I Already Have 100 Jars and Wicks — How Much Should I Budget for Soy Wax and Three Fragrance Oils to Turn Them into Saleable Candles?

The budget, by fill weight and wax

Wax and oil are the only things left to buy, and both scale with the finished weight in each jar. "100 jars" without a fill is not enough to price, so the table runs three fills and two waxes. Fill one of your jars to the line you like with plain wax and weigh it — that figure picks your row. The worked example on this page uses 180 g, a labelled example. The two waxes are CSI 464 (₹507.40 a kilo flat, fragrance up to 10% on its page) and Chunks (₹599.00 a kilo, up to 13% on its page); both are container soy waxes, and CSI publishes no data that makes one better in your jar.

So the honest answer is a range: roughly ₹12,522.52 to ₹18,554.68 in CSI wax and oil, depending on fill and wax, before contingency. At the 180 g example with CSI 464 it is ₹15,246.00, or ₹171.30 per saleable candle in wax and oil; with Chunks it is ₹16,842.20. The suggested budget adds one spare wick pack (₹94.40) in case your owned wick fails its check, and a 5% labelled contingency, rounded up to the next ₹500.

Why 100 jars and 100 wicks make 89 candles, not 100

Owned materials carry ₹0 on the order, but they are a fixed count, and everything that is not a saleable candle comes out of them. Three things take a share: tests, breakage and rejects. They do not hit jars and wicks equally, and that difference decides which one runs out first.

Wicks are the limit: 100 wicks less 6 test wicks leaves 94, and if one candle in twenty has to be remelted and re-poured with a new wick, those 94 wicks finish 89 saleable candles. The jars could carry 92. If you can buy more of the same wick from wherever your 100 came from, a handful more lifts the count to 92. Do not top up with a different wick type without testing it — a different wick is a different candle. Exactly 1,000 wicks or extra? makes the same point at scale.

Prove the owned wick first

The title says the wicks are owned, but not whether they have ever burned in these jars with this wax. CSI publishes no wick sizes per jar diameter, and if your wicks came from elsewhere we know nothing about their construction. So before any wax is bought in bulk, pour three check candles with the owned wick in one oil and burn them in 3–4 hour cycles with full cool-down (commonly used working practice). If the pool reaches the jar edge in a reasonable time without a tall flame, soot or a hot jar, the wick passes.

If the owned wick fails, the 100 owned wicks become spares and the production wick has to be bought — 95 candles' worth at ₹5.90 (Thin C1) to ₹12.00 (Cotton Braided) a wick, roughly ₹590.00 to ₹1,200.00. That risk is why the suggested budget keeps a contingency; it is also why you should not buy all the wax and oil until the check candles have burned. What to delay until the wick passes sets out the same rule for large orders.

The priced order for the worked example

At 180 g and 8%, each candle is 14.4 g of oil and 165.6 g of wax. The consumables cover 89 saleable candles plus 6 test candles, divided by (1 − 5%) for re-pours — 100 candles' worth — with 4% pour loss on wax and oil. CSI 464's 10 kg bag, 5 kg bags and 1 kg bags are all ₹507.40 a kilo; only the 500 g bag is dearer. The list picks the fewest bags at that rate.

Three rounding notes. British Rose is one of the oils with a real bulk step — ₹3.42 a gram at 100 g, ₹3.19 at 500 g, ₹3.07 at 1 kg — so its larger bottles are genuinely cheaper per gram. Chocolate Fudge's 100 g is out of stock on the 4 October 2026 re-check, so its cover is built from the 500 g and smaller sizes. Blue Ocean is priced almost flat from 50 g to 1 kg. One rule applies to all three: where a single 500 g bottle costs within about ₹100 of a pile of 50 g and 15 g bottles, the list takes the single bottle — fewer bottles to open, and the spare grams are the start of the reorder.

What the load does to the bill

The title fixes nothing about fragrance load, so here is the 180 g example at 6%, 8% and 10%. CSI 464's page states up to 10%; Chunks' up to 13%. Those are wax makers' formulation limits, not targets.

Raising the load cuts the wax slightly and raises the oil much more, because oil costs several times more per gram than wax. From 8% to 10% the bill rises by ₹1,009.08 with CSI 464. Settle the load in the check candles, then price. 6% versus 8% and 10% versus 8% work the same comparison on 100 candles from scratch.

Buy now, buy after the check candles

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