I Have ₹1 Lakh to Start a Candle Business — What Should My Initial Raw-Material Inventory Look Like If I Want to Avoid Dead Stock?

Where dead stock comes from in a candle business

A new candle business carrying ₹1 lakh of raw materials will make some wrong guesses about what sells. The trick is to make sure the wrong guesses land on materials that can still be used. Wax, jars, wicks and stickers serve every scent you make, so if lavender stalls they simply go into coffee candles instead. A fragrance oil serves one scent only. If that scent stalls, the oil waits — and CSI publishes no shelf life for its oils, so you cannot count on it waiting gracefully. That single difference decides almost everything about how to spend ₹1 lakh without creating dead stock.

The staged ₹1 lakh allocation

Stage 0 buys tools and a three-wick test. Stage 1 buys launch stock for eight scents at 30 candles each — two of them test candles, so 28 to sell — with wax, jars and wicks bought to the 240-candle count and each oil bought to its own 30. Stage 2 is cash: an earmark released one scent at a time when that scent sells through. Every line is a listed, in-stock CSI pack and the lines close exactly on ₹1,00,000.

Look at the two Stage 1 subtotals. Shared materials — wax, jars, wicks, stickers — are ₹31,136.00. Scent-specific oil is ₹13,892.88, or 13.9% of the budget. That ₹13,892.88 is the most this plan can ever lose to dead stock on day one, and it is spread across eight bottles of about 400 g each, not eight kilos. The example scents are Lavender, Roasted Coffee, Citrus Lemon, Fresh Strawberries, Dark Vanilla Oud, Cucumber Green Tea, Orchard Pear, Autumn — four of them (Lavender 1, Roasted Coffee 3, Citrus Lemon 7, Fresh Strawberries 13) are in the first fifteen of CSI's best-selling sort; the rest are chosen to show a price spread. Choose your own eight.

The same ₹1 lakh, bought all at once

For comparison, here is the plan many makers would draw up: put the whole lakh into stock now — 60 candles of each scent, wax and jars to match, oils in bigger bottles. It costs ₹91,021.46. Now suppose three of the eight scents stall and sell only 8 candles each in the first months (a labelled hypothetical — no supplier can tell you which three).

The all-in plan's wax and jars are not lost — other scents will use them eventually — but they are cash you cannot spend while they wait. The oil in the stalled scents is the real loss: ₹8,414.36 against ₹3,420.70. And the all-in plan has ₹8,978.54 left to back the scents that are selling, which is the moment a new business most needs cash. The ₹50,000 depth-or-breadth post shows why spreading thin is not the fix either; staging is.

Stage 2: the release triggers

The ₹35,000.00 earmark is released one scent at a time, and only when that scent earns it. A stage-2 reorder of one scent — 30 more candles — costs between ₹5,332.00 and ₹6,492.00: its oil, 1 × 5 kg of wax, 30 jars at the 50-pack rate of ₹29.50 and wicks with stickers. The earmark therefore covers up to 5 reorders even at the dearest scent's price.

The Stage 1 BOM and the launch count

CSI does not publish the Salsa jar's fill. Its 200 ml is brim volume; with a labelled 0.86–0.90 g/ml approximation the brim would hold roughly 172–180 g, so this page uses an illustrative 160 g fill — weigh a test pour and redo the numbers with yours. At a working 8% — inside the 13% maximum Chunks' page states — each candle is 12.8 g of oil and 147.2 g of wax. The stack: 16 test candles counted as whole candles; 3% pour loss on wax and oil; glass breakage covered by the spare jars that rounding to packs of 50 leaves; round to real packs.

Every oil scents at least its 30; the wax would stretch to 240, the jars to 250. Material cost per candle runs from ₹164.47 to ₹201.59 by scent — wax at the bag price, oil at the 100 g price, wick and sticker ₹8.40, jar and cap ₹29.50 — before labour, packaging, freight and GST.

The Stage 0 test

A wick passes when it is no worse than a candle you trust on every safety line, within the jar supplier's guidance and the candle fire-safety standard you work to. CSI publishes no wick-per-diameter chart and no numeric safety limits.

The day-one shopping list

Related budget questions

The ₹10,000 hub sets the four allocation rules. ₹25,000: bulk or small audits CSI's price breaks; 5 deep or 15 shallow at ₹1 lakh asks the width question; ₹1 lakh with ₹25,000 kept for packaging sets aside the non-CSI costs; the ₹10,000 → ₹1 lakh growth plan stages a whole business; and safety stock for shared wax versus a slow oil is this page's logic for a running range.

Frequently asked questions