My Candle Sales Double During Diwali — How Early Should I Start Increasing Wax, Fragrance Oil, Wick and Jar Inventory Before the Season?

Count back from 8 November

Every festive date on your calendar is Diwali minus something. The customer needs the candle before the day, so subtract a buffer. The courier needs time to deliver it, so subtract transit. The candle needs to cure before it ships, so subtract cure time. The materials need to arrive before you can pour, so subtract delivery. The durations below are working assumptions for illustration. Replace each with your own figure from last season, your courier and your own cure tests.

Cure deserves a word. How long a soy candle needs before its scent is at its best depends on the wax, the oil and your own standard. We are not publishing a cure figure as fact. The seven and fourteen days above are illustrations to show how much the choice moves your dates. A maker who ships at seven days has an extra week of pouring. A maker who holds for fourteen has to finish a week earlier. Use whatever your own cure tests have shown, and use it consistently.

Delivery of materials is the other unknown. CSI does not publish delivery times, and festive weeks are the busiest of the year for couriers and suppliers alike. The honest planning rule is to take your slowest delivery from last year's festive season, not your fastest from a quiet month, and to ask on WhatsApp for current timelines before you rely on a date.

How much more to buy

"Sales double" rarely means every material doubles for a full month. Here is the example we use. It is illustrative, so replace every number with your own. A maker selling 300 candles a month (10 a day) expects 20 a day from 1 October to Diwali, a 39-day window. All candles are 200 g at 8%, so each uses 184 g of wax and 16 g of oil, with a 4% allowance for pour loss and test burns (a working assumption; plan 3–5%).

So a doubled season in this example does not mean buying 780 candles' worth of materials. It means buying 420, because finished stock and materials already on the shelf cover the rest. That distinction is worth real money. At the example's material cost, the difference between buying for 780 and buying for 420 is several tens of thousands of rupees that never needed to leave the bank before Diwali.

Two things push the figure up, and you should check both. The first is gift sets and larger candles. If your festive range adds a 400 g jar or a three-candle box, write a separate kit for it, because a 400 g candle uses twice the wax and oil of the standard one. The second is corporate orders. A 200-candle corporate gifting order is not "sales doubling". It is a separate job with its own purchase, which A Customer Wants 500 Custom Candles — How Much Wax, Fragrance Oil, Wick and Jar Inventory Should I Buy Before Starting Production? and I Need to Produce 1,000 Candles for Diwali — How Much Additional Wax Should I Order Above the Calculated Requirement to Avoid Running Short? cover in detail.

Two orders, not one

Split the 420 extra candles into a firm order now and a conditional order at the checkpoint. We use roughly three-quarters now and a quarter later, which is a working assumption. Lean more on order 1 if last year's season was reliable, and more on order 2 if this is your first festive season.

The checkpoint is simple. By 9 October you have eight days of festive sales. If you are selling at or above 20 a day, place order 2 that day, because it still lands in time for the 17 October full-cure pour on our assumptions. If you are selling at 15 a day, skip it or halve it. At 15 a day the whole 39-day window is 585 candles, and the 60 finished candles, the stock on hand and order 1 already cover about 660. Either way, the decision is made on your data, not on September's hope.

Festive scents and pack sizes

The oils in order 1 are an example of a festive line-up built around warm, woody and Indian floral profiles, the kind of scents commonly chosen for Diwali gifting. That is reasoning, not a CSI sales statistic. Your own festive list should come from last year's October sales if you have them. We have not published throw measurements for any oil, so test anything new before it goes into a festive run.

Two stock notes for festive planning. Seven oils in the collection had no size in stock on the pull date, including Rajnigandha, Mogra and Spiced Rum, which are exactly the kind of scents a festive line-up might reach for. Check the product page before building your plan around an oil, and ask on WhatsApp for restock dates. A festive plan built on an out-of-stock oil is a plan that fails in the second week of October.

If you are reading this late

Every day after 29 September shortens the pour window, but it does not close the season. Here is how the plan changes as the calendar runs out, on the same assumptions.

The one thing not to do late is launch a new scent. A new scent needs a test pour, a cure and a burn before it goes into production. On the assumptions here, a new oil ordered on 6 October might be tested by the third week of the month, too late for a confident festive run. Late in the season, run proven scents harder. That is the wedding season's job too: November to February is the next demand peak, and the same backward calendar applies to it.

Next year's calendar

Diwali moves every year, so plan in weeks before the day rather than calendar dates. Here is the template, with 2026's dates shown for reference. Every interval is the same kind of working assumption as above.

After the season, record three figures while they are fresh: festive candles sold per scent, the date demand actually took off, and how much festive stock was left on 9 November. Those three numbers make next year's order 1 more accurate than any rule on this page. They also feed your demand ranking and the synchronised count for the months after the festival.

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