I'm Launching Three New Fragrances but Don't Know Their Demand Yet — How Much Fragrance Oil Should I Initially Buy Compared with Established Bestsellers?

Bestseller buying versus launch buying

Take a small candle business selling about 400 candles a month of one 200 g container candle at an 8% fragrance load. Every candle holds 16 g of oil and 184 g of wax. Five scents are established. Lavender is the bestseller at 120 a month and the other four sell 60 to 90. These are example figures for the worked maths — replace them with your own sales. For established scents the buying rule is simple: monthly units × 16 g, plus a 3% pour-loss allowance (a working assumption), rounded up to real CSI packs.

Now add three new scents. The tempting move is to treat each like an average established scent, 80 candles a month, and buy 1,318.4 g of oil each. That is a guess dressed as a calculation. The 80 comes from other scents' customers, not from this scent's. Some launches outsell the bestseller; many settle well below the average; a few barely move. Until you have sales, the number that matters is not expected demand but how much stock you are prepared to hold while you find out.

So new scents get a different quantity rule. You buy enough to make a launch batch — a fixed, small run that goes on sale, gets watched for a month, and then decides the next order. It sets a ceiling on cash at risk and it produces data. The rest of this page sizes that batch, prices it, and sets the gate a scent must pass before it is bought like Lavender.

The three buying stages

Each new scent passes through three stages, and the purchase at each stage is sized to that stage's job. The diagram above shows how much oil each stage buys. Here is what each is for:

Sizing the launch batch

Why 24? It is a size a small seller can plausibly clear in a month alongside the core range, and it is large enough that the result means something — selling 18 of 24 tells you more than selling 3 of 4. Pick your own number from two limits: the most you would be comfortable holding unsold for three months, and the fewest sales that would convince you. Then run the same arithmetic. Here it is for our three new scents, all priced at CSI's live listings:

The order of operations matters. First net need: 26 candles × 16 g = 416 g. Then the allowance: × 1.03 = 428.48 g. Only then round up to packs. 4 × 100 g + 1 × 50 g gives 450 g, a 21.52 g cushion. A single 500 g would also work; for these three oils it costs the same or slightly less per gram than the 100 g, but the extra 50 g adds to the bill, so choose on total cost and handling. For Pumpkin Spice, 500 g is ₹2,950.00 against ₹2,690.40 for 450 g in smaller packs.

Why not buy the launch oil as 1 kg to get a lower rate? For most oils there is no lower rate. For two of our three it is only a sliver: Bergamot Amber's kilo is ₹5.44 a gram against ₹5.60 at 100 g, and Raat Ki Rani's is ₹6.77 against ₹7.00. Pumpkin Spice is one of the 24 oils where the kilo really is cheaper, by 10.0% a gram. But 450 g at the kilo rate would cost ₹2,389.50 — you still pay ₹5,310.00 for the bottle and hold 550 g you have no sales reason to own.

Graduating a scent to demand-based buying

Thirty days after the launch batch goes on sale, count what sold. The gate we use in this example is 18 of 24, 75% sell-through. It is a working decision rule, not an industry standard; set yours from your margin and how patient your cash can be. A scent that clears the gate has now produced the one number the bestseller rule needs: its own monthly rate. Its next order is 30 days of that rate plus the 3% allowance, rounded to packs.

Two readings of that table. At 10 or 20 a month the scent stays a 100 g scent: the 1 kg would be 3.1 months of stock at 20 a month and 6.2 months at 10. At 40 a month the 500 g joins the order. Only around 80 a month — roughly the portfolio average in our example — does the kilo become the natural core of a monthly buy. That is also the point at which the kilo's 10.0% saving on Pumpkin Spice actually lands on your costs, because you are using the oil fast enough for it to matter.

What if a scent misses the gate? Look at the pattern, not only the total. Twelve sales in the last ten days of the month is a scent that is starting to move; twelve in the first week and none after is a scent that sold to your regulars and stopped. For the first, run a second launch batch from what is left of the 450 g (21.52 g spare plus any unpoured candles' worth). For the second, stop. Growth that may not last covers the same judgement for the whole range.

Wax, wicks and jars for a launch

Three launch batches are 78 candles. If you pour them on top of your normal month, they need 14,352 g of wax (184 g each), 14,782.56 g with 3% loss — 3 × 5 kg of Luxury Soy Wax Chunks at ₹8,985.00 (three 5 kg bags cost ₹9.00 less than a 10 kg plus a 5 kg). They need 78 wicks plus test wicks, and 78 jars. Those figures are real. What is not real is assuming the three scents add 78 candles to your monthly wax demand for ever.

New scents partly take sales from old ones. A customer who buys Pumpkin Spice in October may be a customer who would otherwise have bought Cinnamon Vanilla. So after the launch, keep buying wax, wicks and jars from your total candle sales, not from the sum of per-scent guesses. If total sales rise, the extra wax follows automatically; if they do not, the new scents have redistributed demand and your wax order should not change. I Have 30 Kg of Soy Wax in Stock and Average 180 g Finished Candles — Approximately How Many Customer Orders Can My Current Wax Inventory Support? converts a wax stock into candles and orders.

The White Matte jar's fill weight is not published, so the 200 g figure is a fill you should confirm with a weighed test pour in your own jar. Wick size for this jar is also not published; the 9 test wicks cover a three-candle wick test per scent. Wick choice does not change with the scent in principle, but a new oil can burn differently, which is why the test stage comes first. I Want to Maintain Two Weeks of Safety Stock for My Candle Business — How Do I Calculate the Minimum Quantity of Wax, Fragrance, Wicks and Jars I Should Never Fall Below? sets minimum stock for wicks and jars across the whole range.

Cash at risk, in rupees

The case for staging is clearest in the worst case: all three scents stall. With the staged buy you have spent ₹341.22 on testers and ₹8,380.40 on launch oil, and the oil is almost all inside candles you can still sell slowly or bundle. With three kilos you have spent ₹17,521.00, and after pouring the same 26-candle batches you still hold 571.52 g of each oil unpoured.

That ₹10,013.60 is the true price of skipping the launch stage. It is not lost — the oil can be poured later — but it is cash you cannot put into Lavender, which has proven demand. The staged route caps the same risk at the price of a few bottles.

A final check on timing. A launch batch tells you most in its first two weeks: if nothing has sold in fourteen days, the gate will almost certainly be missed. Use that as an early warning to adjust photographs, pricing or placement, not to buy more oil. And keep one retained candle from every launch batch for at least the life of the batch on sale, so any customer question can be answered from the same pour. I'm Producing 5,000 Candles a Month — How Do I Calculate Monthly Raw-Material Consumption and Set Automatic Reorder Levels for Every Major Component? shows how the same stage logic turns into automatic reorder levels once a range reaches thousands of candles a month.

The quantities on this page scale directly. A 150 g candle at 8% holds 12 g of oil, so the same 26-candle launch needs 312 g, 321.36 g with loss, which rounds to 4 × 100 g. A 100 g candle holds 8 g, and the launch fits in 3 × 100 g with room to spare. Change the candle size and load first, then run the same four steps: net need, allowance, round to packs, price.

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