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Candle making
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Selling it

Selling wholesale

By Dwight Davis, Founder

Updated

On this page5

Where the volume is, and where your testing discipline gets examined for the first time.

What a buyer asks

A line sheet with wholesale pricing, case quantities and a minimum.

A barcode, usually.

Liability insurance, often naming them.

Consistency: the reorder has to match the first order, on a shelf, side by side.

The safety questions are real

Candles are one of the few handmade categories where a buyer may ask directly whether you burn test, whether your labeling meets ASTM F2058, and whether your vessels are specified for candle use.

Larger retailers ask in writing. Some ask for test records.

Which is why the burn record is a commercial document as well as a safety one, and why "we test everything" without a sheet to show is a weak answer.

The margin has to work

Wholesale is conventionally half of retail. Work backwards from the shelf price rather than forwards from cost.

If half your retail price is below cost, the answer is a cheaper vessel or a higher retail price, decided before you approach anybody rather than after.

What breaks first

Cure time. A wholesale order with a two-week lead time and a two-week cure is a four-week commitment, and nobody accounts for the cure until they have promised a date.

Then vessel lead times, because a vessel substitution is a retest rather than a swap.

Then consistency, when batch two of a color sits beside batch one on a shelf and they do not match.

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.