Free tool
True cost per candle or bar, and your wholesale floor
Enter what goes into one finished unit and see the cost that survives cure loss, seconds and your own labor, plus the lowest wholesale price that still leaves room.
Free tool, no sign up
How many units can you cure and ship before the deadline
Put in your batch size, your finishing minutes and your cure rule, and see how many units your studio can honestly promise before the last shipping day.
Peak season overselling almost never comes from a lack of demand or a lack of wax. It comes from cure math. A candle poured on the fifteenth with a two week cure cannot ship on the twentieth, no matter how many hours you are willing to work, and a cold process bar poured in late November will not be ready for a Christmas order at all.
This planner treats cure days as a hard wall and studio hours as the other limit. It gives you the hours one batch consumes from melt through packing, the units a normal week produces at that rate, and the pour window you still have left before the cure clock runs past your last ship date.
Your result
Studio hours per batch
4.0
From cold pot to packed units, including all the finishing on that batch.
Units you can finish per week
240
Whole batches only, because half a melt does not become sellable units.
Pour days left before the cure wall
21
After this many days, anything poured cannot finish curing in time.
Units that can still cure and ship
720
Your honest ceiling for the season unless you add hours or shorten cure.
Take ten percent off this ceiling before you publish a number, because a fragrance backorder or one bad melt eats a whole pour day.
Cure days are a wall, not a preference
Hours are negotiable and cure days are not. You can find another four hours in a week by finishing labels at night. You cannot make a cold process bar safe and hard in nine days because a customer wants it. The planner subtracts cure from your deadline first for exactly that reason, and what remains is the real pour window.
That is why the last useful pour day is the number to write on the studio wall. Once it passes, every extra hour you work should go into finishing, labeling and packing what is already on the rack rather than starting another melt that will still be soft when the shipping cutoff arrives.
Where the hours actually go
Run the planner with a bigger batch and watch what happens. Setup time is fixed per batch, so pouring ninety six units instead of forty eight spreads that seventy five minutes across twice the output. Finishing minutes do not spread at all, because every single unit still needs a trimmed wick, a label and a box.
That is the practical lesson of a peak week. Bigger melts help a little, and shaving one minute off finishing helps a lot. Preprinted labels from batch data, a wrapping station set up once and left standing, and cutting a whole loaf in one sitting are what move the weekly number.
Questions about this calculator
What cure time should I use for candles?
Soy and soy blends generally benefit from one to two weeks before the scent throw settles, and many makers use fourteen days as a working rule. Paraffin and coconut blends often need less. Use whatever your own burn tests support and record it per product so the ready date is consistent.
My batches vary in size. What do I enter?
Use your most common batch, then run it again for your largest. The gap between the two answers tells you how much capacity you gain by standardizing on the bigger melt. Most studios find one or two batch sizes cover the majority of a season.
Does this account for markets and wholesale at the same time?
It gives you a total unit ceiling, not an allocation. Take the shippable figure, subtract what your stockist orders already commit, and what remains is what you can safely bring to markets or sell online. Committing the same units twice is the most common peak season mistake.
More free tools and working documents
Working document
The batch record and label release checklist
Four stages, twenty checks, covering everything that has to be captured between opening a wax carton and handing a labeled unit to a customer.
That number, taken from your own pours
The figure above is only as sound as the wax price, fragrance load and reject estimate you fed it. Once every carton and bottle is recorded against a batch, the same calculation runs off real scale weights and the units you actually set aside. Ask for a demo and see the version that recalculates itself the morning after each pour.