How to price candles for wholesale

What a wholesale price has to do

Wholesale is what a shop pays to buy your candles in bulk and sell them on. It isn't a discount you're giving a nice customer. It's a different job at a different price, and the shop is doing real work for its half: paying rent somewhere with a door on a street, staffing the counter, and tying up its own cash in your stock months before any of it sells.

The number they'll expect is half your retail price. That lands like a slap the first time you hear it, and plenty of makers come back with something like thirty percent off instead. Almost all of those conversations end the same way, because a shop can't pay seventy percent of retail and still make a living after it doubles the price for its own shelf.

Which is the uncomfortable bit worth sitting with. Wholesale doesn't really squeeze your margin so much as tell you whether your retail price was ever high enough. If you set retail at four times cost, you've got room to sell at half and it's fine. If you set it at two and a half times cost, you're about to work for nothing and you won't find out until the invoice lands.

The keystone rule, and why 2x is a floor

Keystone is the old retail word for doubling. The shop buys from you and doubles it to get the shelf price, so your wholesale number has to be half of whatever you want the candle to sell for in there. Run it the other way and it's easy to hold in your head: cost times two is wholesale, cost times four is retail, and the shop's doubling lands the customer at about your own retail price.

1. Work out your true cost per candle, counting materials, your labour, overhead and packaging.
2. Double it. That's your wholesale price.
3. Double it again. That's your retail price, and roughly what the shop will charge as well.
4. Check your own retail price matches. If someone can buy the same candle cheaper from you than from the shop stocking you, that shop will stop stocking you.

Two times cost is a floor rather than a target. It's the point where a wholesale order is worth doing at all, and it only works because volume does the job margin usually does. You pour more candles per hour of admin, you post one box instead of forty, and nobody's taking a marketplace cut out of every sale. Go below it and volume stops covering the difference.

Watch out. If your wholesale price comes out under what the candle costs you to make, don't take the order and plan to make it up on volume. Losing a dollar a candle loses you more money the more candles you sell.

A worked example, one candle at a time

Here's a bog standard 8 oz soy candle in a glass jar, poured twelve at a time, with an hour and a half of work in the batch at $20 an hour. Everything below is per candle, because that's the only unit that matters the moment a shop asks you for a price.

Nine dollars is the floor underneath everything else. Wholesale at twice cost is $18.00, retail at four times cost is $36.00, and the shop buying at $18.00 puts it out at around $36.00 too. Nobody's undercut and the customer sees one price for your candle wherever they run into it.

Now watch what a bigger batch does. Pouring twenty four instead of twelve takes maybe two hours rather than one and a half, so your labour per candle drops from $2.50 to about $1.67 and your cost lands near $8.10. That's nearly a dollar a candle found by planning rather than by buying anything cheaper, and across a hundred candle order it's the difference between a decent month and a good one.

Tip. Put your own supplier prices into the candle calculator and change the batch size while you watch the cost per candle move. Every wholesale decision you make hangs off that one number.

Setting a minimum order that pays

A wholesale order comes with a pile of costs that have nothing to do with candles. Writing the invoice, packing the box, getting to the post office, chasing the payment a month later. On a twelve candle order all of that eats the margin you just carefully worked out. On a sixty candle order it disappears into it.

That's what a minimum order is for. Most small candle makers land somewhere between $150 and $300 at wholesale prices, which at $18.00 a candle is about eight to seventeen candles. Set yours by working out what one order costs you in admin, then picking the size where that stops mattering.

• A first order minimum, usually the higher one, because a new stockist is the most work you'll ever do for them.
• A reorder minimum, lower, to keep the easy repeat business easy.
• A case size, if you'd rather candles went out in sixes than in ones and twos.

What belongs on a line sheet

A line sheet is the one page a buyer needs to place an order. It isn't a lookbook and it doesn't have to be beautiful. It has to be clear enough that a shop owner can decide in two minutes and order without emailing you three follow up questions.

• Every product, with its scent name, size and a small photograph.
• Wholesale price per unit, with the suggested retail price sitting next to it.
• Your minimum order and case size.
• Lead time, meaning how long between them ordering and the box turning up.
• Payment terms, and whether a new stockist pays up front.
• Your name, email and the date, so an old sheet can't be quoted back at you in eight months.

Printing the suggested retail next to your wholesale price does two useful things at once. It shows the buyer their margin without making them do any arithmetic, and it quietly asks them to keep their shelf price roughly in line with yours.

When to turn an order down

The hardest skill in wholesale is saying no to a real order from a real shop that genuinely likes your candles. It always feels like turning down money. Sometimes it's turning down a loss with a friendly email attached.

• The price they want is under twice your cost and they won't move.
• The quantity is enormous but the deadline means paying yourself overtime you never priced in.
• They want regional exclusivity without the volume to make up for every other shop you now can't sell to.
• They want sale or return, so you carry all the risk on unsold stock and they carry none.
• Payment terms run to ninety days and you have to buy the wax this week.

None of these has to end the conversation. A shop pushing for a lower price will often take a smaller range instead, or a bigger order at your actual price, or a longer lead time that lets you pour it all in one efficient go. Offer the version that works for you and let them choose. A shop that only works out when you're losing money will cost you more the longer you keep them.