My Oud Candle Needs Only 6% Fragrance but My Lavender Candle Needs 9% — Should the Two Candles Have Different Production Costs Even if the Jars Are Identical?

Two candles, one vessel, and the only line that moves

Start by separating what is shared from what is not, because that is where most two-SKU cost sheets go wrong. Both candles take 150 g of Luxury Soy Wax Chunks, which at ₹599.00 a kilogram in the 1 kg pack is ₹89.85. Both take the same White Matte Glass Jar at ₹70.80 each at the 10 pack, and the same Eco Candle Wicks Thin (C1) at ₹5.90. That is ₹166.55 of shared cost before either candle has a scent. It is 70% of the oud candle and 70% of the lavender one, which tells you immediately that the argument you are having is about a minority of the candle.

The fourth line is the whole of the difference, and it has two inputs, not one. Rate: White Royal Oud is ₹8.10 a gram at the 1 kg pack, Lavender Fragrance Oil is ₹5.22. Quantity: your 6% of 150 g of wax is 9 g, your 9% is 13.5 g. Multiply and the oud line is ₹72.93 against the lavender's ₹70.48. The oil that costs about 1.55 times as much per gram produces a fragrance line only ₹2.44 dearer, because you use 1.5 times as much of the cheaper one. A costing that stops at the price list gets this backwards every time.

Why you cost them separately even when the answer is close

The temptation with a gap of ₹2.44 is obvious: call it ₹238.26 for both and move on. It is the wrong habit for three reasons, and none of them is about this particular ₹2.44. The first is that a blended figure is only correct at the mix you blended it at. Average the two candles evenly and you get ₹238.26, which overstates the lavender by ₹1.22 and understates the oud by the same. Sell seven lavenders for every three ouds — a realistic Indian range where the floral is the volume line — and the true average is ₹237.77, which understates the oud candle by ₹1.71 and overstates the lavender by ₹0.73. Your average moves whenever your customers change their minds, which is not a property you want in a cost figure.

The second reason is that the blend hides the direction of subsidy. If you sell both at one price, the lavender candle is quietly funding the oud one at every mix, and a blended cost makes that invisible on the books. Over a run of 500 candles at seven-to-three, the blended figure understates the oud line by ₹256.57 in total. That is not a large number here, and that is exactly why the habit matters: the day you add a scent at ₹130.00 for 15 gm or swap the vessel, the same error structure produces a figure that is large, and you will not see it because the method never showed it.

The third reason is practical rather than theoretical. Per-SKU costs are what let you answer questions at the speed a business actually asks them: whether a gift set of one oud and two lavenders makes money at a bundle price, whether a corporate order for 200 oud candles is worth the fragrance outlay, whether dropping a scent would help. None of those is answerable from an average. Keep one sheet per SKU with the shared lines identical and the oil line separate, and every one of those questions is a two-minute job.

"Identical jars" is the expensive ambiguity, not the load

Here is the part of the question that moves more money than the loads do. A jar holds a fixed volume, and a fragrance load is extra weight poured into that volume. At 150 g of wax each, your oud candle puts 159 g into the jar and your lavender puts 163.5 g — four and a half grams more, because 9% of 150 g is that much more oil than 6% of 150 g. If the jar is comfortably under-filled at 163.5 g, nothing needs deciding. If it is full at 159 g, the lavender candle cannot be 150 g of wax, and costing it as though it were overstates both your wax consumption and your cost.

You will not settle that from a product listing, and the White Matte Glass Jar page shows why: it gives a fill of 200 ml. Millilitres are volume and your recipe is in grams, and the two do not convert without knowing what you are pouring — soy runs at roughly 0.9 g to the millilitre, less when it is warm, which is general candle-making practice rather than a figure CSI publishes. The only reliable method is to fill the vessel with water to the line you intend to pour to, weigh the water and multiply by about 0.9. Do that once per vessel, write the answer on the shelf, and the question of whether your 9% candle still fits stops being a guess. The 150 g pour used throughout this page sits inside a 200 ml vessel at both loads, and this page makes no claim beyond that.

Bring the lavender back to the same 159 g of fill and the algebra is the usual one: fill is wax plus 9% of wax, so the wax is 159 ÷ 1.09 = 145.87 g and the oil is 13.13 g. The candle costs ₹232.62, and the gap between your two SKUs widens from ₹2.44 to ₹6.86 — nearly three times as much. Over a hundred candles that is the difference between ₹244.35 and ₹685.63, which is the point at which a reading of your own question stops being pedantry.

This page carries the equal-wax reading — 150 g of wax in each candle — throughout. It is the series convention, it matches how loads are stated on product pages, and it is how most makers actually scale a recipe. But write down which one you are using at the top of your cost sheet, because the two readings disagree by ₹4.41 on the gap between your two SKUs, and a sheet that silently switches between them is worse than either.

The load is doing more work than the rate

Hold the two oils still and move only the loads, and the size of the lever becomes obvious. Your oud at 6% costs ₹72.93 of fragrance. The same White Royal Oud at your lavender's 9% would cost ₹109.39, taking the candle to ₹275.94 — ₹36.46 more per candle than it costs now, which is 15 times the entire gap between your two SKUs. Run the lavender down at 6% instead and it costs ₹213.54, putting ₹25.94 between the two candles — the gap the oil prices alone would have predicted.

The commercial reading of that table is uncomfortable and worth saying plainly. If you have never tried the lavender below 9%, you do not know that it needs 9%; you know that 9% works. Those are different claims and the gap between them is ₹34.02 a candle in this comparison. Finding the minimum working load is a burn test, not a spreadsheet exercise, and what load to use for floral and woody oils sets out how floral and woody oils tend to behave differently at the same percentage. A woody oil carrying heavy base notes often reads as strong at a lower load than a fresh floral does, which is the most likely reason your two numbers are 6% and 9% in the first place.

What each SKU does to your fragrance stock

Cost per candle is not the only thing that differs between your two SKUs. So does the yield from a pack, and it differs in the opposite direction to the price. A 1 kg pack of White Royal Oud at ₹8,103.00 pours about 111 candles at your 6%; a 1 kg pack of Lavender Fragrance Oil at ₹5,221.00 pours about 74 at your 9%. The dearer oil goes further, so the cheaper oil is the one that runs out mid-run — a detail that matters more in October than the ₹2.44 does, because a stock-out in the fortnight before a festive dispatch costs you orders rather than rupees.

The pack ladders are worth reading per product rather than assumed. On White Royal Oud the rate per gram is effectively level from the 100 gm pack upwards: the 9 g your candle uses is ₹97.20 at 100 gm and ₹97.24 at 1 kg. On Lavender Fragrance Oil there is a small step — the 13.5 g your candle uses is ₹97.20 at the 100 gm pack and ₹93.98 at 1 kg, a difference of ₹3.22 a candle. Most CSI oils and waxes carry the same rate at every pack size, so treat a larger pack as a way to make fewer parcels and fewer stock-outs rather than as a rate change, and ask on WhatsApp for anything above the listed sizes.

One more asymmetry that belongs on the same sheet: inventory value. A kilogram of the oud is ₹2,882.00 more cash sitting on your shelf than a kilogram of the lavender, and it converts into finished candles more slowly in rupee terms even though it goes further in gram terms. If the oud is a low-volume line, buying it in the pack that matches a quarter's production rather than a year's keeps that money working. That is a cash-flow judgement rather than a costing one, and it is yours to make.

Costing two SKUs side by side, in four steps

Once both columns exist, the pricing question becomes answerable — but it is a different question and this page deliberately stops short of it. What your oud candle should sell for depends on your customers, your channel and your own targets, not on the ₹2.44 between two cost sheets, and nobody at CSI is in a position to tell you. the Indian candle pricing formula works through the method. What the two columns give you is the only honest starting point: a cost per SKU that is true of a candle you actually make.

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