How Much Fragrance Oil Inventory Should a Candle Brand Keep?

The short answer: hold weeks of cover, not kilos

Fragrance oil is the only material in a candle business that is expensive per gram, bought per scent, and used in quantities small enough to be invisible until the day it is not. A brand can hold ₹11,558.60 of oil and still stop a Diwali run because the one scent that sells is the one that ran dry. The stock question is never "how much oil should I keep". It is "how many weeks of each scent do I have in the cupboard".

The working rule this page uses throughout: four to six weeks of cover on every scent you are actively selling, plus whatever it takes to reach a sensible pack size. Four weeks keeps a monthly pour cycle safe. Six weeks absorbs a delayed courier, a sudden corporate order or a scent that outruns its forecast. Beyond eight weeks, on a normal month, you are buying shelf, not sales. That band is a planning convention, not measured data — it comes from the way a small Indian candle business actually orders, in monthly cycles around pay-day and the festive calendar.

Everything else on this page is arithmetic on top of that rule. The arithmetic starts with one conversion: at 8% of wax weight, a 200 g candle takes 16 g of oil. Sixteen grams is the unit of this entire business. Learn it and every stock question becomes a division.

Read the two right-hand columns together and the real problem appears. The same 500 g pack is five weeks of cover for a scent that sells and six months of cover for one that does not. Your stock plan is not one decision about oil. It is one decision per scent, repeated.

Step one: grams per scent per month

Take last month's dispatches, not last month's intentions. Count candles sold by scent, multiply by the grams each one takes, and you have a usage rate you can divide into any pack size on the store. The example below runs through this page: a small Indian D2C brand pouring 200 candles a month of 200 g each, in six scents, at 8% of wax weight.

Three things fall straight out of that table. The first is that the brand needs about 3.2 kg of oil a month in total — a figure most makers over-estimate by a factor of three because they think in bottles rather than grams. The second is that the spread between the busiest and the quietest scent is nearly four to one: Lavender at 960 g and Citrus Lemon at 256 g cannot possibly be stocked in the same pack size. The third is the monthly oil bill of ₹13,050.06 at 500 g rates, which is the number your cash plan actually needs.

If you sell more than one candle size

Most brands do, and it is where the gram count quietly breaks. A 200 g jar at 8% takes 16 g; a 100 g votive at 8% takes 8 g; a 300 g three-wick at 8% takes 24 g; a wax melt clamshell filled to 60 g at 10% takes 6 g. Work out the grams for each format once, write them on a card above the bench, and multiply by units dispatched rather than by revenue. A month of 60 votives, 100 jars and 20 three-wicks is 480 g + 1,600 g + 480 g = 2,560 g — not the 3,200 g you would get by assuming everything is a 200 g jar. Over a year that difference is most of a kilo of oil per scent, which is real money and real shelf space.

The same care applies to the load itself. The convention on this page and on CSI product pages is percentage of wax weight, so 8% of 200 g is 16 g of oil in a 216 g pour. Some makers quote load as a percentage of the finished candle instead, which would make the same candle roughly 7.4% — a small difference on one candle and a noticeable one across a year of ordering. Pick one convention, write it next to the gram card, and make sure whoever weighs out the batch uses the same one you used to buy.

If you have no sales history yet, do not invent one. Pour a small batch of each candidate scent, sell it, and count. Two months of honest counting beats any forecast, and the 15 g and 50 g packs exist exactly so that counting is cheap.

Why a wide scent range multiplies your stock

There is a number every growing candle brand should calculate once and then look at whenever a new scent is proposed: floor stock. It is the smallest quantity of oil you can hold and still honestly list your range — one sensible pack of every scent, before a single candle is poured. It does not fall when sales are slow. It is the entry fee for the menu.

At CSI prices, one 100 g pack of each scent puts the floor at ₹1,182.20 for three scents, ₹2,402.92 for six, ₹3,687.28 for nine and ₹5,331.28 for twelve. Going from six scents to twelve adds ₹2,928.36 of oil to the cupboard — and adds nothing at all to the number of candles you can pour, because the wax, the wicks and the hours have not changed.

The trap is that floor stock feels free. Each individual 100 g pack is a small line on an invoice — ₹300.00 for Citrus Lemon Fragrance Oil, ₹380.00 for Orchard Pear Fragrance Oil. Twelve small lines are a real amount of working capital sitting still, and the tail of the range is where it sits longest. In the six-scent example above, the slowest scent turns its 100 g pack roughly every twelve days; a twelfth scent selling five candles a month turns the same pack once a year.

The honest test before you add a scent

Three questions, in this order. Will it sell at least as well as your current slowest scent — if not, it is replacing something, not joining it. Can it be poured in a vessel and wick you already stock, so it does not pull a second material into the range behind it. And will it still be on the menu in six months, or is it a festive one-off that should be bought as a 50 g or 100 g pack and retired deliberately.

A seasonal scent bought properly is not a mistake. A seasonal scent bought at 500 g and then quietly carried for three years is. If Apple Cinnamon Fragrance Oil is your Diwali-and-winter scent and nothing else, buy it to the size of that season, sell it out, and let the shelf go empty in March. Empty shelf space in the off-season is a sign of control, not of failure.

The minimum sensible pack for each scent

CSI lists most oils in 15 g, 50 g, 100 g, 500 g and 1 kg. Treat those five sizes as five different jobs rather than five points on a price ladder:

Applied to the worked example, that gives a clean shopping list rather than a guess. Lavender at 960 g a month is a 1 kg scent. British Rose at 640 g and Roasted Coffee and Fresh Strawberries at 480 g are 500 g scents. Woody Oud at 384 g is a 500 g scent that you will reorder every five or six weeks. Citrus Lemon at 256 g sits on the line: a 500 g pack is about eight weeks of cover, which is a fortnight past the comfortable band, so it is either a 100 g reorder each month or a deliberate decision to carry two months of it.

Check depth before you commit a candle to a scent

A pack size existing on a page is not the same as that pack being deep in stock this week, and the two things matter differently. A hero scent should be one you can reorder repeatedly at the size you need; a scent you can only get in 50 g today is a scent you cannot build a signature candle around. Before you put a new fragrance on a label, a product photo and a Shopify listing, look at the variant you intend to live on and ask on WhatsApp whether it will be there next month. That question costs nothing and prevents the most expensive kind of stockout: the one where the candle exists but the scent does not.

One warning about reading the pack ladder as a savings ladder. On several CSI oils the per-gram rate stops falling well before the kilo. Apple Cinnamon is ₹4.74/g at 100 g and the same ₹4.74/g at 1 kg; Woody Oud is ₹4.53/g from 100 g upwards. On those oils, holding a kilo of a slow scent buys you nothing but risk. On others the rate does keep stepping — British Rose runs ₹3.42/g at 100 g and ₹3.07/g at 1 kg. Check the ladder on the product page for the specific scent before you size the pack.

The oil stock sheet, filled in

Six columns, one row per scent, updated on the day you weigh out a batch. Grams on hand, grams used last month, weeks of cover, the pack you reorder in, the level that triggers the order, and a note. That is the whole system, and it fits on one page or one spreadsheet tab.

One person owns the sheet, and it is updated on a fixed day rather than when someone remembers. The natural rhythm is the day you reconcile the month's sales: sales by scent are already in front of you, so the usage column fills itself, and the weighing takes minutes. If two people pour, the rule that keeps a sheet honest is that whoever opens a new pack writes the date and the starting grams on the bottle in marker pen. A sheet that depends on memory becomes fiction by the second month, and a fictional sheet is worse than none because it is trusted.

Notice what the sheet does that a cupboard cannot. British Rose looks low because the bottle is opaque and half-used, but at 7.8 weeks it is the healthiest line on the page. Citrus Lemon looks fine because there is still liquid in it, and it is a fortnight from stopping a batch. The sheet is worth keeping for exactly that inversion.

What to hold for the festive peak

Diwali 2026 falls on 8 November 2026. Soy candles keep developing their throw for 14–21 days — the Luxury Soy Wax Chunks page itself asks for a minimum of 48 hours and ideally one to two weeks — and gift orders have to reach the customer before the festival. Work backwards: dispatch in the last week of October, pour by about mid-October, and therefore have the oil weighed and on the bench by the start of October. The stock question for the festive peak is not "how much extra". It is "how much extra, in my hands, by 1 October".

Size it the same way as any other month, with the festive volume added to the baseline. Take a brand planning 400 festive candles on top of its usual 200: that is 6,400 g of additional oil at 16 g each, concentrated into two or three scents rather than spread across six. At the 1 kg rate for a warm festive scent such as Apple Cinnamon, 6.4 kg would cost ₹30,359.04; at Dark Vanilla rates the same grams cost ₹48,934.40. The scent mix, not the volume, is what moves the festive oil bill.

Two honest cautions about festive oil. First, a festive scent bought at 1 kg is a bet on a collection that has not sold yet; the safer shape is a 500 g commitment plus a second order placed the week the first fifty candles sell, if depth allows. Second, CSI's oil pages do not publish a shelf life — the wax pages for Luxury Soy Wax CSI 464 and Premium Coconut Soy CSI 468 state 60 months in cool, dry storage, but the oils say nothing of the kind. So do not assume a leftover festive kilo is a free asset next year. Ask on WhatsApp before you plan around carrying one.

Storing oil in Indian conditions — and what is not published

A Delhi or Ahmedabad store room touches 40°C and more in May. A Mumbai or Kochi one runs at humidity that gets into anything left open. General candle-making practice for fragrance oil is unchanged by geography but tested hard by it: keep bottles tightly closed, upright, out of direct sunlight, away from the window and off a hot floor or a metal shelf, and decant nothing into a container you cannot seal. Label every bottle with the date it arrived, so that a first-in, first-out rotation is possible without guesswork.

Here is the honest gap, stated plainly because a supplier blog that hides it is not worth reading: CSI oil product pages do not publish a shelf life or a storage temperature. They publish family and notes for 58 of the 92 oils, a candle usage range for 72, an IFRA claim for 46 and a numeric flash point for 16. Shelf life is not among them. If your inventory plan depends on holding a scent for a year, message WhatsApp +91 7397976926 and ask, rather than working from a figure nobody published.

One related point on flash point, because it affects how oil is handled rather than how long it lasts. Flash point is a transport, storage and handling property — it is not the temperature at which fragrance burns off in wax. The published figures on CSI's list run from 85°C for Neroli and 98°C for Gardenia Tuberose up to 199°C for Eucalyptus Spearmint. The usual 80–90°C add window sits below most of them; on the low ones, add at the lower end. None of this changes what you hold, but it does change how you store a big festive block: low-flash-point oils belong in the coolest, darkest part of the room, not next to the melter.

A storage layout that survives a monsoon

Keep the working bottles — the ones you open weekly — on one shelf at bench height, and the sealed reserve packs in a closed cupboard or a lidded plastic crate, away from the pouring area. Wipe the neck and cap of every bottle before it goes back; a sticky thread is how a cap stops sealing. Stand bottles in a shallow tray so a slow leak is visible and contained instead of soaking into a shelf. And never store oil in the same crate as unpacked jars — glass and scent share a smell in a closed box, and a jar that has picked up last month's coffee note will ruin a fresh rose candle.

Finally, the point of the whole exercise: inventory is a cash decision dressed as a cupboard decision. The six-scent example holds around ₹11,558.60 of oil if every core scent is bought at 500 g, and turns it roughly every five to six weeks. Doubling the range without doubling sales would add ₹2,928.36 or more that turns far more slowly. Every rupee in a bottle is a rupee not in jars, wax or a Diwali advertisement — and jars and wax are what actually stop a batch when they run out.

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