Working out what to charge

By Dwight Davis, Founder

Updated October 2026

On this page5

Cost per candle Worked example From cost to price The sanity check References

Done once, properly, before the range is priced rather than after.

Cost per candle

Per unit: vessel, lid, wick, wick sticker, label, band, share of the carton.

Then wax at cost per ounce times ounces, fragrance the same, dye.

Then labor at your rate divided by finished candles per hour: poured, cured, trimmed, cleaned, labeled, banded and boxed.

And a share of the test candles, which are real cost producing no revenue. Amortize them across the production run of that fragrance.

Worked example

Suppose a 9 oz candle: vessel and lid 2.40, wick and sticker 0.15, label and band 0.30, carton share 0.20. Packaging 3.05.

Wax at 6.0 oz and fragrance at 0.5 oz: call it 1.10.

Finishing 30 candles an hour at 25 an hour: 0.83.

Unit cost about 4.98, plus overhead and testing amortization, call it 5.60.

Note the shape: the vessel and lid are more than half, and the fragrance everyone obsesses over is a fraction. That is the real lever.

From cost to price

Wholesale has to clear cost with a real margin. Retail is conventionally about double wholesale.

So set wholesale first, double it, then sanity-check the retail number against what the category actually sells at in your channel.

If it is above the band, the vessel has to change. If it is well below, you have a premium position you are not charging for.

The sanity check

A real week: hours worked, candles finished, gross margin per candle. Multiply.

If the week's margin is not a week's pay, the answer is a higher price point through the vessel, or wholesale volume, not working faster.

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.