DOMS launches new brand film “Every Year Counts” for back-to-school season

GUJARAT: There is something faintly manipulative, and entirely brilliant, about an advertisement that makes grown adults tear up over pencil sharpeners. That is precisely the trick DOMS Industries has pulled off with its new brand film, “Every Year Counts”, launched on 1st August as the school-bag rush begins across India. Forget rulers and erasers. This is a masterclass in selling sentiment first and stationery second.

The film, anchored by the line “you spend years getting them ready, until one day they are”, does not open with a product shot or a price point. It opens with a ritual: covering textbooks, labelling notebooks, sharpening pencils, packing bags. Small, repetitive, unglamorous chores that most parents perform without a second thought. DOMS wants them to think twice. The pitch is that these micro-moments, not one grand milestone, are what quietly build a child’s confidence and independence. It is a clever pivot away from the usual back-to-school script of discounts and duffel bags, towards something closer to a meditation on parenting itself.

Santosh Raveshia, managing director, DOMS Industries, frames it as a tribute to parents and educators who “quietly invest in these formative years”, with DOMS positioning itself as a small but meaningful accessory to that labour. Saumitra Prasad, chief marketing officer, DOMS, goes further, calling the film an expression of the brand’s philosophy that meaningful growth is built through years of preparation rather than a single flash of achievement. Anupama Ramaswamy, managing director and chief creative officer, Havas Creative India, which conceived the campaign, adds the emotional hook: parents rarely notice these routines while living them, only in hindsight.

Strip away the poetry and the strategy is sound. DOMS is not merely a pencil company anymore. Since its acquisition of Uniclan Healthcare in September 2024, it has been quietly stretching into baby hygiene, an adjacency play that only makes sense if the brand can own the entire emotional arc of raising a child, not just the September stationery list. A campaign built around years, not moments, gives DOMS the narrative runway to keep showing up in a household’s life long after the geometry box is bought.

There is also a harder commercial logic at play. DOMS already claims the title of India’s fastest-growing stationery and art material company by revenue, with a distribution network spanning 28 states and eight union territories domestically and more than 55 countries abroad, including the United States, the Middle East, Africa, Asia Pacific, Europe and Australia. That scale means the brand no longer needs to shout about market share. It can afford to whisper about childhood instead, and let the emotion do the selling for it.

Whether nostalgia converts into shelf space is another matter. Nielsen and Kantar have long shown that emotionally resonant advertising builds brand recall, but recall does not always translate into a shopper reaching for DOMS over a cheaper, unbranded notebook at the local kirana store. The stationery category in India remains stubbornly price-sensitive, particularly outside metro markets, and no amount of misty-eyed filmmaking changes the arithmetic of a household budget ahead of admission fees and uniform costs.

Still, credit where it is due. In an industry where advertising typically defaults to bright colours and louder discounts, DOMS and Havas Creative India have chosen restraint and emotional precision instead. The film’s insight, that parenting is made of accumulation rather than milestones, is genuinely well observed, and it is rare to see a stationery brand trust its audience with something this quiet. If the campaign does its job, DOMS will not just sell more pencils this season. It will make sure its name is the one parents reach for, almost on autopilot, every single year after.