The Client Wants a Custom Jar That I Cannot Reuse for Other Products — Should I Purchase Exactly the Order Quantity or Additional Replacements?

Your order and your jar, as numbers

The title gives no figures, so this is a worked example you replace with your own. A wedding client wants 500 candles in a jar made for them: clear glass embossed with the couple’s monogram, from your own jar supplier (CSI does not make custom jars). Each candle is a 200 g fill at 8% (16 g oil + 184 g wax, total-weight basis), with the fill confirmed by a weighed test pour in a sample jar. The supplier quotes ₹68.00 a jar, a minimum order of 600, about 14 days to make and deliver the run, and 30 days for any reorder because it goes back into their production queue. You charge the client ₹450.00 a candle (₹2,25,000.00). The wedding is 45 days after you accept.

Notice what is not on the list: a reorder plan. That is deliberate. With a custom jar, everything you will ever have for this order is in the first delivery, so the quantity you write on the jar PO is the quantity of candles you can possibly deliver, minus whatever breaks.

Which losses eat a jar, and which only eat wax

The usual mistake is to take a general "reject rate" and apply it to the jars. Many rejects do not destroy the jar at all. A candle with a bad surface, a sinkhole or a wick that drifted can usually be melted out, the jar cleaned and dried, and poured again; that costs wax, time and some fragrance, but the jar survives. Only some losses take the jar with them, and those are the ones the jar buffer must cover.

So the worked jar buffer is 4% of the order plus extras (2% at inspection, 1% on the bench, 1% in transit): 21 jars on 505. If your own last three orders of glass show 3% at inspection, use 3%. If you have no history at all, the worked figures are a starting point, not a benchmark; the confidence-level way of sizing a buffer for client-specific materials is the custom-materials buffer post, and this post does not repeat it.

The replacement test: reorder time against the production window

With a standard jar you can afford to buy close to the average loss and top up if a bad box arrives. With a custom jar you cannot, and the test is simple arithmetic you can do before you quote:

The rule. If the reorder time is shorter than the production window with a few days to spare, buy the order, the planned extras and your average loss, and keep the supplier’s reorder as the safety net. If the reorder time is longer, as it almost always is for a custom jar, buy for the worst loss you can reasonably expect (your worst recent order, or the labelled working figure) and treat the buffer as the whole plan. Here 30 days against a 7-day window means the second case: the settling number is 526.

The purchase sheet: from 500 to 600

Required, plus planned, plus loss, rounded to what can actually be bought, and the leftover written down: the same five steps for every line, with the jar line the only one that ends in a supplier minimum.

Three things in this sheet are easy to get wrong. First, the jar line is driven by jar losses (21) while the wax and wick lines are driven by pours (516: the 505, plus the 2% of jars that break after they are filled), because jars rejected at inspection never get filled. Second, the CSI lines round to real in-stock packs and their leftovers are ordinary stock: 4.11 kg of wax, 23 wicks, 34 boxes. Third, the oil is your approved oil at 8.34 kg for these pours, sized the same way in the bulk purchase sheet post; it is left off here because it does not depend on the jar.

The full method for turning a client PO into every BOM line belongs to 6339; the jar line is the only one this post changes, and it is the one where rounding to the MOQ creates a cost the client has to see.

The MOQ leftovers: client-specific risk, priced

A standard jar’s leftover is a small saving waiting to happen. A custom jar’s leftover has exactly one buyer: the client whose name is on it. So it is not your inventory risk to carry quietly; it is part of the price of the client’s design choice, and they should see it.

The below-MOQ row is worth checking every time, because the answer is often counter-intuitive: in the worked quote the 526-jar run at ₹78.00 costs ₹228.00 more than the full 600 at ₹68.00, and gives the client 74 fewer spares. Spare jars at a wedding are not useless either; families commonly want a few for keepsakes, or for a second function.

Put the jar figures in the quote as their own lines, not hidden inside "materials": the order jars, the buffer (₹1,768.00, 0.79% of the order value), and the MOQ leftovers. A client who sees that their design choice costs ₹10.06 a candle in jars they will never light can decide whether the design is worth it; a client who discovers it after the event rarely agrees.

The contrast: a CSI standard jar

Run the same 526 through a standard CSI jar. The clear 200ml Salsa Glass Jar with 63mm Lug Cap is ₹29.50 a jar in 50s and 100s, so 526 rounds to 5 × 100 + 1 × 50 = 550 for ₹16,225.00, with 24 left over (₹708.00 worth) that go straight into your own range. Six packs of 100 would cost ₹17,700.00, so the mixed packs are the cheaper rounding. Whether CSI can supply 550 from one batch on your dates is not something we publish: confirm stock, batch and dispatch on WhatsApp before you commit.

Two cautions about the contrast. A 200 ml jar is not a 200 g candle: wax is lighter than water, so a 200 ml Salsa holds less than 200 g of wax to its fill line (why a 200 ml jar does not take 200 g), and the worked 160 g fill would need re-quoting. And a standard jar only replaces a custom one if the client agrees: if they asked for their monogram, a coloured Salsa is a different product, not a cheaper version of the same one.

What you never skip, and how to protect the order

A custom jar is a new container, and a new container is a new formula even when the wax and oil are already approved (6312 treats the full three-variable case; what to retest when only the jar changes covers the test list). Its walls, base and width decide the wick, and you cannot read those off a drawing. So the jar supplier’s pre-production samples are where the order is won or lost.

If the loss runs worse than the buffer on the day (a bad crate, a dropped tray), you have three honest moves and should agree which in advance: deliver short with an agreed credit per missing candle, fill the gap with a standard jar on a separate table if the client accepts it, or deliver the balance after the event. The worst move is promising "all 500" when the jars in your hands cannot make them; how to handle a supply that falls short before you start is 6354, and why every critical material should be secured before a date is promised is 6355.

The products around a custom jar

CSI does not make custom jars, so the jar itself comes from your own supplier. These are the CSI products that sit around it: the standard jars to compare it with, the wax and wicks that stay reusable whatever happens, and the box that protects the buffer in transit. Nothing here is ranked on performance (CSI publishes no burn data).

Frequently asked questions