Waxmelt making - How To Cut Fragrance Oil Costs Using A Simple Spreadsheet
- Billy Giles
- 6 days ago
- 8 min read
If you make and sell wax melts, there is a good chance you are spending more than you need to on fragrance oils.
When I was growing Shelley's Waxmelts—from making batches at home, to a market stall, and eventually to our own shop—I needed a real competitive edge. Alongside printing our own labels (Read about printing your own product labels here), my biggest breakthrough came from applying a corporate supply-chain method called ABC Inventory Analysis to the way I bought fragrance oil.
I started tracking fragrance oil usage down to the millilitre. It sounds like a lot of effort, but in practice it takes minutes and the difference it makes to your profit is significant.
The goal was simple: bulk buy the oils I used most, avoid sitting on dead stock, and make sure every penny I spent on fragrance was working as hard as possible.
Combined with making our own labels this really helped give us a tremendous competitive edge over our local competitors and it can do the same for you.
I have included a free Spreadsheet within this guide so you can download a copy and start saving money and maximising your profits right away!
Why Fragrance Oil Pricing Matters So Much
Fragrance oil gets cheaper the more you buy. Here is what the average pricing looks like across the main UK trade suppliers:
Moving from a 100ml bottle to a 1 Litre bottle of the same oil cuts your cost per millilitre by nearly 42%. Across a range of 100 scents, that gap adds up to thousands of pounds a year.
The problem is knowing which scents are worth buying in bulk and which are not. Without real data, most sellers either play it safe and buy everything in small bottles — paying the highest price on everything — or they bulk order the wrong scents and end up with bottles they cannot shift. Both mistakes cost money.
How the System Works
The system uses two simple tables inside one spreadsheet. I will be providing a copy of the spreadsheet for you to download — all you need to do is fill it in. Keep a backup copy in case you accidentally overwrite a formula or enter the wrong figures.
Table 1: The Order Log -TAB ONE
Every time a fragrance oil order arrives, log it. Scent names go down the left-hand column. The bottle size — whether 100ml, 500ml, or 1 Litre (enter as 1000ml) — goes into the next column along. A simple SUM formula gives you a running total of every millilitre you have ever bought of each scent.
Table 2: The Stock Take - TAB 2
Do a complete stock take before buying your next batch of fragrance oil.
This is where the kitchen scale comes in!
Trying to judge how much oil is left in a dark plastic bottle by looking at it simply does not work.
In General fragrance oil has the same density as water. That means 1 gram equals 1 millilitre.
Step 1: Log Your Orders (Sheet 1)
When a new fragrance oil delivery arrives, open up the 1 - Order Log tab.
Find the scent name down the left side (Column A). If it’s a brand-new scent, just type it into the next empty row at the bottom.
Look across to the next empty Order column and type in the size of the bottle you bought in milliliters (e.g., 100, 500, or 1000).
The Spreadsheet Math: The sheet automatically adds these up in the TOTAL BOUGHT column so you can track your historical purchases over 25 individual orders.
Step 2: Do a Quick Stock Take (Sheet 2)
Every few weeks, grab your open oil bottles and a digital kitchen scale, then head to the 2 - Stock Take & Usage tab.
The 1g = 1ml one gram on your scale equals one milliliter of oil.
The Baseline: Weigh an empty plastic bottle first to get your baseline container weight (usually between 15g and 25g depending on your supplier).
The Entry: Pop your scent bottle or multiple bottles on the scale, subtract the empty bottle weight, and type that final number directly into the yellow Stock In Hand (ml) column.
Example: If the scale reads 360g and your empty bottle is 20g, you have 340ml left. Type 340 into the yellow box.
Step 3: Act on the Automatic Data
The moment you type in your stock numbers, the spreadsheet automatically subtracts your current stock from your total purchases to calculate your Actual Used (ml).
It then uses that data to automatically sort your scents into three clear buying tiers:
The Golden Rule for Ordering
Before you place your next order with your oil supplier, open up Sheet 2 and look directly at the Recommended Bottle Size column.
If it says 1 Litre, buy big and grab the maximum profit margin. If it says 100ml, stay small and protect your cash. The longer you use this routine, the more accurate your buying becomes, freeing up clean profit to test fresh, trending scents completely risk-free.
You can edit and alter the spreadsheet and add a date column if you want or any other kind of feature you feel might also help you, I'm really interested to know what kind of new ideas you come up with too, so drop me an email at bgiles@theproperhustle.co.uk if you end up improving the spreadsheet further!
What the Data Shows You
Once you have a few months of figures, your scents fall naturally into three groups. Here is how a typical 100-scent range breaks down at 100 jars per week:
This is why the data matters so much. Each group lands in a different price bracket, and buying at the right size for each tier means you are never over-paying or over-ordering.
The bestsellers justify a full Litre order every time — you will get through it quickly and the unit cost is at its lowest. The steady sellers sit comfortably in the 500ml bracket — enough to cover a full year's usage without tying up cash in excess stock. The slow movers stay in 100ml bottles on purpose.
Buying a full Litre of a scent that only uses 300ml a year means waiting three years to work through it. The system protects you from that mistake just as much as it helps you unlock better prices on your winners.
The Difference to Your Profit
One thing worth noting before you look at these figures. Our jars contain 100g of finished wax melt. Many sellers work with different formats — 55g snap bars are very common, and some use 35g bars.
The lighter your unit, the less fragrance oil it contains, so your oil cost per unit will be lower than the figures shown here. The principle is exactly the same though, and the system works just as well whatever weight you are producing. You just need to work out your own oil usage per unit and plug your real numbers in.
At 100 jars per week, here is what the system does to your numbers:
The product is exactly the same. Same wax, same packaging, same scent strength. The only thing that changed is the buying decision.
Add that to the savings from printing your own labels and you have completely changed the economics of your business, freeing up real money every single week.
What This Looks Like as Your Business Grows
Here is where it gets interesting. Without a system, your oil cost per jar stays stuck at around £1.12 no matter how much you sell — you are always buying small because you do not know what to bulk order.
With the system, your cost per jar keeps falling as you grow, because more and more scents cross into cheaper buying brackets. Slow movers become steady sellers. Steady sellers tip into litre territory. The savings compound automatically.
The figures marked with ~ are approximate, based on how buying tiers typically shift as volume grows. The direction is always the same though — the more you sell, the harder the system works for you.
Scaling from a standing start to £100,000 turnover saves well over £23,000 in fragrance costs alone. That is enough to invest in new equipment or a move to an even busier location further enhancing your savings. It's enough to hire staff to free up some of your time.
For us, it allowed one of us a full time job, it allowed us to kit out our own luxurious shop, and it meant we could move fast, which is critical in business.
Every time you save money, your business becomes more flexible and you have more options open to you.
A Constant Flow of New Scents Keeps Wax Melt Customers Coming Back
The buyers driving your growth are not one-time purchasers — they are repeat customers who come back specifically because they want something new to try. Variety and novelty are what this market runs on.
Most small sellers cannot keep up. because they are buying everything in small bottles at the highest price, testing a new scent feels like a gamble.
If it does not sell, the cost comes straight off their profit. So their range stays static, their regulars get bored, and repeat sales dry up.
This spreadsheet system removes that problem entirely.
The money saved on bulk buying your proven bestsellers funds a constant flow of 100ml tester bottles at virtually no risk. If a new scent fails, the cost is negligible — absorbed by the savings already made on your top sellers. But if it lands well, your spreadsheet picks up the spike in usage within weeks and you move it straight to a litre order.
At Shelley's we grew our range to 141 scents this way. Not by gambling on bulk orders of untested fragrances, but by using the savings from our bestsellers to keep adding to the menu one small bottle at a time.
That breadth of range became one of our biggest competitive advantages — most local sellers were offering 30 or 40 scents at best. We had more than three times that, and because the system kept our average cost at £0.48 per jar, every single one of those scents was still profitable.
Because we also printed and cut our own labels in-house, saving us even more money, we were able to respond at lightning speed and a new fragrance could go from idea to shelf-ready product on the day the next fragrance oil delivery arrived.
That combination — tracked buying costs and printed-on-demand labels — made us extremely difficult for local competitors to match. They simply could not move at the same speed or carry the same variety without it hurting their margins.
It also meant we could say yes to customers. When someone asked whether we stocked a particular fragrance, the answer was almost always yes. That kind of responsiveness helped us to build a loyal customer base and improved our customer service.
The ability to respond and deliver quickly to bespoke requests really helped to drive our growth.
The tracking system does not just save you money. It gives you the financial freedom to move fast, stay fresh, and build the kind of range that turns a one-time buyer into a customer who comes back every single month.
The Bottom Line
Weigh your open bottles every few weeks. Log the numbers. Let the spreadsheet tell you what to buy in bulk and what to keep small.
That is the whole system. It takes minutes to maintain and it is worth thousands of pounds a year in profit that you would otherwise leave on the table.
Here is a copy of the spreadsheet.
Comments