A Customer Wants 500 Custom Candles — How Much Wax, Fragrance Oil, Wick and Jar Inventory Should I Buy Before Starting Production?

The full-order quantities

At 20 candles, a 4% allowance on wax is 80 g — a handful. At 500 candles it is over two kilos. That is why the allowance, the test candles and the spares have to be written down as separate lines before anything is bought. Here is the scenario: the customer wants 500 custom-labelled candles in a Yankee Glass Jar 130 ml with clear cap, scented with Sandalwood at 8%, poured in Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464, which is rated up to 10% fragrance load (the wax maker's stated formulation maximum, not a regulatory limit).

CSI does not publish a fill weight for this jar. We use 110 g of finished candle as a working assumption — plausible for a 130 ml jar poured below the rim with soy wax, which is lighter than water — and show below what happens at 100 g and 120 g. Weigh your own before you order anything.

Why 4% and not 5%? The maker in this example has already poured a 100-candle run in the same jar, so the first-run learning is behind them. Plan 3–5% extra for pour loss and test burns as a working assumption; move toward 5% if this is your first run at this size, or if you are pouring by hand from a jug rather than from a melter tap. The six test units are three approval candles (customer, your reference, a spare for a second opinion) and three burn tests spread across the run: one from the first batch, one mid-run, one from the last.

Jars get ten spares — about 2% — because glass chips and cracks in unpacking, in the heat of pouring and in labelling. Wicks get fifteen, because a crooked or buried wick is cheaper to replace than to fix. These are counts you set from your own breakage history; if you have none yet, these are reasonable starting points. The strict-deadline post goes further on buffers when the delivery date cannot move.

The fill weight decides everything

Every line in the lead table is a multiple of the fill weight. If the jar actually takes 100 g at your fill line, you have overbought; if it takes 120 g, you will run out of wax about eight candles from the end of every hundred. The table shows the whole order at three fills so you can see the size of the error before it happens.

Ten grams of fill moves this order by about 421 g of oil and 4.84 kg of wax — ₹2,103.94 and ₹2,537.00 respectively. That is more than the allowance on either line. The allowance is for loss; it is not a substitute for knowing the fill.

When to buy it: two gates, one order

Before the customer approves a sample, the scent, the jar and even the colour can still change. Anything you buy for 500 candles before that point is a bet. So the money moves in two steps. Gate 0 is a sample kit: enough oil, wax, jars and wicks to pour the 6 test units. Gate 1, after written approval, is the full list in one order.

Everything in the sample kit is used again: the rest of the wax and oil go into the production run, and the spare wicks join the order stock. So Gate 0 is not a cost on top of the order — it is the first part of it, bought early. What it buys you is the right to change your mind cheaply. If the customer asks for a different scent after smelling the sample, you have spent ₹364.62 on Sandalwood, not ₹23,394.68. When the client has not finalised the fragrance covers the case where Gate 0 needs several scents.

Why not buy in two drops?

The usual reason to split a big purchase is cash, and the usual reason not to is price. On this order, price doesn't come into it: CSI 464 is ₹507.40 a kilo at 1 kg, 5 kg and 10 kg, and Sandalwood is ₹5.03 a gram at 100 g, 500 g and 1 kg. Two half-size purchases of oil and wax come to ₹50,709.32 against ₹50,546.88 in one go — the difference is only rounding at the pack edges. So splitting buys you cash flow and costs you very little money.

What it costs you instead is consistency. The second drop may be a different production lot of wax and a different batch of oil. Most of the time you would never notice; occasionally a scent reads slightly differently or a wax sets with a different surface, and you have 250 candles that don't quite match the other 250. On a custom order where the customer has a reference sample on their desk, that is a real risk. Buying all the wax from one batch and keeping batches identical go into it properly.

The shopping list and the materials

The three picks below are the materials in the scenario, with every in-stock size listed so you can re-round for your own fill weight.

What is left when the order ships

If everything goes to plan, you finish with about 197 g of Sandalwood and 2.29 kg of CSI 464 unused — the pack rounding plus whatever part of the allowance you didn't lose — along with some spare jars and wicks. That is not waste. It is the start of your next run, or the reference stock for a repeat order from the same customer, which on custom work is common. Keep the spare jars from the same delivery for any replacements the customer asks for later.

What you should not do is fold that leftover into this customer's price. Their quote is built on what their candles consume plus tests and a fair allowance, as in I Received an Inquiry for 100 Candles but Normally Make Only 20 at a Time — How Should I Calculate Raw Materials Before Quoting the Customer?. The pack rounding is yours. On a list this size the rounding is small — 19.1 g of oil and 0.24 kg of wax beyond the allowance — because the packs are small relative to the order. That is one of the quiet benefits of a 500-piece order over a 100-piece one.

If the customer comes back asking for 1,000, the method doesn't change — the list doubles, the gates stay. The questions that do change are cash and discount. I Got an Inquiry for 1,000 Corporate Candles — Should I Purchase All the Raw Materials Before Receiving the Customer's Advance? looks at buying before the advance arrives, and which costs fall with volume looks at what you can and can't give away on price.

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