I'm Starting a Candle Business but Don't Know Which Jar Size Will Sell — Should I Test Several Containers or Standardise One Jar First?

Five containers, costed

CSI's container range includes five that suit a starting brand. Only two publish a fill weight: the Golden Aluminium Tin at 85 g and the Heart Cutout Velvet Jar at 50 g of wax. The White Matte Glass Jar uses this series' 200 g default. The 200 ml Salsa jar and Yankee 130 ml jar are sold by volume, and their wax fill is not published. We use 170 g and 110 g as illustrative placeholders so the maths can run. Do not rely on them. Fill your jar with water to the level you will pour, weigh it, and use that.

Read the last column. Small containers cost more per gram of candle, because the container and wick are fixed costs that do not shrink with the fill. The 50 g Heart jar costs about ₹188.08 per 100 g of candle; the White Matte about ₹124.63. That does not make small candles a bad idea. It means their selling price has to carry a larger share of packaging per gram, which introducing a smaller affordable candle and why a 100 g candle costs more per gram than a 300 g work through.

Lids, caps and pack sizes

Two containers come with a closure: the Salsa jar's golden lug cap and the Yankee jar's clear cap. For the others, a lid is a separate purchase from your own supplier. CSI's data has no lid prices, so as an example only, a lid at ₹25.00 (replace with a real quote) would lift the White Matte candle to ₹274.26. That is the kind of difference a container test should surface before you commit. Material cost here excludes labour, labels, packaging, freight and GST.

Pack sizes matter just as much. The White Matte jar is listed only in fives and the golden tin only in twelves, so their unit price never falls. The Heart velvet jar is ₹45.00 whether you buy one or ten. The Salsa jar is the exception: ₹40.12 each in fives, ₹29.50 each at 50 or 100. That break is only available to a maker who commits to one jar in quantity, which is the practical case for standardising early. Oil works the other way round from containers: for most oils the per-gram price above 100 g is flat, while this one container has a real break at 50.

The container test

A good container test changes one thing at a time. Use one scent in every container, so differences come from the container, not the fragrance. Use two wick options per container, because wick sizing for jar diameters is not published in this data and the right wick for a 50 g heart jar is unlikely to be the right one for a 200 g jar. Ten candles is enough: five containers, two wicks each.

The spare containers are not wasted. Three White Matte jars, three Salsa jars and ten tins remain; whichever container wins, its spares are the first few candles of the launch. Wax is bought as 1 kg plus 500 g of CSI 464, rated up to 10% fragrance by the wax maker, so the 8% load is inside that formulation ceiling. The fill weights for Salsa and Yankee are placeholders; if your weighed fills differ, re-run the oil and wax lines before you order.

Standardise vs spread

Suppose the test is done and you plan a launch of 60 candles. You can put all 60 in one container, or spread them across three sizes, 20 each, "to see which sells". The container bill alone already differs, and that is before the costs that multiply with each size.

The single-jar plan reaches the Salsa jar's 50-pack, where the unit price falls from ₹40.12 to ₹29.50, a 26.5% saving that is one of the few genuine pack breaks in CSI's container range. Spread across three sizes, no jar gets past its smallest pack. Part of the gap is simply that the White Matte jar costs more per unit than the other two; the rest is pack price. The per-size costs outside CSI's catalogue multiply too. As an example only, if a label design and first print cost ₹500.00 per jar size (replace with your printer's quote), three sizes cost ₹1,500.00 against ₹500.00 for one. Wick stock multiplies with size, and so does the burn testing each new size needs.

Spreading also muddies the result you wanted. If the 85 g tin outsells the 200 g jar, is that the size, the price, the look, or the fact that it was cheaper? With 20 candles each, you cannot tell. A launch in one jar tells you whether the scents sell. A second size added later, against a known baseline, tells you whether the size sells. How jar size affects cost, shipping weight and margin at ₹499, ₹799 and ₹1,199 is the pricing side of that later decision.

Choosing the one

We have no sales data by jar size, so this page will not tell you which size sells. What it can do is list the questions that decide it, all of which your test answers.

Once the jar is settled, every other purchase gets simpler. The 100-candle bill of materials, buying for 50 candles or the next batch and the ₹10,000 plan all assume one standard jar, because that is what makes a shopping list repeatable.

Frequently asked questions