I'm Selling 100 Candles a Month — At What Point Should I Stop Buying Small Packs and Move to Wholesale Raw Materials?

First, cost one month properly

A hundred candles a month sounds like a scale. It is not a scale until it is grams. This page uses a candle you can check line by line: 150 g of Premium Coconut Soy CSI 468 — the page gives a melting point of 50–53°C, a pour temperature of 58–60°C and a fragrance load of up to 13% of wax weight — with oil at 8% of wax weight (12 g), one Eco Candle Wick Thick (C2), one 200ml Salsa Glass Jar with 63mm Lug Cap, a wick sticker and a care sticker. Three scents, split 50/30/20 across the month: British Rose, Citrus Lemon and Lavender.

That gives the only four numbers this decision needs: 15 kg of wax a month, 600 g, 360 g and 240 g of the three oils, 100 jars and 100 wicks. Everything below is those numbers run against two price columns. If your fill is 120 g or 200 g, or your load is 6% or 10%, redo the grams and the conclusions hold their shape — the ranking of materials barely moves, because it is set by the shape of CSI's pack ladders rather than by your recipe.

The two switches that cost you nothing

Start with the 200ml Salsa Glass Jar, because it is the largest saving on the page and the easiest to act on. At the 5-piece pack a jar is ₹40.12. At 50 pieces it is ₹29.50, and at 100 pieces it is still ₹29.50 — so the ladder ends at 50, and there is no reason to go past it. A hundred jars a month costs ₹4,012.00 bought five at a time and ₹2,950.00 bought fifty at a time: ₹1,062.00 saved, on an order that is smaller, not larger. Two packs of fifty is exactly one month of stock. There is no cash cost, no extra storage and no commitment beyond the month you were buying anyway.

The wax works the same way, with a smaller prize. Premium Coconut Soy CSI 468 is ₹650.00 a kilo in the 1 kg bag and ₹637.00 in the 5 kg, so 15 kg a month costs ₹9,750.00 in fifteen small bags and ₹9,555.00 in three large ones — ₹195.00, again for less money out of the door, not more. Three 5 kg bags is one month of stock, which no maker at this output should find alarming.

Fragrance oil: the eight-week gate

Fragrance has the steepest per-gram ladder in the catalogue and the worst consequences if you get it wrong, because a kilo of a scent that stops selling is a kilo you own. The gate that works at this output is simple: buy the pack only if your current usage empties it within eight weeks. Eight weeks is roughly two production cycles, which is long enough to be efficient and short enough that a scent going out of favour does not strand you. It is a rule of thumb, stated as one, not a measured optimum.

Read the last column carefully, because it is where the decision splits. Your lead scent at 600 g a month works through a 1 kg pack of British Rose in about 7 weeks: that clears the gate, and the kilo is the right buy. Your second scent would need 12 weeks for a kilo and fails, but clears a 500 g pack in 6.0 weeks. Your third is the interesting one: 240 g a month takes 9.0 weeks even on a 500 g pack, so it sits just outside the gate. Either accept nine weeks on one scent or keep buying it in 100 g bottles and give up ₹38.40 a month. That is a real choice, not an oversight — and it is the point at which a single output figure stops giving you a single answer.

One more oil-specific caution that is about the weather rather than the money. Oil packs live longer than wax packs in your storage, which means they live through more of an Indian year. Keep them capped, out of sunlight and out of a kitchen that hits 40°C in May, and prefer a cupboard to an open shelf through a Mumbai or Kochi monsoon. CSI publishes a 60 month shelf life for CSI 464 and CSI 468 in cool, dry storage; equivalent figures are not published for every oil, so ask on WhatsApp rather than assuming.

The materials where wholesale does not exist

Eco Candle Wicks are ₹5.90 each for Thin (C1) and ₹9.44 each for Thick (C2) at every published pack from 10 wicks to 1,000. A thousand C2 wicks is ₹9,440.00 and ten months of your output at no discount whatever. One reviewer asks the team to work on pricing and delivery timelines on these wicks, which is a fair note to publish on a page like this: the pack ladder is flat, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. If you want a genuine wick step-down it exists on Performance Wooden Wicks, which fall from ₹59.00 each at ten to ₹41.30 at a hundred — worth ₹1,770.00 a month if wooden wicks are what your candles use, and nothing at all if they are not.

Candle care stickers do step, from ₹0.83 to ₹0.70 each, but the bigger roll is a thousand stickers: 43 weeks of stock at your output, to save ₹12.70 a month. That fails the eight-week gate by a factor of ten. Buy the 500 roll and spend the attention somewhere that matters. The larger wick sticker sheet is not currently available, so the 40-sticker sheet at ₹2.50 each is the only option regardless of your volume.

What wholesale actually buys you at this volume

Everything above is what the store prints. There are two further levers at 100 candles a month, and neither of them appears on a product page. The first is bulk pricing: CSI quotes it on WhatsApp +91 7397976926 rather than publishing it, so a maker at your output who has never asked has never seen it. Ask with numbers — kilos a month, scents, jar counts, whether you can commit to a quarter — because a vague enquiry gets a vague answer.

The second is consolidation, and it is probably worth more than any of the pack switches. One review on the store notes that the shipment charges were too high for that customer, alongside praise for the wax and the packing, and another asks for a discount on bulk buys. Both are honest reflections of the same thing: freight is a real cost, it is charged at your checkout, and CSI does not publish rates, free-shipping thresholds or delivery times. Four small orders a month cost four times whatever one costs. One monthly order — wax, oils, jars, wicks, stickers together — cuts that to one, and it is the only lever on this page that you control completely. Put your own number in that row before you decide whether the ₹1,565.40 of pack savings is the main event or a footnote.

What the switch takes out of the business

The full switch described here moves your monthly materials bill from ₹19,467.80 to ₹17,902.40, and puts roughly ₹2,678.80 of extra oil on the shelf in the month you make it. That is a one-off, not a recurring cost — from month two you are simply buying less often — but it has to come from somewhere, and at 100 candles a month it is not a trivial number. If your working capital is tight, make the two free switches now and take the oil switch one scent at a time over three months.

Storage is the quieter constraint. Fifteen kilos of flake wax a month in three 5 kg bags is an easy stack in a cupboard. Two hundred jars, if you ever go to a two-month vessel buy, is a different matter in a flat, and glass that is stored badly is glass that arrives at your pouring table chipped. Keep wax and oil away from sunlight and out of a kitchen that reaches 40°C in a Delhi or Nagpur May; keep jars boxed and off the floor through a monsoon. None of that costs money. All of it costs a decision about where things live.

A final honest note on where the real money is at 100 a month. ₹1,565.40 a month is 8% of your materials bill and worth collecting. But if you are selling those hundred candles at anything like a normal retail price, a single rupee on your selling price, or one fewer failed batch, or one wick size that stops a tunnelling complaint, moves more money than the whole pack-size exercise. Do the free switches, apply the gate to oil, then go back to making better candles.

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