I Use the Same 8 cm Jar Across Eight Candle Fragrances — How Do I Calculate One Combined Monthly Jar Purchase Instead of Ordering by Fragrance?

Why the jar is ordered by total, never by fragrance

When every fragrance in a range uses the same container, the jar stops being a per-SKU material and becomes a shared one, like the wax. Yet jars are often ordered the way oils are — fragrance by fragrance — because the production plan is written that way. That habit costs money three ways. Each fragrance gets rounded up to a whole pack, so the roundings add up. Breakage gets applied eight times, each time rounded up to a whole jar. And a buffer kept per fragrance is bigger in total than one buffer kept for the range, because the fragrances rarely all run high in the same week.

The reader's container is an 8 cm jar. CSI does not publish internal diameters for any of its jars, so this page prices the White Matte Glass Jar as the candidate and treats the 200 g fill as the reader's weighed fill — measure the diameter and weigh a test pour before you commit to it. The method works for any jar from any supplier; only the pack prices change.

Step 1: candles poured per fragrance

The reader's example plan is 240 candles a month across eight fragrances, from 45 Mango Coconut down to 15 Autumn, a new addition this month. One QC candle per fragrance and an example 3% reject allowance turn that into candles poured. Breakage of 2% is then applied to the total — glass breaks in storage, washing and handling, not in a particular fragrance.

Applied per fragrance and rounded each time, breakage alone asks for 267 jars instead of 265. Rounded to each fragrance's own 5-pack, the order becomes 280 jars. Counted once for the range, it is 265. At ₹70.80 a jar, the per-fragrance habit costs ₹1,062.00 more this month for 15 jars that sit on the shelf — and the same thing happens again next month.

Step 2: one buffer for the range, not eight

Suppose you want enough spare jars to cover a fragrance selling 20% above plan — a labelled example. Kept per fragrance, that is 20% of each fragrance's poured count, 51.8 jars in total. But a common inventory rule of thumb says that when demand swings are independent, the buffer for the combined demand is the square root of the sum of the squared individual buffers — here 19.1 jars. The jar line can carry a smaller buffer than the eight fragrances would separately, because a high week for one fragrance is often a quiet week for another.

Two honest caveats. The rule of thumb assumes the fragrances move independently. In the weeks before Diwali, or when a single promotion lifts the whole range, they move together and the pooled buffer is too small — use the sum for those months. And the oils cannot pool: each fragrance's oil buffer stays its own. Which materials deserve safety stock and a shared wax versus a slow oil build on exactly this difference.

Step 3: the month's order — one jar line, eight oil lines

The jar line is now one number. The wax is shared too: Premium Coconut Soy Wax CSI 468, whose page states a melting point of 50–53°C, pour at 58–60°C and a fragrance load of up to 13%; 8% is well inside it. The wick is the reader's tested Eco Thick C2 in this jar (CSI publishes no wick-size-per-diameter chart). Only the oils stay per fragrance, each rounded to its own cheapest in-stock packs. Lids for the White Matte jar are not a CSI listing; they appear as an example line.

Look at the oil lines and you can see why they cannot be pooled the way jars can. Each lands on its own packs: Honeydew Melon reaches its 500 g bottle, whose per-gram price (₹3.40) is 22% below its 100 g (₹4.35); Gardenia is priced the same per gram from 100 g to 1 kg, so it is bought in 100 g bottles; Chocolate Fudge's 100 g was out of stock on the 24 September pull (stock unchanged on the 4 October re-check), so its line is covered by 7 × 50 g + 2 × 15 g rather than an unavailable size. Eight oils, eight decisions.

At this order's rates, the jar is 27% of the material cost of a Mango Coconut candle and 27% of a Fallen Leaves one — second only to the wax (₹117.21, 44% of the Mango Coconut candle). Unlike the wax, glass breaks, takes shelf space and cannot be remelted into next month's batch, which is why the jar line deserves the most care in counting, breakage and buffer, and why the cash-locked-in-stock post treats glass as its own decision.

Buy now, buy after testing

Autumn is new this month and has not yet passed in this jar, wax and wick. The addendum rule for this series is simple: materials shared across options can be bought now; production quantities of an untested oil (or wick) wait. So the jars, the wax and the Thick C2 wicks for all eight fragrances are bought today — if Autumn fails, those jars, that wax and those wicks simply go to the other seven. Autumn's own production oil waits for three trial candles.

The CSI products in this order

Running a one-jar range month after month

The same combine-by-material logic is applied to one oil across products in 5986 and to wicks in 5988; the consolidated monthly order puts every line on one invoice, and the cluster hub has the whole pipeline.

Frequently asked questions