Should I Keep the Same Number of Months of Inventory for Wax, Fragrance Oil, Wicks and Jars or Manage Each Material Differently?

Why one number for four materials is the costly option

A single cover number feels like a policy because it is easy to say and easy to audit. The trouble is that it answers a question nobody asked. The question is never "how much inventory should I hold?" It is "what would it cost me if this specific thing ran out, and what does it cost me to make sure it doesn't?" Those two costs are wildly different for wax, fragrance oil, wicks and jars, and a single number quietly assumes they are identical.

Start with the damage side. Production stops at whichever material runs out first — that is the binding constraint, and it is the whole reason this cluster exists. But "stops" means different things per line. In the worked business below there are twelve SKUs sharing one wax. If the wax is out, twelve of twelve stop. There are two jar formats, six SKUs each: a jar stock-out stops six of twelve. There are two wick sizes, with the Thin (C1) in ten SKUs: ten of twelve. And there are six fragrance oils, each in two SKUs: two of twelve. The exposure ranges from 100% of your output to 17% of it, across materials you were about to cover identically.

Now the cost side, which runs in almost the opposite direction. Per candle, this business spends ₹110.82 on wax, ₹77.55 on fragrance oil (at Lavender's 500 g rate), ₹70.80 on the jar and ₹5.90 on the wick — ₹265.07 of material in a 200 g-class candle. The wick is 2.2% of that. So the item that gates ten of twelve SKUs is also the one where a year of cover would barely register on your bank statement, and the item that gates two SKUs is the second most expensive thing in the candle. Hold those two to the same number of months and you are simultaneously under-insuring the cheap critical part and over-funding the expensive optional one.

There is one more asymmetry, and it is the one makers discover painfully. A fragrance stock-out is partly recoverable; a wax or wick stock-out is not. If Jasmine is out, you pour the eleven other SKUs this week and the Jasmine orders slip. If the wax is out, the workshop is idle and every order slips. Recoverable risk deserves thinner cover, because you still have a business during the gap. That single distinction is worth more than any formula on this page.

The four consumption lines, converted

Everything below rests on one set of stated assumptions, so they are spelled out before any arithmetic. The reader sells 300 candles a month across 12 SKUs, pours a 200 g-class candle with a 185 g wax fill at 8% of total wax weight — which is 14.8 g of fragrance oil, or about 7.4% of the finished 199.8 g — works 20 days a month, buys one wax, six fragrance oils, two wick sizes and two jar formats, and has observed lead times of 7 days on wax, 10 on fragrance, 7 on wicks and 14 on jars. Those lead times are the reader's own record of past orders, not a CSI commitment; CSI publishes no delivery times.

Convert monthly sales into daily consumption, then into a reorder point. The standard formula is reorder point = average daily consumption × lead-time days + safety stock. The safety-stock column is left at zero here on purpose: the point of this table is to show how far apart the four lines already are before you add any buffer at all.

Read the last two columns together and the policy writes itself. The jar has the longest lead time and the second-highest exposure, so its reorder point is already 70% of a whole month's consumption before safety stock. The fragrance line has the longest lead time of the consumables but the smallest exposure. And the wick — the thing most makers reorder last, in a panic — needs only 84 pieces on the shelf to survive a full lead time, which is less than one listed 100-pack.

What one month of each material actually costs

Here is the same month priced at CSI live September 2026 figures. Every rate names the listed pack it comes from, so you can check it on the product page. Wax is valued at ₹599 per kg, which is the listed 1 kg price and also the 5 kg pack rate (₹2,995 ÷ 5). Fragrance oils are valued at each oil's listed 500 g rate. Wicks are valued at the listed 100-piece rate — ₹5.90 for Thin (C1), ₹9.44 for Thick (C2) — which happens to be the rate at every C1 and C2 pack from 10 to 1,000. Jars are the White Matte Glass Jar at ₹70.80 each, again the same in the 5-pack and the 10-pack.

The two columns on the right are the whole argument. Wax and jars are 71.8% of the cash and 100% and 50% of the exposure respectively. Wicks are 2.6% of the cash and 83% of the exposure. Fragrance sits in between on cash and at the bottom on exposure. If you were allowed only one sentence of inventory policy, it would be: spend freely on the cheap thing that gates everything, and keep a tight leash on the dear thing that gates one product.

The four targets, and the ₹59,110 they release

Below are the two policies side by side. The uniform policy holds three months of all four lines. The four-line policy holds three months of wax, one month of each fragrance oil, four months of Thin (C1) and two of Thick (C2), and two months of jars. Note what it does not do: it does not reduce wax cover, and it increases the cover on the wick that sits in ten of twelve SKUs. Every rupee released comes from fragrance and jars — the two lines whose stock-out is recoverable or partial.

That is a 26.0% reduction in raw-material cash with better protection on the two lines that can idle the workshop. The reason it works is that months of cover are not a measure of safety — they are a measure of how long you could keep going, and keeping going requires every line at once. Three months of a fragrance oil you use 740 g of per month buys you nothing on the day the wax runs out. The 4 months of C1 is not generosity either; at ₹5.90 a piece it costs ₹1,416 more than three months, which is the price of five candles. The policy is simply buying protection where protection is cheap.

What to buy deep, what to buy shallow

Four cards, one per line, each showing every listed pack with its per-unit rate and how many 185 g candles it covers. Read the per-unit column before you decide how deep to go: where it is flat, depth costs you nothing but shelf space; where it steps, depth has a price and must be justified by exposure.

Building the four-line policy in one sitting

This takes about an hour with last month's sales and your own order history. The output is five numbers per material line — daily use, lead time, reorder point, cover target, rupee value — on one sheet you can reprice in minutes.

When to change the numbers

Four events should move a target, and nothing else should. Everything else — a good week, a bad week, a nervous Sunday evening — is noise, and reacting to noise is how a tidy policy turns back into "buy more of whatever we nearly ran out of last".

The last row is the one worth tattooing somewhere. Most "we need more inventory" conclusions are really "we reordered late", and buying a month of extra stock to paper over a missed reorder costs real money and fixes nothing. Check the reorder date before you check the shelf. If the reorder point was right and was hit and nobody acted, the policy was never the problem.

Frequently asked questions