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Growing the operation

Making more of it

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Three things limit output here and the melting capacity is the last of them.

The constraints, in order

The pour window. Wax has to be poured inside a temperature range, which caps how many vessels one pot fills.

Curing space. Two weeks of production sitting somewhere stable.

Finishing hours. Trimming, cleaning, labeling, banding and boxing, which usually exceed pouring.

Melting capacity comes fourth and it is what people buy first.

More pots, not a bigger one

Two or three pouring pots staggered, one filling while another comes to temperature, multiplies throughput for very little money.

A large melter is useful as a reservoir feeding those pots, not as the thing you pour from: pouring directly out of a tank means the last vessels are filled well below the first ones' temperature.

Curing space is the hidden one

Every candle occupies a shelf for a two weeks. Doubling output doubles the shelving, and it has to be stable, dark and lidded.

Makers scaling up discover this when the cure shelf overflows into the pouring area, and cross contamination of scent starts.

Plan the storage before the production increase, not after.

The step change

There is a real discontinuity somewhere in the low thousands per run, where hand pouring and hand finishing stop scaling however well organized you are.

The options there are a semi-automatic filling setup, or a co-packer. The second is usually cheaper until the volume is proven.

What does not work is pushing hand production past it: quality drops in the visible places, crooked wicks, uneven fills, marked glass, which is the opposite of what a growing wholesale relationship needs.

References

No published source. This page is written from practice rather than from published guidance. No extension service or agency publishes on this question for candles, so nothing here is cited, and it should be weighed as experience and not as a standard.
Written from the federal regulation, the CPSC material and the published scope of the ASTM candle standards. The standards themselves are copyrighted documents that must be bought; what is described here is their scope and requirements as published, not their text. Your own burn testing against your own vessel and wick is what establishes whether a candle you made is safe.