Which Fragrances Should I Choose for a 500-Piece Candle Gift Order?

One, two or three scents — side by side

If you have not yet chosen the format, wedding favour candles prices the small formats and the bulk supplier checklist covers what to confirm before a large order; the Diwali buying guide applies the same arithmetic to a mixed festive range. The working order on this page is 500 gift jars: White Matte Glass Jars at the series' 200 g working fill, 8% load (16 g of oil and 184 g of wax each), Luxury Soy Wax Chunks at ₹599.00 a kilo and one Eco Thin C1 wick. The table compares the three options with a 5% allowance for pour loss and test burns — a working assumption — and pack mixes chosen from in-stock sizes to cover each oil's grams.

Read the table in two halves. The top half is the oil, and it says the bill depends on which oils you choose, not how many: Vanilla Bean is ₹7.65 a gram at 1 kg, Orchard Pear ₹3.74 and Eucalyptus Spearmint ₹3.07, so replacing half or two-thirds of the Vanilla Bean with cheaper oils lowers the bill. Had the second scent been another premium oil, the bill would have stayed the same or risen. The bottom half is the overhead, and it only rises. More scents mean more candidates to test, more labels to design and print, more pour batches to run and clean between, and more opportunities to put the wrong candle in the wrong box.

The "whole kilos only" row shows what happens when a buyer skips the 100 g and 500 g top-ups and rounds every oil up to the next kilo. With one scent you are left with 600 g of Vanilla Bean; with two, 1,600 g across both; with three, 600 g. The leftover depends on where each scent's grams land against a whole kilo, and every extra scent is one more oil rounded up on its own. On CSI's listed catalogue, most oils cost the same per gram at 100 g as at 1 kg — for Vanilla Bean ₹7.90 against ₹7.65, for Orchard Pear ₹3.80 against ₹3.74 — so topping up with 100 g bottles is almost free and saves you buying stock you do not need.

Splitting the 500: 50/50, 60/40, thirds

An even split is not always right. If one scent is the clear favourite in your test, or the client wants a lead scent with a secondary option, weight the split. The tables show the grams and pack mixes for each common split, all at 8% in 200 g jars with 5% allowance.

Weighting the split toward the dearer oil raises the bill: 60/40 in favour of Vanilla Bean costs ₹3,498.00 more than 50/50, and 50/25/25 costs ₹5,436.98 more than equal thirds. That is not a reason to avoid weighting — if Vanilla Bean is what the recipients want, weight it — but it is a number to put in the quote. For the same maths at 1,000 pieces with corporate-neutral oils, see which fragrances for a 1,000-piece corporate order.

When recipients choose: the buffer

If your client hands candles out at an event and lets people choose, you cannot know the split in advance. One scent may run out while another sits on the table. The usual answer is to produce each scent to cover more than its even share. How much more is a judgement; as a working assumption, this page covers each scent for 65% of recipients with two scents and 45% with three. That is a planning figure, not data about how people choose.

The extra jars are not wasted — they become stock for your own range or the next order — but they are money spent before the event. With two scents the buffer is 150 jars; with three, 175. This is the strongest argument against three scents for a choose-your-own format, and a reason to confirm how the candles will be distributed before you quote. If the client insists on choice, two scents with a buffer usually beats three.

Picking the scents with a scoring sheet

With the count settled, choose the oils. For a mixed gift audience, the scents should come from different families so that a recipient who dislikes one is likely to accept the other: warm with fresh, or gourmand with floral. The example pairs a vanilla with a fresh fruit. The gifting hub maps families to recipient types. We have not published throw measurements for any oil, so the choice comes from your own side-by-side test. Pour each candidate from a 15 g tester into a 200 g jar at 7.5% (15 g of oil) or into a smaller jar at 8%, cure, and score on a sheet like this:

Weighting offence risk as heavily as scent strength is deliberate. A gift candle that one recipient in ten dislikes is a worse outcome than one that is slightly quieter but accepted by all. Use at least five people who are not candle makers on your test panel. And check stock before you finalise: an oil that wins the test but is out of stock at the size you need is not a choice. On the 24 September pull, Mogra and Rajnigandha are out of stock in every size; we do not publish restock dates.

The priced two-scent order

Here is the full order for the recommended option: 500 White Matte jars, 250 in Vanilla Bean and 250 in Orchard Pear, at 8% with 5% allowance on oil and wax, plus the four testers used to choose. Wax is 92,000 g, or 96,600 g with 5%.

That is ₹292.33 per jar in materials, before labour, gift packaging, freight and GST. The jars are ₹35,400.00 of it and the wax ₹58,184.00, together more than the oil. If the client's budget per jar is tight, the jar is where the saving is: the same order in 200 ml Salsa jars at ₹29.50 each would save ₹20,650.00 on containers, though the Salsa jar's fill is not published and would need weighing. For corporate paperwork on an order this size, see corporate gift candles; for a quote beyond the listed packs, the wholesale route.

Frequently asked questions