I'm Making 500 Candles for a Wedding Order — How Many Extra Glass Jars Should I Buy to Cover Transit Damage and Production Rejects?

Six places a wedding order loses jars

A retail run can absorb a shortfall: you sell 97 this week and 3 next week. A wedding cannot. The candles are for a date, a venue and a guest list, and "three short" means three empty places on a table. So the extras for a wedding are sized around where jars are lost between your supplier and the reception, and when.

1. Samples and references (a separate pack of 10, bought first)

Many wedding orders are won or lost on a sample. The couple or their planner wants to smell and hold the candle before committing to 500. If you offer three fragrance or colour options, that is three candles, poured and cured in the jar you will actually use; samples made in a different jar are a promise you cannot keep. Keep two more from the approved option: one to burn, one never lit, which is what production is matched against. With five jars left for a short burn test, that is one pack of 10, bought about two months before the wedding and kept apart from the production order.

2. Arrival and inspection rejects (about 2%, 10 jars)

Some glass arrives damaged; some fails inspection with the carton intact: chipped rims, cracks, stones, rocking bases, lids that do not seat. Every jar is inspected before it meets wax, and a chipped rim is a reject, not a cosmetic note (the chipped-rim post makes the case). CSI publishes no breakage rate for its jars, so this is our planning allowance. The inspection routine itself is in the QC checklist.

3. Production losses (about 3%, 15 jars)

Five hundred jars is a long pour, often across several sessions: jars get knocked over, wax runs down the outside, a jar cracks while cooling, a wick drifts and cannot be saved. Many cosmetic faults cost wax and time rather than glass (melt out, clean, repour), but a wedding order leaves less time to do that, so we allow a little more here than for a relaxed retail run.

4. Transit to the venue (about 1%, 5 jars)

A wedding order usually travels once, as one consignment to a venue or planner, rather than as 500 separate parcels. That is kinder to glass than individual courier shipments, and the allowance can be small, but only if the packing is good. If the candles go by courier to more than one address, raise this bucket.

5. Venue spares (about 1%, 5 jars)

Things break during setup: a box dropped from a table, a candle knocked over while a centrepiece is arranged. Five finished, labelled candles in their own box, travelling with the order, turn a disaster into a swap. Tell the planner where they are.

6. Final check and late changes (about 1%, 5 jars)

After the cure, every candle gets a last look before it is stickered and packed. A few fail: a surface that frosted, a wick that leans. And before the count freeze, a client may add a table. Five poured candles held back for these cases keep the venue spares untouched.

The 540-jar count, bucket by bucket

Two notes on reading it. First, the sample pack is a separate, earlier purchase: it exists before the order does, and its jars are poured weeks before the production jars arrive. Second, the percentages are deliberately smaller than a first-run hub would use (see the first-run-of-100 hub), because a maker quoting a 500-candle wedding should already have burned the jar to the bottom. If you have not, do that first: testing a new jar before ordering 500.

A standing percentage for different kinds of order (wedding against Diwali against corporate) is a different question, and the buffer-percentage post owns it. This page is one wedding, counted.

Pack combinations for 540: four CSI jars

Four in-stock CSI jars that suit wedding candles, from favour size to gift size. Most CSI jars are priced flat per jar across pack sizes; two of these four are not, and those two change the arithmetic.

Salsa clear: buy 550. The 5 Pcs pack is ₹40.12 per jar and the 50 Pcs pack ₹29.50, so eight 5 Pcs packs (40 jars, ₹1,604.80) cost more than one 50 Pcs pack (₹1,475.00). The larger order is both cheaper and gives you ten more spares. This is the one place in this post where more jars cost less.

Mini jars: buy 540. The price steps are smaller, so filling the gap with a 25 and three 5s is ₹156.35 cheaper than a 50. With Golden lids, skip the Golden / 25 listing (priced the same as Golden / 50) and fill with 5s: ₹11,658.40.

Clear 150 g and votives: no decision to make. Flat per jar means 540 costs 540 jars' worth, in any pack mix. There is no bulk saving at 500 on the listed prices; for a quote on larger quantities, ask on WhatsApp.

Working back from the wedding date

Worked example: a wedding on 12 December 2026, 77 days after these prices were checked. Diwali, 8 November 2026, falls 34 days before it, inside the stretch when your production jars are arriving. If you also make Diwali stock, the two runs compete for your bench, your wax and your jar order. Dispatch is from Pune; delivery time depends on your location and is not published, so the dispatch durations below are placeholders to replace with a date confirmed on WhatsApp.

The inspection window is the most important bar in the diagram. It is the last moment a shortfall can be fixed by buying more jars rather than by apologising. Everything before it can slip a little; nothing after it can.

Client samples: the extras that win the order

Samples are the one kind of extra that is bought before the order exists, and the one most often skimped. Three rules.

Same jar, same lid, same wax, same wick. A sample in a different jar tells the client nothing about the candle they will receive, and tells you nothing about how the fragrance throws in that jar. If you have not burned this jar before, the sample pack doubles as your test: five of its ten jars are burn tests.

Price the samples in. Three sample candles and two references in the Clear 150 g jar use five jars (₹472.00), plus wax, oil and your time. Either charge a sampling fee credited against the order, or build it into the per-candle price. Either way, do not give it away without deciding to.

Keep the reference candle unlit and labelled. Write the batch, fragrance, load, wick and date on its base. It is your quality standard for 500 candles and your evidence if the client ever says the order does not match what they approved.

Getting 500 candles and the spares to the venue

The transit bucket assumes the order travels as one or a few consignments you pack yourself. Three things keep it small. Pack candles upright and separated so glass does not touch glass: dividers, tissue or bubble between jars. Keep each carton to a weight one person can lift without dropping it. And box the 5 venue spares separately, clearly marked, so they are not opened and used for the first table that is set. What good glass packaging looks like, and what to expect from a supplier shipping jars to you, is in I'm Ordering Glass Candle Jars From Another State — What Packaging Should I Expect From a Supplier to Minimise Transit Breakage?.

For your own packing, CSI lists an Air Bubble Roll (air column) at ₹900.00, Premium Packing Tissue Paper, 100 sheets of 50 × 75 cm, at ₹650.00, and a Corrugated 3 ply box 7 x 5 x 4 Inch in a pack of 50 at ₹1,336.00 (₹26.72 per box). The page text we hold for the air bubble roll does not state a roll length, so ask before you work out how many candles it covers. Individually boxing 540 candles is a real cost; for a single consignment to one venue, larger cartons with dividers are usually the better answer.

What to buy: jars and labels

Four jars that suit wedding candles and one label, chosen on what their pages state, their pack structure and stock on 26 September 2026, not on burn performance: CSI publishes no burn-down or breakage data for these jars.

What to agree with the client before you order

Some of the risk in a wedding order is not in the glass. Four things are worth putting in writing before the jar order goes in. This is practical advice, not legal advice.

Guest counts at Indian weddings can move late. The honest way to handle that is a price for additions and a date after which they cannot be promised, not a secret buffer of 100 jars. If the client wants an assured margin, sell it: "up to 520 at the same price per candle if confirmed by 25 October 2026" is a sentence that pays for its own jars.

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