Raw Materials Required to Make 100 Scented Candles

The whole order on one screen

Here is a hundred candles as a purchase order. The candle being costed is a 150 g soy fill in a lidded glass jar, scented at 8% of wax weight, single wick, one colour. The Clear Glass Jar with Golden Lid page gives a 150 g fill capacity, 8 cm height with the lid on and a 7 cm outer rim, and describes it as hot-pour safe to 85°C — which sits comfortably above the 75–80°C pour temperature the Luxury Soy Wax Chunks page asks for. Every quantity below already carries its allowance, and every pack below is a variant that exists on the store today.

Two numbers come out of that table and they are not the same number. The order is ₹27,968.68, which is ₹279.69 a candle. The consumption — what the hundred finished candles actually contain — is ₹25,511.92, or ₹255.12 a candle. Quote your customer from the second figure and reconcile your bank balance with the first. Mixing them up is the single most common arithmetic mistake in a first production run, and it always flatters the candle.

The jar is doing most of the work in that total. At ₹94.40 it is 37% of the consumed cost of the candle, more than the wax and fragrance together. That is not a reason to avoid it — a lidded apothecary jar is what lets a handmade candle sell as a gift — but it is a reason to decide the vessel before you decide anything else. Swap to the Clear Glass Votive Jar 70 gram at ₹31.86 and 110 vessels cost ₹6,879.40 less, though you are then making a 70 g candle, not a 150 g one, and a smaller candle changes the wax line too.

From 150 g a candle to the number you actually order

Every quantity on the list above came out of the same four-step calculation. It is worth doing longhand once, because after that you can re-run it for any fill size, any load and any count in about two minutes.

Run those four steps on a different candle and the whole sheet moves. A 100 g fill drops the wax line to 11 kg bought — two 5 kg bags plus a 1 kg bag, ₹6,589.00, the smallest combination that covers the 10.5 kg requirement. A 200 g fill takes the wax line to 21 kg. The proportions matter more than the absolute numbers: on the 150 g candle costed here, wax is 35% of the consumed cost, fragrance 22%, the jar 37%, and everything else together 6%.

Where a bigger pack saves money — and where it saves nothing

Not every product on a supply store rewards volume. Some lines have a genuinely falling rate as the pack grows, some are flat from the smallest sensible pack upwards, and one or two are marginally dearer at the top. You cannot know which is which without looking, so look before you build the order.

Read the wax row carefully, because it is the one people get wrong. The 1 kg and 5 kg packs of Luxury Soy Wax Chunks both work out to ₹599.00 a kilogram, and the 10 kg pack works out to ₹599.90. Over the 16 kg this run needs, taking a 10 kg bag plus a 5 kg plus a 1 kg costs ₹9,593.00 against ₹9,584.00 for three 5 kg bags plus a 1 kg — a difference of ₹9.00. That is small enough that handling should decide it: one 10 kg bag is easier to store and harder to lift onto a kitchen counter, three 5 kg bags are easier to work with and easier to keep sealed. What matters is that you checked rather than assumed.

The fragrance row is where the real money sits. Apple Cinnamon runs at ₹4.74 a gram from the 50 gm pack all the way to 1 kg, so there is nothing to gain by over-buying. Compare that with Citrus Lemon, where the rate falls from ₹5.43 a gram at 15 gm to ₹2.83 at 1 kg — a line where reaching for the bigger pack genuinely pays. The general rule is not "buy big", it is "check the per-gram rate on the product page and buy the combination that covers your requirement with the least excess, unless the rate is falling."

Check the depth before you build the order round a pack

At a hundred candles you are usually inside CSI's listed depth on every line, but not always by much, and the pack you plan the order around should be one with room behind it. Two examples from this very list. The Eco Candle Wicks Thin (C1) 100-wick pack and the 50-wick pack carry the same ₹5.90 rate, but the listed depth behind them is different; building the order on two 50s plus a 10 gets you the same 110 wicks at the same ₹649.00 with more room behind it. The Clear Glass Jar with Golden Lid is listed in packs of ten and packs of twenty at the identical ₹94.40, and the pack of ten is listed far more deeply — so eleven packs of ten is the order that goes through cleanly.

The same logic applies to the fragrance. Apple Cinnamon is listed in 15 gm, 50 gm, 100 gm, 500 gm and 1 kg, and the listed depth is not even across those variants. Since the per-gram rate is flat from 50 gm upward, there is no penalty in composing 1,300 g from a 1 kg and three 100 gm bottles rather than from a 1 kg and a 500 gm — and the deeper variants make the order more likely to ship complete. Where a variant you want is thin, the right move is not to abandon the scent but to send the list on WhatsApp and ask.

Ordered, consumed, left over: three different numbers

This is the part of a hundred-candle order that nobody writes down, and it is the part that decides whether your second run looks cheaper than your first. You spent ₹27,968.68. Your hundred candles contain ₹25,511.92. The remaining ₹2,456.76 did not evaporate — it is sitting on a shelf in a form you can pour next month.

Three practical consequences follow. First, price the candle at ₹255.12 plus your own rows, not at ₹279.69 — otherwise you are asking your first hundred customers to pay for stock they will never receive. Second, when you run the same hundred candles again, the order is smaller: the wax, the jars, the wicks and the stickers all start from a part-used shelf, and the care sticker roll will not need replacing for four more runs. Third, if you are never going to pour that scent again, the leftover is not stock at all — it is a sunk cost, and it belongs in the price of these hundred candles. Be honest with yourself about which of those three you are looking at.

There is one line on that table that deserves a second look: the dye. It is the only figure on this page that cannot be derived from a published number, because no dosage per candle is printed. This sheet assumes one 50 gm bottle colours a hundred candles, which puts ₹4.72 a candle in the stack. That is an assumption, and the way to replace it with a fact is to note the bottle level before and after your first hundred. Drop the dye entirely and the consumed cost falls to ₹250.40 a candle, which is a perfectly good reason to launch a first collection in uncoloured wax.

The four rows CSI cannot fill for you

A hundred candles do not go out of your door as a hundred candles. They go out as a hundred labelled, boxed, padded, couriered units, made by somebody whose time has a value. CSI sells wax, fragrance, wicks, vessels, dyes, finishing items and tools. It does not sell printed labels, mailers, cartons, bubble wrap, ribbon, tissue or courier services, and it publishes no rates for freight, labour, electricity or marketing. Putting a plausible number in those rows would make this page look more complete and make your pricing worse, so the rows stay blank.

Two of those rows are worth a warning at this exact volume. The first is labels: a hundred is an awkward print quantity, often priced close to five hundred, which is why many small Indian brands print five hundred and hold four hundred. If you do that, the cost of this run's labels is not one-fifth of the invoice — it is the whole invoice unless you are certain the other four hundred will be used. The second is outbound courier, which at a hundred units is usually the largest single line on the whole sheet if you are shipping direct to customers, and close to trivial if you are handing the run to one corporate buyer. The same hundred candles can have wildly different true costs depending on who receives them.

None of this is a reason to despair of costing. It is a reason to keep the two halves separate. CSI materials are knowable to the paisa and will not surprise you. Your own rows vary by city, by courier, by print run and by how you value your Sunday. Keep them in their own block, total them separately, and add the two totals at the bottom.

Nine checks before you press pay

One: is the fill weight confirmed on a scale? The jar page says 150 g and this sheet trusts it, but a single poured-and-weighed jar turns a published capacity into your own measured number. Two: is the load applied to wax weight? 8% of 150 g is 12 g of oil. If your sheet says 12.96 g you have used the other convention and the fragrance line is 8% too big. Three: is the load inside both ceilings? The Chunks page allows up to 13% of total wax weight; the Apple Cinnamon page states 6–10% for soy candles. The lower figure governs, so anything up to 10% is inside both, and 8% leaves room to push the scent up after your test burns.

Four: are the allowances written down? 5% wastage and 4% spares are assumptions on this page, and they should be visible cells in your sheet, not hidden inside a total. Five: is every pack on the list actually a variant? Wishing for a 2 kg bag of wax does not create one. Six: is the depth behind each pack comfortable? Eleven packs of jars needs eleven packs listed, not eleven jars. Seven: is it one consignment? Splitting the order splits your courier cost, which is a row CSI cannot help you with.

Eight: have you allowed cure time? Soy container candles are commonly given 14–21 days before they are judged for throw, and the Luxury Soy Wax Chunks page asks for a minimum of 48 hours and ideally one to two weeks. A hundred candles poured on the day of a market are a hundred candles that will not smell like themselves. Nine: does the sheet end in two totals? ₹27,968.68 of CSI materials, and your own rows underneath. If your sheet ends in one number, something in it is invented.

Once those nine hold, the order is boring — which is the goal. You will know before you click that the run will produce a hundred sellable candles plus a handful of spares, that it will consume ₹255.12 of materials per candle, that roughly ₹2,456.76 of what you are buying will still be yours afterwards, and that the only numbers you still owe yourself are the four you have to get from your printer, your packaging supplier, your courier and your own diary.

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