One Candle Gives Me ₹150 Profit and Another Gives ₹300 but Sells Much Slower — How Do I Decide Which Product Deserves More Raw-Material Inventory?

What you are actually choosing between

Your question contains two numbers and one hidden constraint. The numbers are your own: ₹150.00 of profit on one candle and ₹300.00 on the other, used here exactly as you wrote them and never treated as CSI figures. The hidden constraint is that you are not choosing which candle to sell. You are choosing where a fixed quantity of raw-material cash goes when you next place an order, and that cash is the thing in short supply — not shelf space, not enthusiasm, and not margin.

Once the constraint is cash, the ranking question changes shape. A candle earns you its contribution once, when it sells. The materials inside it, however, are paid for once and then sit — in a bag of wax, a bottle of oil, a carton of jars — earning nothing until that candle is poured, cured and sold. The right comparison is therefore not ₹300.00 against ₹150.00. It is ₹300.00 against ₹150.00 per rupee of stock, per month of sitting. That is the whole page in one sentence, and the rest of it is arithmetic and honesty about where the arithmetic stops.

Two things follow immediately. First, a premium candle carries more expensive materials almost by definition — a costlier wax, a costlier fragrance, a heavier vessel — so its higher contribution is partly bought rather than earned. Second, a slow candle holds those materials for longer, which multiplies the disadvantage instead of adding to it. Contribution is a rate; inventory is a stock. Comparing one against the other without dividing by time is the mistake this page exists to fix.

The one ratio that answers it

Write the obvious version first. In a month, a product returns its contribution multiplied by the units it sells: contribution × units. It ties up the raw-material cost of every unit it is holding, which is the materials cost multiplied by the units on the shelf. And the units on the shelf, expressed in months, are simply months of cover — the stock you hold divided by the units you sell in a month. So the return per rupee of stock per month is contribution × units, divided by (materials × units × cover).

The units cancel. What is left is contribution ÷ (materials cost × months of cover), and the cancellation is the useful part: you do not need to know how many candles a month you sell to rank two products. You need to know what each one costs in materials, what each one contributes, and how long each one's materials sit. That is a far easier set of numbers to get honestly, and it is why this page never asks you to supply a monthly volume.

Multiply by 100 and you have the form used throughout this page: rupees of contribution returned per ₹100.00 of raw-material stock, per month. It reads like an interest rate, and treating it like one is the right instinct. Money in a bag of wax is money you have lent to your own production line, and you should want to know what it pays.

Read the bottom row before anything else. For every rupee of profit your ₹150.00 candle makes you, it asks you to hold ₹1.02 of raw material. Your ₹300.00 candle asks for ₹1.30 — ₹0.28 more working capital per rupee earned, permanently, for as long as you sell both. That single row is the argument, and it is true at every volume, in every month, whatever the weather does to your sales.

Two real candles, costed from live stock

Your question gives profit and speed but not materials, so the materials here are CSI's, live in September 2026, chosen to be what a real volume candle and a real premium candle are made of rather than to prove a point. Both are costed on the series convention: 200 g of wax plus 16 g of fragrance at 8%% of wax weight, 216 g in the vessel. That is the fill reading carried through every figure on this page. Vessels are priced per piece and no capacity is claimed for either of them — CSI does not publish a fill weight for these two listings, so the honest thing is to price the glass and let you match it to your own measured pour.

The gap between the two stacks is ₹236.52, and it is worth seeing which lines carry it. Fragrance carries ₹99.66 of it — the single largest component, and the one your range decisions move most. The vessel carries ₹85.76. The wax, the line most makers shop hardest on, carries only ₹47.56. If you were hunting for a way to bring the premium candle's stock burden down, the ranking of those four numbers tells you where to look first and where not to bother.

Two page facts belong beside those rates, because they set the load you are allowed to use. The Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468 page states a maximum fragrance load of up to 13%% of total wax weight, and the Santal Noir page publishes no candle usage range at all — so on that pairing the wax grade's stated maximum is the only published limit, and 8%% sits well inside it. On the volume candle, the Eco Soy CSI 400 page does not publish a maximum load, while the Citronella page states candle use up to 10%%. Where a wax ceiling and an oil range both exist, the lower governs; where one is missing, say so and ask on WhatsApp rather than guessing.

Where the ₹300.00 candle would have to turn to win

Set the two ratios equal and solve for the cover that would make them match. Parity needs the premium candle's cover to be 0.79 of the volume candle's: for every month your ₹150.00 candle's materials sit, your ₹300.00 candle's would have to sit 0.79 months. Put the other way round, the premium candle has to clear its stock about 27% faster to earn the same return on the same rupee.

That is the sentence to sit with, because it inverts the intuition in your question. You framed the premium candle as the one that earns more and sells slower, as though the two traded off. They do not trade off evenly. Doubling contribution from ₹150.00 to ₹300.00 buys you a factor of two. Raising materials from ₹153.24 to ₹389.76 costs you a factor of 2.54. The materials factor is bigger, so the premium candle starts behind and slower selling widens the gap rather than closing it.

Pack size is the lever you are not pulling

Everything above treats the denominator as fixed. It is not. The cash tied to a product is the material cost per candle multiplied by the number of candles' worth you hold, and the second of those is often decided not by you but by the smallest pack CSI sells. One kilogram of fragrance at 16 g a candle is 62.5 candles of cover whether you wanted that much or not. If the premium line sells in single figures a month, a kilogram is most of a year.

So run the ladder before you assume the big pack is the right one. CSI publishes no quantity-discount ladder as a policy, and the ladders that do exist behave differently from one oil to the next — which is exactly why the general advice to buy bigger is worth ignoring in favour of the two ladders in front of you.

The two ladders point in opposite directions and that is the finding. On Santal Noir the whole distance between the 100g pack and the kilogram is ₹1.12 a candle — small enough that a slow line can be stocked in 100g packs almost for free, releasing ₹8,201.00 of cash that was doing nothing. On Citronella the same step is ₹76.46 a candle, because that ladder falls sharply between the 100 gm and 500 gm packs. Paying ₹76.46 a candle to free ₹2,124.00 is a bad trade on a line that moves, and buying the kilogram there is straightforwardly right.

Write that as a rule you can apply to any scent on the store: divide the extra cost per candle by the cash it frees, and compare the answer with what that cash earns in the fast line. On the premium scent, ₹1.12 a candle against ₹8,201.00 freed is a trivial price for the cash. On the volume scent, ₹76.46 a candle against ₹2,124.00 freed is not. The rule takes a minute per oil and it is the only part of this page that will change your next order.

Find the row nearest your own figure and read across. The arithmetic is unkind at the top of that table and kind at the bottom, which is the honest shape of the problem: a premium scent bought by the kilogram only makes sense once the line sells fast enough to eat a kilogram in a sensible number of months. Until then the smaller pack is not a compromise, it is the correct purchase.

Running the allocation on your own two products

One caution about step four. The ratio ranks; it does not decide. A product at the bottom of the list is not automatically for the chop, because the list has no column for the customers the premium candle brings in, the gifting orders it anchors, or what your range looks like without it. What the ratio does is stop you funding a slow line by accident, which is what happens when a purchase order is written from a margin table.

When the slow candle deserves the cash anyway

Shared materials. If both candles use the same wax and the same vessel, the allocation question is much smaller than it looks, because only the differing lines compete for cash. On the pair here the fragrance alone accounts for ₹99.66 of the ₹236.52 gap. Two candles that differ only by scent are not two inventory decisions; they are one wax decision and two small oil decisions, and the premium line becomes far cheaper to keep.

Seasonal shape. A premium candle that sells slowly for nine months and then clears in the run-up to Diwali is not a slow candle; it is a seasonal one, and averaging its cover across the year hides that. Diwali 2026 falls on 8 November 2026, and with a 14 to 21 day cure for soy plus delivery time the festive pours want to be done by around mid-October. A scent bought in August for that window has high cover in September and none in November. Judge seasonal lines on their season, not on the annual mean.

Shelf life and the cost of being wrong. CSI states a 60 month shelf life in cool, dry storage for Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468, so wax bought deep is not spoiling in a hurry. Fragrance oil pages do not all publish a shelf life; where a page does not, ask on WhatsApp rather than assuming. Indian storage conditions are the real variable here — a Mumbai monsoon cupboard and a Nagpur summer loft are not the same place to keep stock for eight months, whatever the page says.

Minimum viable range. A brand with one candle is a product, not a range, and the second line is often what makes the first one sellable at its price. If your premium candle is doing that job, it is being paid for out of the volume line's revenue and the ratio is measuring only half of its contribution. Keep it, fund it in the smallest pack that works, and stop calling the decision an inventory question.

Two of those blanks bear on this page more than the others. Cost of capital is the missing unit on the whole ratio: ₹97.89 per ₹100.00 a month is only obviously good if you know what the same ₹100.00 would earn elsewhere, including simply not being borrowed. Your labour tilts the comparison further than the materials do, because a premium pour is usually the slower one to make — and if you are the production line, the hours the premium candle takes are hours the volume candle is not being made in.

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