I Sell 1,000 Candles a Month — How Many Weeks of Wax, Fragrance, Wick and Jar Inventory Should a Small Manufacturer Normally Keep?

The four lines, converted to a day and a week

Weeks of cover is a ratio, and like every ratio it needs a denominator you trust. The denominator here is the weekly draw per line, so that is the first thing to compute. At a 185 g fill with fragrance dosed at 8% of wax weight, each candle is 185 g of wax and 14.8 g of oil — 199.8 g poured, which is the same dose expressed as 7.41% of the finished candle if you prefer that convention. One wick and one jar each, before any allowance for breakage or rejects.

The conversion is worth doing in full, because the pack sizes make the point better than any argument. A 10 kg bag of wax is 1.35 working days at this volume. A 1 kg bottle of a single fragrance is 1.69 days if it were your only scent. A 1,000-wick pack is 25 working days — a whole month. A 100-jar pack is 2.5 days. Four materials, four completely different relationships between a purchase and a week of production.

Why each line earns a different number of weeks

Three things decide a line's cover target, and only one of them is about candles.

The first is lead time, and it dominates. Cover must at minimum span the gap between placing an order and having usable material, so a 21-day line needs three times the cover of a 7-day line at the same consumption. These are your own observations, measured on your own deliveries — not a courier estimate and not something a supplier page tells you.

The second is what the buffer costs. Twelve spare days of wicks is 480 wicks: ₹2,832 on Eco C1. Twelve spare days of jars is 480 jars: ₹14,160. Twelve spare days of fragrance is 7.1 kg: ₹26,555 at the Roasted Coffee kilo rate. Same twelve days, nine times the money. When a buffer is almost free, buy it generously; when it is expensive, earn it.

The third is what else can go wrong on that line. Glass breaks in transit and in handling, so a jar target should carry an allowance on top of the lead-time arithmetic — at 3% of a month that is 30 jars. Fragrance has a different failure mode entirely: it is scent-specific, so an 11.84 kg total means nothing until it is split across the scents you actually pour. Wax and wicks have neither problem, which is exactly why they are the easy lines.

The four targets, with the arithmetic

Here is the whole answer in one table. The lead times are the reader's; the buffers are choices and are labelled as such. Nothing here is an industry norm, because there isn't one worth quoting — the figures follow from your own measurements.

Two things stand out when it is laid out this way. The first is that the wicks are nearly free to protect: the most generous cover target on the page costs less than 4% of the shelf. The second is that jars and fragrance together are more than half the money — ₹83,198 of ₹1,47,758 — and they are also the two lines where the pack ladder and the scent split need real attention. If you have an hour to spend on inventory this month, spend it on those two.

Buying each line at 1,000 candles a month

One card per line, chosen so that each shows a different kind of pack ladder: one that is marginally dearer at the top, one that steps down slightly, and two that are perfectly flat. Each table lists every listed pack with its price and per-unit rate.

The shortest line is the only one that matters

Everything above produces four numbers, and there is a strong temptation to average them into a single reassuring figure. Resist it. Production stops at whichever material runs out first, so a shelf is only as deep as its thinnest line. The averages hide exactly the thing you need to see.

Shelf B is not a hypothetical — it is the normal shape of a candle business that reorders whatever it notices, because wax and oil are the materials you handle most and jars are the ones that arrive in boxes and get stacked. The discipline is to read the board by its minimum, every week, and let that single figure be the one you quote.

One more subtraction belongs here. At a thousand candles a month you are almost certainly taking some orders in advance, and a confirmed order's materials are committed, not available. A 300-candle wholesale order quietly removes 55.5 kg of wax, 4.44 kg of oil, 300 wicks and 300 jars from every line at once. Available stock = on hand − committed, and the board must be read on the available column or it will flatter you precisely when you are about to promise a date you cannot keep.

A four-row board you can read in ten seconds

Nothing on this page needs software. A whiteboard with four rows and five columns, updated once a week, carries the whole system. Fill the target column once from the arithmetic above; fill the on-hand column weekly; read the minimum.

The red thresholds are deliberately set at bare lead-time cover with no buffer left, because that is the moment a late delivery becomes a stopped pour. Note how different the four red lines are — 74 kg, a scent-by-scent figure, 280 wicks and 840 jars. A single red line for the whole shelf would be wrong on three rows out of four.

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