I have about 250 saved and a craft fair booked in eight weeks, and I want to turn up with roughly fifty 8oz amber jars. I already own a kitchen scale, a saucepan and a thermometer. What I cannot work out from supplier sites is whether 250 is comfortable, tight, or a joke, because every list I find quietly forgets shipping, testing burns and the boxes. Numbers from your own first run are what I am after, not a shopping list.
Politely disagreeing with the framing. You asked what fifty candles cost, but the real question is what fifty sellable candles cost, and the answer includes about four weeks of testing before you pour any of them. Eight weeks is genuinely tight if you have never poured. I would buy materials for twenty test candles now, in one fragrance, and only order jars in bulk once you know your wick size. Ordering fifty jars before you have a working recipe is how people end up with fifty jars of something they cannot sell.
Twenty five good ones outsell fifty inconsistent ones and you carry half the weight. Bring a sign up sheet for the ones you run out of.
That is a bit deflating but probably right. Would you still aim for fifty at the fair or just show up with twenty five?
The line item nobody budgets: warning labels, and a scale that reads to a single gram. Labels are cheap and boring, and in a lot of places you are expected to have them on anything you sell, so check what your local trading standards actually ask for well before the fair rather than the night before. The scale matters because at 8oz you are measuring fragrance in single grams, and a scale that rounds to five makes every jar a different candle.
Jars and shipping will be more than half your total. Wax is the cheapest thing in the box. Budget for burning ten of the fifty and selling none of them.
Ten of fifty sounds harsh until you have done it. Every wax and fragrance pairing needs burning before you sell it, and you cannot sell a jar you have burned.
And test in the jar you will actually sell. A test burn in a different vessel tells you almost nothing about the one on the table.
I bought a starter kit for my first batch and would not again. The wax was fine, the fragrances were weak, and the wicks were one size that suited none of my jars. Buying the same components separately from a single supplier came out cheaper per candle and let me choose the wick series. The one thing the kit genuinely saved me was a pouring pitcher, which you do want, and which a saucepan is a poor substitute for once you are doing batches.
One more that stings: card payments at the stall take a percentage, and the pitch fee for the fair itself is often more than the wax for your entire run. Neither is candle making and both come out of the same 250.
@batch_bea · 4mo ago
I kept every receipt from my first run of sixty jars because I wanted to know whether this was a hobby or a business. Rough proportions, since prices move and mine are not your currency anyway.
Wax was about 15 percent of total spend. Fragrance oils about 20 percent, and that was with only three scents. Jars with lids about 30 percent. Wicks, stickers and warning labels about 8 percent. Shipping across three separate orders, because I forgot things twice, about 20 percent, which still annoys me. Boxes and tissue for the stall took the rest.
The lesson is not the numbers, it is that one consolidated order would have saved me a real chunk, and that three fragrances was the right call. Everyone I know who bought twelve first time round still has nine of them.
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