I Want to Minimise Dead Fragrance Inventory — What Should I Learn From 100 g or 500 g Testing Before Moving to 1 Kg Packs?

What a kilo actually commits

Start with the grams, because the rupees follow them. At 14.8 g of oil per 200 g candle — 8% of a 185 g wax fill — a 1 kg pack is 67 candles, a 500 g pack is 33 and a 100 g pack is six. Those numbers are the whole argument. Sixty-seven candles of one single scent is a lot of candles for most makers, and the test of whether a kilo is inventory or dead stock is simply how long 67 takes you.

Now put money on it. The table below takes six oils and asks a single question: three months after you buy the kilo, at six candles a month, how much of that purchase is still oil rather than candles? The share is the same for all of them — 73.4%, because 3 × 6 × 14.8 g is 266.4 g of 1,000 — but the rupees are not, and the rupees are what you cannot spend on anything else.

The five facts a small pack must record

A 100 g pack costs ₹300 to ₹896 across the single-note range. Spent carelessly it produces six pleasant candles and a vague impression. Spent properly it produces five written facts, and those five facts are exactly what a kilo purchase needs in order to be a stocking decision rather than a bet. Write them on one line per scent, in a notebook you will still have in six months.

Fact three deserves a note, because it is the one most often skipped and the hardest to reverse. Several pages publish a vanillin position and you should read it before you pour: Sandalwood, Jasmine, British Rose and Eucalyptus Spearmint all state 0% vanillin and no discolouration; Vanilla Bean states 2.5% with potential discolouration and suggests testing with lighter waxes; Roasted Coffee states vanillin present and instructs you to test in white wax before full batch production. A stated position tells you what to expect. Only your own cured jar tells you what it looks like in your wax, in your jar, under your photography light — and that is a decision about a product line, not about a batch.

What small-pack testing really costs

Here is the objection, stated fairly: small packs cost more per gram, so a careful tester pays a penalty. True — but it is worth pricing that penalty rather than assuming it, because on this store it ranges from exactly nothing to more than the kilo itself, and the difference is per oil.

The gate on this page consumes 24 candles of oil: six formulation jars, six cure-confirmation jars and twelve customer-test candles. That is 355.2 g. The premium is 355.2 g × (price per gram at 100 g − price per gram at 1 kg). Against it, set what you avoid committing — the kilo price minus the four 100 g packs you actually buy.

Read the first two rows carefully, because they settle the argument for a large part of the range. On Sandalwood and Woody Oud the premium is zero. The listed price per gram is ₹5.027 and ₹4.531 respectively at 100 g, at 500 g and at 1 kg — identical. There is no financial reason whatsoever to buy a kilo of either before you have tested it, which means the only reason anyone does is habit. On seven more oils the premium runs from ₹57.54 to ₹174.40, against commitments avoided of ₹1,632 to ₹4,486: you are paying roughly two to seven rupees in the hundred for the right to change your mind.

Then there is Citronella, which is the honest exception and the reason this has to be checked per oil rather than assumed. Its ladder is unusual: ₹7.670 a gram at both 50 g and 100 g, then ₹2.950 at 500 g and ₹2.891 at 1 kg. Four 100 g packs therefore cost ₹3,068, which is ₹177 more than the entire kilo at ₹2,891. On that listing, the right test rung is 500 g at ₹1,475 — 33 candles for less than half the price of four small packs.

What 100 g can and cannot teach

Six jars is a small number, so be precise about what it can carry. A 100 g pack can settle facts one, two and four — your load, your wick and your weighed grams — and it can start fact three. What it cannot do is tell you whether the result repeats across batches, or give you a sell-through figure worth the name. Six candles sold is an anecdote; thirty-three is a thin but usable number.

That layout uses 85.2 g of the 100 g pack and leaves about 15 g spare, which is one more jar if something goes wrong. Note that the 6%, 8% and 10% figures are percentages of the wax weight — on a 185 g fill that is 11.1 g, 14.8 g and 18.5 g of oil respectively, giving finished candles of about 196 g, 200 g and 204 g. Some makers calculate load as a share of the finished candle instead; both conventions exist, so whichever you use, write it next to the number. And never take 10% as available by default: it is available only where both the oil page and the wax page permit it.

What 500 g adds

The 500 g rung exists for two jobs that six jars cannot do, and both of them are about confidence rather than discovery. By the time you buy 500 g you should already know the load, the wick and the grams. What you are buying now is evidence that the recipe survives being made twice, and a sell-through number you can put into the cover formula.

Look at the last two rows on Jasmine and the point makes itself: ₹58.05 a candle at 500 g against ₹58.06 at 1 kg. The kilo is one paisa a candle dearer, because two 500 g packs at ₹1,961 each come to ₹3,922 against the kilo's ₹3,923. There is nothing to be gained by jumping, and 34 extra candles of commitment to be lost. On that listing the 500 g rung is not a compromise — it is simply the correct pack.

The 100 g → 500 g → 1 kg protocol

Five steps, each ending in a written result that permits or blocks the next purchase. Total oil consumed before any kilo is bought: about 855 g — roughly 58 candles, almost all of them sellable.

The reusable kilo gate

Write this on the inside cover of your batch notebook. It uses your figures only, and it works for every oil on every store.

Gate four is where most of the discipline lives, and it is worth restating as a sentence you can say out loud: a kilo of fragrance oil is three months of stock for a maker selling about twenty-three candles a month of that one scent, and it is a cash problem for everybody else. Not a quality problem, not a taste problem. A cash problem, with a cure date attached. The companion question — how many candles you should test and sell before that threshold is credible — is worked through in how many candles a fragrance should sell before it deserves bulk inventory.

Frequently asked questions