not a flat line. The split used here — 35/25/18/14/8 — is a normal enough shape to plan against, and you should replace it with your own last-three-months figures the moment you have them. At 500 candles a month it puts 2100 g a month behind the lead scent and 480 g behind the fifth. Six weeks of cover is the target for all five — and the last column shows how few of them actually get it once the packs on offer are taken into account.

The bottom row is the lesson, and it is a pleasingly clean one. Mango Coconut at 480 g a month needs 665 g for six weeks. The packs available are 500 g at ₹1,982.00 and 1 kg at ₹3,964.00 — and both work out at ₹3.96 a gram, because that oil's page prices the kilo at exactly twice the half-kilo. So the kilo buys you no rate advantage whatsoever. All it buys is 4.5 more weeks of exposure to your own range changing, and ₹1,982.00 of cash you could have left in the bank. Take the 500 g pack, hold 4.5 weeks and reorder more often.

What the shelf is actually holding

Add the two halves together: ₹45,666.00 of wax and ₹29,381.80 of fragrance is ₹75,047.80. Against a monthly wax-and-oil consumption of ₹60,196.54 — ₹38,055.00 of wax and ₹22,141.54 of oil — that is a little over five weeks of materials standing still. Divided across the candles you will sell this month it is ₹150.10 a candle, which is a useful number to carry in your head: it tells you what growing your output does to your working capital before it does anything to your bank balance.

Two lines this page has deliberately not added. Vessels: 500 Black Glass Jars with Black Lid at ₹107.00 each is ₹53,500.00 a month, and if you hold four weeks of those the shelf grows by about that much again. Wicks: 500 Eco Candle Wicks Thick (C2) at ₹9.44 is ₹4,720.00, which is small enough to hold deep without thinking about it. Beyond those sit the rows CSI cannot price at all — labels, printed cartons, mailers, bubble wrap, ribbon, courier, rent, electricity and your own hours. Those belong in your cost sheet as blanks you fill in, and they are usually the reason a maker's real working capital requirement is larger than any materials figure suggests.

The reorder table, filled in

The one number this table needs that nobody can give you is your lead time — the days between placing an order and the material being on your bench, ready to pour. CSI does not publish delivery times, and they will differ between a metro pin code and a small town anyway, so measure your own: note the order date and the arrival date for your next three consignments and use the longest. Then set each reorder point at two weeks of usage plus that measured lead time, so a late consignment eats buffer rather than production.

Storing 90 kg of wax and 8 kg of oil through an Indian year

Ninety kilos of flake wax is nine sacks — roughly a metre of floor if they are stacked sensibly, on a pallet or a plank rather than directly on a floor that will sweat through a Mumbai or Kochi monsoon. Keep them sealed, out of direct sunlight, and away from a wall that bakes in a Delhi, Ahmedabad or Nagpur summer. CSI 464 publishes a 60 month shelf life in cool, dry storage and asks that it be stored away from sunlight and moisture, which is the whole storage brief in one line. Oil is smaller and fussier: bottles capped tight, upright, in a cupboard rather than on an open shelf, and never next to the melter.

The risk that actually bites at this output is not spoilage. It is range change. A festive collection, a corporate order in a new scent, a jar that goes out of stock and forces a different diameter — any of those can strand part of an 8 kg oil holding. That is why the cover targets here stop at six weeks rather than twelve, and why the tail scent is the one worth questioning. Wax, by contrast, survives almost any range change you can make, which is the real argument for holding it deep and holding oil shallow.

One equipment note, because at 500 candles a month it starts to shape your inventory rather than just your evenings. A 1 litre Mini Electric Wax Melter at ₹2,360.00 holds about a candle and a half of wax at this fill; a 10 kg Electric Wax Melter at ₹21,240.00 holds a batch of 66. One reviewer describes ten kilos melting in twenty to thirty minutes with no temperature worry — the relevance to this page is that melt capacity sets your batch size, batch size sets how often you break into a wax pack, and that in turn sets how smooth your consumption looks against a reorder point.

How to tell you are holding too much

Four signals, in the order they usually appear. One: any oil pack that has been open for more than eight weeks and is still more than half full. Two: a scent whose stock in weeks is higher than your top scent's, which means the split is being ignored. Three: wax cover above about eight weeks with no festive run in front of it — at this output that is over ₹71,036.00 of flakes doing nothing. Four: ordering because a pack size looked like good value rather than because a reorder point fired. That last one is the most expensive and the hardest to see, because it feels like good buying.

And the honest counter-case, from a supplier who would happily sell you more: there are three situations where holding above these targets is correct. Before a festive run with a confirmed forecast. When a scent is genuinely your signature and you have twelve months of sales behind it. And when you are switching a grade or a vessel and need overlap so the old line can keep shipping while the new one cures. Outside those three, more stock at 500 candles a month is usually just ₹150.10-a-candle turning into more.

Finally, review the whole sheet on a fixed rhythm rather than when something goes wrong. Once a month, update the usage line from actual pours; once a quarter, revisit the cover targets and the scent split, because a range that sold 35/25/18/14/8 in June may sell something quite different by October. Inventory at this size is not a number you set once. It is a small, boring habit that keeps roughly ₹75,047.80 of your money working instead of sitting.

Frequently asked questions