I Want to Produce 100 Candles but Have Not Finalised the Wick — How Many Sample Wick Sizes Should I Add to My Raw-Material Order Before Buying Production Quantities?

How many sample wick sizes, and why not more

Every other line on a 100-candle order comes out of arithmetic: grams of wax and oil from the candle weight and load, jars and stickers from the candle count. The wick does not. Whether a wick gives a full, safe melt pool depends on the jar's internal diameter, the wax, the oil, the load and even the dye, and CSI does not publish a wick size per jar diameter for any of its wicks. Nobody can tell you the right size from a table for your jar. What you can do is buy a small number of candidates, pour identical candles on each, and let the burns decide.

The practical question is how many candidates. The answer on CSI's catalogue is short, because the listed options are few. The Eco Candle Wicks listing has two sizes, Thin C1 and Thick C2. Two other constructions are listed: Cotton Braided Wicks Ready Made and Performance Wooden Wicks. CSI publishes no construction details, tab heights or sizing equivalence between these lines, so none of them is "between" the two Eco sizes — each is simply another candidate. For most makers the right ladder is the two Eco sizes as the core, plus at most one other construction you would genuinely sell.

What each rung costs in candles, not just wicks

The wicks are the cheap part of a sample ladder. Each rung is three test candles — a labelled working practice: two burned in matched cycles and one burned to the end — and each candle is a full 200 g of Luxury Soy Wax Chunks and Orchard Pear at 8% (184 g wax + 16 g oil) in a White Matte Glass Jar. The wick must be tested in the candle you will sell: same oil, same load, same jar, same wax. A wick proven in an unscented candle tells you little about a scented one.

The wooden rung is the expensive one: ₹590.00 for ten wicks, about six times the Thick C2 sample. That is a reason to include it only if a wooden-wick candle is part of your range, not as a curiosity. Note that the oil line barely moves between ladders: Orchard Pear is ₹3.80/g at 100 g and ₹7.00/g at 15 g, so the cheapest oil combination often mixes 100 g bottles with a 15 g one. The leftover jars from the packs of 10 and 5 go straight into production.

The burn protocol for each rung

From winning rung to production wick order

The production stack for 100 saleable candles — 4 pre-production test candles, a 3% reject allowance and 4 spare wicks, all labelled assumptions — needs 112 wicks. Each sample pack leaves wicks behind after three test candles. Subtract them before rounding the production order:

Two details hide in that table. Thin C1's 20-pack leaves 17 wicks, so the production need drops to 95 and a single 100-pack covers it. And for Cotton Braided and Wooden the rounding lands just above a pack boundary, so the sample leftovers decide whether you buy one extra 10-pack. Stickers are bought at one per wick whichever rung wins: 3 sheets of 40, ₹300.00.

The wax is listed at ₹12,558.00 as 42 × 500 g — the strictly cheapest combination, because 500 g bags of Chunks are ₹598.00 a kilo — but 4 × 5 kg + 1 × 1 kg at ₹12,579.00 is ₹21.00 more and far easier to handle. The oil can be bought now if your load is settled; if the ladder shows that no wick works at 8% and you need to change the load, it waits. The 6%-versus-8% page and the 10%-versus-8% page cover that decision.

The wick options and the candle they are tested in

Related 100-candle shopping lists

This page owns the wick question on a 100-candle order. First 100 candles: bulk or small sorts the other materials; burn-test samples for 100 candles budgets the whole test programme; 100 lavender candles in 8 cm jars is a full worked list; and the 100-candle template has a line for every material. When the order grows, 1,000 single-wick candles and a large order before the wick passes carry the same logic to bigger quantities.

Frequently asked questions