Certain childhood memories never fade. The shading pastels, the water and poster colours and the ubiquitous yellow and black geometry box have been an inseparable part of the growing-up years of every Indian student. “Long before ‘branding’ became a corporate buzzword, Camel understood that in a commodity category like stationery, the identity is the moat,” says Asparsh Sinha, managing partner, Open Strategy & Design. “The camel and the distinct yellow-and-black livery signalled a clear, differentiated point of view from the very start.”
Founded as Dandekar & Co. in 1931 by DP Dandekar and GP Dandekar to manufacture ink powders and tablets, the Rs 800-plus-crore brand now offers more than 2,000 art and stationery products and is majority-owned by Japan’s Kokuyo Co. Ltd since 2011.
As the company expanded its product lines beyond ink into art materials and stationery, it also rebranded as Camlin, a portmanteau of ‘Camel’ and ‘ink’. It was incorporated as a private limited company on December 24, 1946, to take over the business of Dandekar & Co before eventually partnering with the Japanese stationery giant to become Kokuyo Camlin Ltd.
When Camel launched its first product there was hardly any brand operating in the stationery market, which stands at around $3.6 billion currently and is on course to become a $6.3 billion opportunity by 2032. “The Camel brand literally had a monopoly in the space,” says Sanjeev Shukla, business advisor, Vinusto.in.
By the 1950s, the Camel brand had created a healthy market for itself among businessmen in the erstwhile Bombay Presidency. The company achieved real growth when it entered the art and craft market. In the 1960s, Subhash Dandekar, son of founder Digambar Dandekar, saw that artists were struggling for good art material and decided to tap into this unorganized market.
Subhash went off to Glasgow to study colour chemistry and upon returning, established a laboratory dedicated to formulating colours tailored for the Indian market. The move helped transform Camlin into a leading producer of high-quality art supplies. By 1988 the company was selling two distinct product lines — craft tools like brushes, paints, colour pencils under the brand Camel and functional tools like pens, pencils, erasers, geometry tools and boxes under the brand name Camlin.
In a bid to stay connected with its consumers, Camlin in the 1970s started the All India Camel Colour Contest, which gave lakhs of students from across the country a platform to showcase their talent. “This helped them build a community around the artists and students,” says Ambi Parameswaran, branding veteran & founder, brand-building.com.
Camlin began to face its first major challenge around 2008, when the Raveshia family-owned DOMS brand began to flex its muscles with a wide range of products and rapidfire launches. Over the next decade or so the DOMS brand surpassed traditional competitors including Kokuyo Camlin in overall scale and pencil market share, eventually becoming India’s top stationery brand by 2024-25.
The brand that singlehandedly created a category from scratch now faces a range of challenges. There is severe margin compression, driven largely by rising input costs and fierce competition from both organised and cheap unorganised or imported alternatives. Then there is the price sensitivity of the Indian customer. “Stationery today is also about design and self-expression. So the brand will need to make itself contemporary without losing the familiarity that makes it so loved,” sums up Rutu Mody Kamdar, founder, Jigsaw Brand Consultants.