I Sell 100 Candles a Month at ₹599 With ₹200 COGS — How Much Gross Profit Does the Product Generate Before Fixed Business Expenses?

The sum, and what each figure in it is

Your question supplies everything the calculation needs: a volume of 100 candles a month, a selling price of ₹599.00 and a cost of goods of ₹200.00. Those are your figures and this page uses them exactly as written, unrounded and never presented as CSI prices. Gross profit per candle is the price minus the cost of goods — ₹399.00. Monthly gross profit is that figure times the volume — ₹39,900.00. Annual gross profit at the same run rate is twelve of those — ₹4,78,800.00. Nothing in that chain is clever, and nothing in it is wrong.

What can be wrong is the label on the answer. Gross profit means revenue minus the cost of goods sold, and nothing else. It is the money the product itself generates, and it is the right figure for questions about the product: is this SKU worth making, does this recipe carry its own weight, would a cheaper vessel help. It is the wrong figure for questions about the business: can I pay myself, can I afford a stall at a Diwali market, should I rent a workspace. Those questions need the gross profit minus every fixed cost, and this page will not guess a single one of them.

One more definition worth fixing while the numbers are in front of you, because the two get swapped constantly. Margin is gross profit as a share of the selling price: ₹399.00 ÷ ₹599.00 = 66.61%. Markup is gross profit as a share of the cost: ₹399.00 ÷ ₹200.00, which is just under two times. Both describe the same candle. A supplier quoting you a markup and a buyer asking about your margin are asking about different denominators, and the gap between the two figures is wide enough to lose an argument in.

The same money per day, per week and per hour

₹39,900.00 sounds like a salary until you divide it by the time it takes. Spread across a 30-day month it is ₹1,330.00 a day and ₹9,310.00 a week. Across an illustrative 22 working days it is ₹1,813.64. Those are useful for cash planning but they are not the interesting division. The interesting one is per hour of your own labour, because at 100 candles a month you are almost certainly the entire production line, and your hours are the constraint that decides whether the next hundred candles can happen at all.

Your monthly hours are your figure, not one this page can supply — melting, pouring, curing checks, wicking, labelling, packing, photography, replies to customers and a trip to the courier all count, and makers who have actually measured are usually surprised. The table below runs the division at four illustrative hour totals so you can find the row nearest your own. Time the next full batch end to end, once, and the right row will stop being a guess.

What ₹39,900.00 has not paid for yet

The honest paragraph of this page is this one. ₹39,900.00 is gross profit, and gross profit is spent before you see it. The list below is what stands between ₹39,900.00 and anything you could call profit. CSI sells wax, fragrance, vessels and wicks, so those four lines sit inside your ₹200.00 and can be checked against live prices. Nothing else on the list is something CSI sells or publishes a rate for, which means no honest number for it exists here. Copy the table, fill in your own figures, and total the sheet as materials plus your own costs.

There is one piece of arithmetic worth doing against that table without filling any of it in, because it reframes every fixed cost you are considering. At ₹399.00 of gross profit a candle, every ₹1,000.00 of monthly fixed cost consumes 2.51 candles of your 100, and every ₹10,000.00 consumes 25.06. So a decision that adds ₹10,000.00 a month to your overheads is a decision to give away a quarter of this month's production before you have poured it. Priced that way, most subscription tools and most stall fees answer themselves.

Reproducing your ₹200.00 from live stock

Your ₹200.00 is the figure the whole month rests on, so it is worth seeing what it buys. Here is a candle built entirely from CSI stock in September 2026: 150 g of Eco Soy CSI 400 at ₹399.00 a kilogram, 12 g of Peach Melon Berry at ₹4.18 a gram — 8% of wax weight, the series convention — an Green Matte Glass Jar at ₹70.80 a piece in the five pack, and an Eco Candle Wicks Thin (C1) at ₹5.90. The 150 g is a fill you measure yourself, not a capacity read off a listing, and the vessel is priced per piece with no claim about what it holds. The load convention matters here: 150 g of wax at 8% carries 12 g of oil and 162 g goes into the vessel, not 150 g.

That table is the uncomfortable one. At 8% the materials alone are ₹186.68, leaving ₹13.32 inside your ₹200.00 for the label, the carton, the insert, the wick sticker and every gram of wax that stays in the jug. At the top of the oil page's stated range the materials are ₹199.21 and the room left is ₹0.79. Neither figure leaves space for packaging. The conclusion is not that your ₹200.00 is wrong — it is almost certainly a good materials figure. The conclusion is that it is probably materials, and that your true cost of goods is higher, which makes ₹399.00 a candle an overstatement of what the product actually contributes.

If it turns out your true cost of goods is higher, the arithmetic is quick and it is worth doing before you plan anything on ₹39,900.00. Every ₹1.00 added to cost takes ₹100.00 a month off gross profit at 100 candles, and every ₹20.00 takes ₹2,000.00. The lever that moves in the other direction is the pour, not the shopping. Dropping this candle from a 150 g wax fill to 120 g saves ₹22.00 a candle at the same 8% load — the materials fall from ₹186.68 to ₹164.68 — which is ₹2,199.53 a month. Whether a smaller candle still sells at ₹599.00 is a question for your customers and not for a cost sheet.

Which lever moves the month most

There are exactly three ways to change ₹39,900.00: sell for more, make for less, or sell more of them. They are not equivalent, and the difference is arithmetic rather than opinion. A 10% move on your price changes gross profit by ₹5,990.00 a month. A 10% move on your cost changes it by ₹2,000.00. A 10% move on volume changes it by ₹3,990.00. Price wins because the whole of a price rise falls into gross profit, while a cost saving only moves the smaller of the two figures and extra volume brings its own materials, its own hours and its own packaging with it.

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