Refill and Subscription

A refill programme (a candle poured into a vessel the customer already owns) turns a one-off sale into a repeat-purchase engine and cuts your per-unit COGS by the price of the glass. A subscription (a candle a month, or a discovery box a quarter) does the same thing on a schedule you can plan production against.

Neither is worth the operational overhead below roughly 20 orders a month. Refills need a return-and-refill logistics loop, subscriptions need a recurring-billing surface and a churn management habit. Under 20 orders a month you should be pouring, testing and improving. Above 20, the compounding return on retention starts to outweigh acquisition.

Honest churn numbers

Consumer-goods subscriptions with monthly billing are widely reported to churn in the region of 10 percent a month or more in the first year (see for example the Recurly and Zuora subscription benchmarks). Candle subscriptions tend to sit at the higher end of that range. Skip-a-shipment options, quarterly rather than monthly billing, and a genuinely surprising scent each month all pull churn down, but expect to lose a meaningful share of subscribers over the first six months and plan the economics around that, not around a best case.

Refills tend to churn less because the customer already owns the vessel and has a physical reminder on their shelf. I do not have public retention numbers I trust to quote here, but in my own shop, refills repeat more often than a fresh candle sale to the same customer. Measure it on your own orders before you build a forecast on it.