How Pallas prints its merch with water-based ink in Neukölln

Berlin's industrial grit meets environmental mindfulness when Pallas rolls out its merchandise. The festival's apparel is screen-printed in a workshop tucked inside a Neukölln warehouse using water-based inks that align with the event's CO2-neutral ambitions. This approach gives each garment a tactile softness and a slightly imperfect finish, traits that Australian festival-goers have begun to associate with conscious European production.

For visitors flying in from Sydney, Melbourne, or Brisbane, the gear carries a sense of place that mass-produced merch rarely captures. The Neukölln workshop sits among courtyards shared with other creatives, painters, and small labels that rent space in converted post-war buildings. Pallas treats its merchandise as a collaboration with this wider maker community, not just an afterthought to ticket sales.

The workshop setting inside a Berlin post-war shell

The studio is housed in a former transformer station on the south side of Neukölln, a few minutes' walk from the canal paths that locals use for running and dog walking. Concrete pillars still bear the markings of past industrial use, and high windows filter the kind of soft daylight that printmakers chase. The space feels closer to an Australian warehouse studio in Marrickville or Collingwood than to a polished European atelier, with raw timber benches stacked with screens and squeegees.

Printers come and go through the day, balancing festival work with their own label projects. A few are graduates of Weißensee or UdK, while others learned the trade working summer shifts at print shops near Hackescher Markt before settling in. The shared equipment includes a four-colour manual carousel, an exposure unit built in the early two-thousands, and drying racks fashioned from electrical conduit. Anyone who has toured the back rooms of a Brunswick print studio will recognise the gentle rhythm: mix ink, flash off, line up the next colour.

The workshop's relationship to the festival is intentionally informal. Crew members from Pallas drop in to review samples, and the printers are invited to attend pre-parties during the run-up to the event. That fluid exchange means design decisions get made on the printing floor rather than across a corporate approvals chain.

Why water-based inks change the finished garment

Plastisol remains the default in many streetwear studios from Surry Hills to Fortitude Valley because it sits crisp on top of cotton and prints a film you can peel off. Water-based ink behaves differently. It soaks into the fibres, so the print feels like part of the fabric instead of a glued-on patch. After a few washes the design fades gently rather than cracking, which gives each piece a worn-in look that recalls favourite tour tees from the early two-thousands.

The technical side demands more care. Curing temperatures sit around 160 degrees Celsius, screens need frequent degreasing, and humidity in the warehouse can slow drying times on damp mornings. Printers compensate by warming screens, layering thin passes, and using a heat gun on problem areas. The result is softer on the skin and breathable, which matters during a long night on the dance floor at E-Werk.

Environmentally the case is even stronger. Water-based inks contain no phthalates or PVC, and the washout water can be processed through a sediment filter rather than treated as hazardous waste. Pallas pairs this approach with organic cotton blanks sourced from Portuguese mills, closing the loop between event operations and the merch table.

From sketchbook to silkscreen

Art direction for the merch moves through the same collaborative channels as the festival's poster campaign. Designers based in Berlin, Mexico City, and Seoul send layered files that the Neukölln team separates into spot colours. A typical drop uses three colours: a base tone pulled from E-Werk's brick walls, a fluorescent accent that mimics the lighting rigs, and a deep ink black for typography.

Australian audiences will spot subtle local touches tucked into some of the graphics. A limited run from the 2024 edition featured a small thorny devil motif nodding to arid-climate iconography, painted in by a visiting illustrator who had flown out for the festival. Another design referenced red desert dust trails layered over a stylised Brücke arch, the kind of crossover that lands well with a crowd that grew up on posters from Melbourne institutions like Halfway Crooks and the First Dog Pub.

Once a design is locked, screens are coated, dried in a light-safe cabinet, then exposed under a UV rig with positive film. Prepping a three-colour job takes roughly five hours from start to first pull, which the printers schedule into the afternoon before a late-night run.

Hands on the press during a production sprint

A merch sprint for Pallas runs like a small concert tour. The team gets the blank tees and hoodies in tubular cotton from Lisbon, counts them into batches of fifty, and lays them out on the carousel. Each colour is printed wet-on-wet with intermediate drying, then the full set is moved to a rack and hovered over with a heat gun before going through a conveyor dryer.

Printers take breaks behind the kiln room, drinking strong coffee from a moka pot that never seems to cool. The conversation drifts between festival lineups and apartment rental prices, occasionally surfacing gripes about pigment migration or squeegee angles. There is the same easy patter you hear at a print co-op in Stanmore when somebody blows a screen mid-run and a colleague offers a fix.

The sprint ends with quality checks done under daylight. Garments that fail inspection get re-printed or set aside for staff. The successful run is folded, tagged with biodegradable labels, and trucked across the canal to a storage unit near Hermannplatz. From there they go to E-Werk's cloakrooms, the pop-up shop on Köpenicker, and the online portal for international buyers.

Caring for the gear once it lands in Sydney

Printed tees can survive years of sweaty dance floors if given a basic wash routine. Pallas recommends turning the garment inside out, washing cold with a pH-neutral liquid detergent, and skipping fabric softener. Hanging to dry in the shade extends the life of both the cotton and the ink, which Australian buyers tend to appreciate after a long summer of festival weekends.

Importing the gear involves a small customs dance. Orders shipped below the AUD$1000 threshold for personal use sail through with minimal fuss, although the Australian Border Force occasionally asks for proof of purchase for orders closer to that line. Mail goes through letter-tracked services from Berlin that take about ten working days to reach Sydney or Melbourne, plus clearance time.

For a buyer who wants to see the merch in person before committing, the festival sometimes runs a small pop-up in Melbourne's Fitzroy during European summer tours. The volunteers running the table are usually the same ones who threw warehouse parties in their early twenties, so asking about the prints often turns into an impromptu design talk.

Sustainability claims and what they mean on the ground

Pallas promotes itself as a CO2-neutral event, and the merch program supports that goal through several channels. The blanks come from one Portuguese mill that runs on renewable grid power, the inks are water-based and low-VOC, and leftover garments from previous editions go to a local shelter rather than landfill. The festival also offsets transport emissions through a forest regeneration project in Brandenburg.

Australian readers sceptical about green festival marketing have plenty of reason to push. The local industry has its own initiatives, including the Music Climate Guide and venues that publish sustainability reports after every summer festival. Buying merch printed with water-based ink is a small but tangible way to back the principles those programs promote.

The window to grab a piece of this season's merch is narrow, and the custom water-based runs tend to sell out before the festival weekend closes. Anyone keen on landing one can browse the drop through pallas-orbit.com, where details about the Neukölln production process and shipping windows to Australia sit alongside ticketing info. A concrete next step is to set a calendar reminder for two weeks before the festival opens and revisit the merch tab then, which secures a piece of gear stitched in Neukölln before the queues build at E-Werk.