How to Calculate Reorder Levels for Candle Raw Materials

The formula, and the four numbers it needs

Most makers confuse two different questions. How much should I hold? is a question about cash and cover. When should I order? is a much smaller question with a precise answer, and it is the only one this page deals with. The reorder level is the quantity at which you place the order — the height on the shelf below which waiting is a gamble. Everything above it is comfort; everything below it is a countdown.

The formula is short: reorder level = daily usage × (lead time + days between stock checks) + safety stock. Four inputs. Two of them you measure from your own production, one you measure from your own past orders, and one is a judgement you make and write down as a judgement. No supplier can hand you any of the four, which is exactly why the number is worth calculating rather than guessing.

Work through what each term is doing. Daily usage converts output into grams and units per day. Lead time is the gap between deciding to order and being able to pour with what arrives — not the courier's transit time alone, but order to bench. Days between stock checks is the term almost everyone forgets: if you look at the shelf every third day, the level has to survive three extra days, because by the time you notice, three days have already gone. Safety stock covers the difference between an average week and a bad one: a delivery that takes longer, a batch you poured twice, a wholesale order that landed unexpectedly.

One clarification before the arithmetic. The reorder level answers when; the reorder quantity answers how much, and on a Shopify store the answer to the second is constrained by the packs on the page — 500 g, 1 kg, 5 kg and 10 kg for most waxes, 15 g to 1 kg for oils, and fixed wick and jar packs. So the practical sheet has two columns: the level that triggers the order, and the pack you buy when it does.

Step 1 — Turn your output into daily usage, material by material

The example running through this page is a small Indian brand pouring 120 candles a month in one size — a 150 g fill in a 150 gram glass jar — across four fragrances, at an 8% load of wax weight, which is 12 g of oil a candle. Every figure below is derived from those four facts, and yours will differ; the method will not.

Two things fall out of that table immediately. First, wax and oil are measured in grams a day while wicks and jars are measured in units a day, and mixing the two units is how sheets go wrong — keep each material in the unit it is bought in. Second, the oil row is the one that has to be split. A brand pouring 120 candles across four scents is not a 1.44 kg-a-month oil buyer; it is four separate 360 g-a-month buyers, and each of those needs its own reorder level. Treat oil as one line and you will run out of the scent that sells while holding three you do not need.

Dyes, mica, lids, care stickers and lacquer deserve lines too if you use them, calculated the same way. What does not belong on this sheet is anything CSI does not sell: mailer boxes, printed labels, ribbon, bubble wrap, courier charges and your own hours. Those are real costs and real lead times, but they are your suppliers' figures, not ours, and inventing numbers for them would make the whole sheet untrustworthy.

Step 2 — Measure lead time yourself, because nobody publishes it

CSI does not publish delivery times, and this page will not estimate one. What you can do — and what every business with a working reorder sheet has done — is measure your own. Open your last three orders and write down, for each, the date you placed it and the date the material was actually usable on your bench. Not the dispatch date, not the tracking page's promise: the day you could pour with it. Take the longest of the three and use that as your lead time. Redo it every few months, and after any change of address or courier.

Two customers have raised delivery timing in their own reviews, and both are fair. Subhankar Roy, reviewing Eco Candle Wicks, writes “Good quality .... if possible delivery date would be try little bit quick please”, and Monika Deep writes that the “Quality of the wick is good for jar candles, team can work on the pricing and delivery timelines”. Read as a maker rather than as a supplier, that is useful information: your lead time is a real, variable number, and the correct response is not to hope it improves but to build it into the level. A longer lead time does not mean you carry more risk. It means you order earlier.

Three things that belong inside your lead time

Your own ordering delay. If you notice on Friday and place the order on Monday, that is three days of lead time, and it is yours, not the courier's. Availability. A pack that is thinly stocked when you go to order it extends your lead time to whenever it returns, so check the variant on the product page and keep a tested alternative grade in mind — a maker who can pour Eco Soy CSI 400 as well as CSI 464 has a shorter effective lead time than one who cannot. Rest and cure at your end. Wax is usable on arrival, but if your process includes any settling or decanting, count it.

Step 3 — Safety stock, honestly labelled

Safety stock exists because averages lie. Your average month might be 120 candles, but the month a corporate gifting order lands is 200, and the week the courier is delayed is the week you needed the wax. Formal inventory theory sizes safety stock from measured variability in demand and lead time. Most small candle businesses do not yet have enough clean data for that, so the practical approach is a percentage — stated openly as an assumption and replaced with real data as soon as you have it.

This page uses 50% of lead-time-plus-review demand as safety stock. On wax that is 0.6 kg × 10 days × 0.5 = 3.0 kg, on top of the 6.0 kg the exposure itself needs, giving the 9.0 kg level. It is an assumption, not measured data, and you should move it deliberately: raise it for materials that stop production dead, lower it for materials you can substitute. Wax and wicks stop a pour. A particular jar colour usually does not — you can pour into the other colour you also stock.

A second, cheaper safety mechanism costs nothing: shorten the review gap. Checking stock every third day instead of every tenth removes seven days of exposure from every line on the sheet, which on wax is 4.2 kg of buffer you no longer need to hold. For a business short of cash, tightening the routine beats raising the safety stock, and it is the one lever entirely within your control.

The filled reorder sheet

Putting the three steps together for the example brand — 120 candles a month, 150 g fill, four scents, an illustrative 7-day lead time, a 3-day stock check and a 50% safety allowance — gives a 10-day exposure on every line and the sheet below. Copy the columns, not the numbers.

Add the last column and the buffer on that shelf is about ₹13,977.12 of material — roughly a fortnight of production sitting there so that a courier delay never becomes a lost pouring day. Compare that with the alternative: at 0.6 kg a day, running out of wax for one lead time is seven days of production, or ₹2,131.08 of wax you could have been pouring, plus the orders you could not ship. Inventory is expensive; stopping is usually more expensive.

When the wax line trips, the order that goes in is not only wax. The sensible basket for this brand — a 10 kg wax pack, 500 g each of two working scents, a 100-wick pack, ₹7,490.00 of jars and ₹200.00 of stickers — comes to ₹16,837.00 in one consignment. Consolidating matters because freight is charged per consignment and is not a published CSI figure: ask for a quote to your pincode on WhatsApp +91 7397976926 before you split an order in two.

Walkthrough: building the sheet in one sitting

The whole exercise takes less time than one emergency order. And it is worth repeating that this is only the timing question — how many candles a kilo of wax makes and how much fragrance oil a business needs cover the quantity side, and the pack you buy when the level trips is a separate decision from the level itself.

Your reorder level is not a constant

A reorder level is a photograph of one rate of production. Triple the rate for the festive ramp and every level triples with it — the wax line goes from 9.0 kg to 27.0 kg, which is more than a single 10 kg pack, so the reorder quantity has to change as well as the level. Meanwhile lead times are least reliable in exactly the weeks when couriers are busiest. That combination is why so many Indian makers lose a week in October.

Four triggers should send you back to the sheet. Output changes by more than about a quarter in either direction. A new size or scent joins the range, because it takes a line of its own and steals usage from the others. Your load or fill weight changes — moving a 150 g candle from 8% to 10% adds 3 g of oil a candle and lifts every oil level by a quarter. Your lead time changes, whether because you moved city, changed courier or hit a festive season. Half an hour every quarter keeps the sheet true.

Diwali 2026 falls on 8 November 2026. With a 14–21 day cure plus courier time, production candles want to be poured by about mid-October, which means the ramped usage rate is a September and early-October phenomenon, not a November one. Recalculate the levels at the start of September, place the first ramped order early, and treat the festive lead time as longer than your measured average rather than shorter.

Where reorder levels break in real workshops

1. The sheet exists, the check does not

A perfect reorder level checked once a month is a monthly reorder level. The review gap is part of the formula for a reason. Pick a day, put it in the phone, and count the shelf on that day even when nothing looks low.

2. One line for fragrance instead of one per scent

“We have 1.4 kg of oil” tells you nothing if 1.2 kg of it is the scent nobody orders. Each fragrance gets its own level — 180 g in the example — and each is reordered on its own. This is also why a wide scent range costs more than it looks: every extra scent adds another buffer to hold.

3. Ignoring the pack ladder when the level trips

The level says order; the store decides in what units. If your oil level is 180 g, your realistic reorder is a 500 g pack, which is 1.4 months of that scent — so the pack you buy sets your real cycle length. Check the variant is available before you rely on it, and keep the level a little higher for anything you can only buy in one size.

4. Counting boxes instead of contents

A half-used 10 kg sack is not 10 kg. Weigh it, or mark the bin, but do not count packages. The same goes for wicks: a 100-wick bag with 18 left in it is an 18-wick bag, and the only way to know is to count or to keep opened stock in a separate labelled container.

5. Treating a wholesale enquiry as ordinary demand

A 200-candle corporate order is not covered by a safety stock built for a 120-candle month, and it never should be — holding stock against orders you might win is the most expensive way to run a small business. Quote a date that includes a fresh supply order instead, and if the timing is tight, ask for a bulk quote on WhatsApp before you confirm the delivery date with your customer.

6. Never revisiting the safety percentage

The 50% used here is a starting assumption. After six months you will know which materials you nearly ran out of and which sat untouched. Move the percentage by material, write down why, and your sheet stops being a formula from a blog and becomes a record of your own business.

Five steps and none of them is difficult: measure your daily usage, measure your lead time, admit how often you really check the shelf, add an honest safety allowance, and write the resulting number where you will see it. Then redo it whenever your output or your lead time moves. The 12-month candle business calendar is a good place to plan the quarterly review, and sourcing supplies for a business covers the supplier side of the same problem.

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