The Real Cost
Everything the raw-material spreadsheet forgets.
The first time I costed a candle honestly I nearly stopped making them. I had been telling myself I sold at a profit for two years. I had not. I had sold at a wage of about $3.81 an hour, which is not a business, it is a hobby with a shopfront.
The exploded view opposite is the drawing I wish someone had put in front of me on day one. Every line is a real cost, priced against the suppliers linked in the resources index. None of it is padded.
The lines beginners forget
Wax, fragrance, wick and vessel are the four costs everyone sees. The other five are the ones that quietly eat the margin. Warning stickers, printed labels, boxes, tissue and the wick tab you order in bags of a thousand. Add them up on a single candle and it is around $2.54, which is roughly the difference between a job and a wage.
Then there is electricity. A standard wax melter draws about 0.18 kWh/kg of wax. At the EIA rate that works out at roughly 3 cents per kg, about 1 cent on a 200 g candle. Trivial per unit, meaningful when you pour a hundred.
Labour is not free
The line that makes people flinch is labour. If you pour, wick, label, box and photograph a candle in 15 minutes and you value your time at $15 an hour, that is $3.81 of labour per unit. If you refuse to book it, your pricing is subsidised by your evenings.
The overhead worksheet
The studio overhead worksheet on this spread turns rent, insurance, packaging you buy in bulk, and any regional label admin fee into a per-candle number. Divide the annual total by the units you honestly expect to make in a year. If that number scares you, cut units, not costs.
Feed those numbers into the maker log at /account and the cost engine will carry the overhead into every recipe automatically. You never have to remember it again.
A price that ignores your overhead is not a price. It is a donation to your customers.
- Wax, fragrance, wick, vessel priced at real supplier rates
- Warning sticker, printed label, box, tissue, wick tab added per unit
- Electricity per kg of wax poured, at the local kWh rate
- Labour booked at the rate you would pay a hire, not a favour
- Studio overhead allocated per unit against honest annual volume
| Symptom | Likely cause | Fix | Prevent |
|---|---|---|---|
| Margin looks fine on paper, bank balance disagrees. | Overhead and labour not booked into the per-unit cost. | Feed rent, insurance, packaging and labour into the studio overhead worksheet and let the cost engine carry them. | Reconcile studio overhead against actual bank spend every quarter; rebuild the per-unit allocation whenever annual volume forecast shifts by more than 10%. |
| COGS varies wildly between batches of the same recipe. | Supplier price drift on wax or fragrance is not being repriced. | Reprice every SKU quarterly against current supplier invoices; keep the last three invoices in the batch record. | Diarise a quarterly SKU reprice; attach each new supplier invoice to the batch record on arrival, not at year-end. |