Wakefit launches ‘Dhamki Squad’ campaign for World Sleep Day; invites Indians to share childhood bedtime threats

Direct-to-consumer sleep and home solutions brand Wakefit has launched a new campaign titled “Wakefit Dhamki Squad” to mark World Sleep Day, inviting people across India to share the memorable bedtime warnings they heard growing up.

The campaign draws on a familiar childhood experience in many Indian households — mothers enforcing bedtime with humorous or intimidating “dhamkis”. Through the initiative, the brand is encouraging people to relive those moments by sending their funniest, scariest, or most creative bedtime threats via Instagram direct messages. The most iconic submissions will win a cash prize of ₹50,000 and be inducted into the tongue-in-cheek “Wakefit Dhamki Squad”, positioned as a league of India’s most effective bedtime enforcers.

Conceptualised by The New Thing and produced by Good Take Studio, the campaign arrives at a time when late-night scrolling, binge-watching and extended workdays have made consistent sleep routines increasingly difficult.

According to Chaitanya Ramalingegowda, the campaign builds on the company’s decade-long effort to highlight the importance of sleep while using humour and cultural insights to engage audiences.

“This World Sleep Day marks a decade of Wakefit’s commitment to helping India sleep better, not just through our sleep and home solutions but also by sparking meaningful conversations around sleep,” Ramalingegowda said. “Despite everything we’ve tried, we realised that as adults, the freedom to control our own bedtimes is often what gets in the way of sleep discipline. So this time we're finally resorting to the one radical sleep authority that has never failed — Indian mothers and their terrifying bedtime dhamkis.”

The brand has previously used World Sleep Day as a cultural marketing moment. Its past initiatives include the #Gaddagiri campaign highlighting the effects of sleep deprivation and the widely discussed Wakefit Sleep Internship Program, where participants were paid to sleep as part of a social media-driven awareness campaign.

Last year, Wakefit also responded playfully to a statement by Reed Hastings that “sleep is our biggest competitor,” by encouraging people to “binge on sleep”.

The creators behind the latest campaign say the idea was rooted in a shared cultural memory across generations.

“Most of India has gotten threatened into bed by their mothers at some point,” said the creators from The New Thing. “It cuts across language, city and generations. At a time when proper sleep cycles feel like a distant memory, we saw an opportunity for Wakefit to revisit those humorously relatable bedtime roasts and remind people about the sleep discipline many of us have quietly lost as adults.”

Founded in 2016 by Ankit Garg and Chaitanya Ramalingegowda, Wakefit offers mattresses, furniture and home furnishing products through its omnichannel presence across India. The company operates as a vertically integrated business, managing product design, manufacturing, distribution and customer experience in-house while selling through its own website as well as online marketplaces.