I Want to Start Selling 200 g Soy Candles Online in India — What Exact Categories of Raw Materials Should I Buy for My First 100 Units?

Start with the product brief, not the shopping cart

Your product is already defined: a 200 g soy candle, sold online, posted to customers across India. That single sentence decides most of your list before you open a product page. You need a container wax rather than a pillar wax, a jar that genuinely holds 200 g of finished candle, a wick suited to that jar's width, a way to centre and fix it, fragrance at a load you can repeat, and enough measuring kit that candle number 87 weighs the same as candle number 3.

The most common first-order mistake is treating the hundred units as one purchase. Treat them as two. The first purchase exists to answer questions: does this wax give a smooth top in this jar, does this oil throw at this load, which wick gives a full melt pool without soot. The second purchase exists to fill orders. Everything on this page is split along that line, and every quantity is calculated, not estimated.

Packaging belongs on your list as a category, but not on ours. CSI does not sell boxes, labels or courier cartons, so they appear here only as your own line with your own price.

The ten categories on a first-100 list

Read the table as a checklist. The middle columns are what to buy for testing; the last column is what replaces it once the formula is approved.

Packaging is the eleventh line you add yourself. Price it per candle and keep it separate from the material cost below, so you can see each number clearly.

Why these particular options

Wax. CSI 464 is a 100% soy container wax in flakes, made for a single pour, with a stated fragrance load of up to 10% and a stated shelf life of 60 months in cool, dry storage. Reviewers on the product page describe it as easy to work with for beginners. Luxury Soy Wax Chunks or Premium Coconut Soy CSI 468 become your second wax only if 464 fails a specific test, such as a rough top you cannot fix with pouring conditions.

Jar. The matte 200 ml jar is listed with a fill weight of 200 ml and a size of 8 cm high by 7 cm wide. Millilitres and grams are not the same thing for wax, so pour one jar to your intended fill line with melted wax, let it set, and weigh it. If the result is short of 200 g, either your product becomes the weight the jar actually holds or you choose a larger vessel. Do this before you print a single label.

Wick. CSI publishes no wick sizing chart, so nothing here is a guaranteed size. A 7 cm opening is a sensible place to compare Eco C1 against Eco C2. The Cotton Braided Ready Made wick is listed for candles wider than 8 cm, so it is not your first test in this jar.

Fragrance. Three candidates at 100 g each let you choose two winners for launch. Lavender is rated Strong on its product page and has a published load of 6 to 10%; its flashpoint is not published, so ask CSI on WhatsApp for the MSDS before you set your adding temperature. Roasted Coffee and Bergamot Amber both publish soy ranges of 6 to 10%.

Exact quantities for 100 units plus the tests

Use 8% of total candle weight as a suggested starting load. A 200 g candle is then 184 g of wax and 16 g of oil. One hundred candles need 18,400 g of wax and 1,600 g of oil, split between whichever two oils you approve.

The test plan, also a suggested starting point, is three oils × two wicks × two candles each, which makes 12 test candles. They use 12 × 184 g = 2,208 g of wax, leaving 5,000 − 2,208 = 2,792 g from the 5 kg bag, enough for 2,792 ÷ 184 = 15 more candles once rounded down. Each oil gives four test candles at 16 g, using 64 g and leaving 36 g in its 100 g bottle.

For production you still need 18,400 − 2,792 = 15,608 g of wax. You have two honest routes. Two 10 kg packs at ₹10,148.00 leave you 4,392 g of spare wax for re-tests and reorders. A 10 kg pack, a 5 kg pack and a 1 kg pack, at ₹5,074.00 + ₹2,537.00 + ₹507.40 = ₹8,118.40, give 16,000 g, which leaves only 392 g spare, about two candles. The second route saves ₹2,029.60 but leaves almost no room for a spilled pour.

For oil, 50 units of each approved fragrance need 800 g. The 1 kg bottle covers that and, with the 36 g already left in the sample, leaves 236 g for your first reorder or a retest. Lavender 1 kg is ₹5,221.00 and Roasted Coffee 1 kg is ₹3,738.00.

Both totals exclude packaging, labels, labour, shipping and GST. If a C2 wick wins, replace ₹5.90 with ₹9.44 and the totals rise by ₹9.44 − ₹5.90 = ₹3.54.

What the test set must prove before you reorder

Buy this to test, buy this once validated

Test-first set: CSI 464 5 kg ₹2,537.00; Lavender, Roasted Coffee and Bergamot Amber 100 g, ₹1,490.00 together; 20 matte jars ₹1,416.00; 20 Eco C1 ₹118.00 and 20 Eco C2 ₹188.80; one sheet of wick stickers ₹100.00; bamboo wick holders ₹118.00; scale ₹354.00; pen thermometer ₹354.00; large pitcher ₹708.00; stirring sticks ₹118.00. Total ₹7,501.80, or ₹9,861.80 if you also need the Mini Electric Melter at ₹2,360.00.

Once validated: two 10 kg packs of CSI 464 ₹10,148.00; 1 kg of each approved oil, for example Lavender ₹5,221.00 and Roasted Coffee ₹3,738.00; ten packs of matte jars ₹7,080.00, which with the 8 test jars left over gives 108; 100 Eco C1 ₹590.00, or 50 C1 at ₹295.00 plus 50 C2 at ₹472.00 if the two oils approved different wicks; two more sheets of stickers ₹200.00. With C1 for both oils, the production order is ₹26,977.00 before packaging.

If you are tempted to skip the test set and buy production quantities on day one, look at what you would be risking: a kilogram of an oil you have never burned, and a hundred jars whose real fill weight you have never measured. The test set costs less than either mistake.

Where this page fits

CSI already has guides that cover parts of this question. This page turns the product above into a raw-material list; these go deeper on the rest:

Three things to buy for this job

Frequently asked questions