Portfolio
Portfolio
How Berlin’s Club Culture is Merging with Wellness
Berlin's techno scene has long carried a particular reputation — for long hours, a certain chemical permissiveness, and an underground culture that operated by its own rules. That framing is not exactly wrong, but it is increasingly incomplete. What's happening in the clubs now is a renegotiation of what raving actually demands of a body, and what responsibility a community owes its members. The shift isn't coming from above — from regulation or public health campaigns — but from inside the scene itself. Partygoers, DJs, and the brands emerging around them are treating the dancefloor less as a space of abandon and more as an endurance environment, one that requires preparation, recovery, and the right kit.
The following is adapted from a report commissioned by Canvas8, published November 2024, featuring interviews with Cédric Meister, DJ and co-founder of techno label Acting Press, and Miglė Kazlauskaitė, designer and founder of Berlin jewellery brand MIGLĖ.
The demographic shift underlying all of this is measurable. Gen Z Europeans now spend 67% less on alcohol than their parents' generation — a figure driven by a combination of economic pressure, better health literacy, and a consumer market that has responded with alternatives worth actually choosing. (Fortune, 2024) Global non-alcoholic beer sales rose 29.2% in 2024 alone. (BevReport, 2024) In Berlin, the carbonated mate drink Club-Mate — a longtime dancefloor staple — has spawned a category of its own, with competitors like Mio Mio positioning themselves directly at the same crowd. Cédric Meister, DJ and co-founder of techno label Acting Press, who plays regularly at Berghain and Ohm, describes a shift he's observed at close range: people, he says, have become healthier in their daily routines, and are increasingly looking out for each other on the floor — reminding each other to hydrate, eat, take breaks. The club, in his account, has become a place where that kind of mutual care is unremarkable.
Brands have followed. Happy Tuesdays, a London-based supplement company, produces post-rave wellness packs combining scientifically-informed compounds for cognitive and physical recovery. German brand Suppleminds offers a dissolvable powder — minerals, plant extracts, amino acids, including 5-HTP as a serotonin precursor — marketed specifically for after-rave recovery. At the higher end, Berlin's Hangoverrefresh offers four intravenous infusion packages, from a 99-euro electrolyte and vitamin-C formula to a 149-euro "Sports Cannon" combining glucose, amino acids, and electrolytes. These are products that would once have seemed incongruous in a nightlife context. Their existence now is less a commentary on wellness culture's reach and more a reflection of who is actually in the clubs: people who have work on Monday, who track their sleep, and who see recovery as part of the same logic that gets them on the dancefloor in the first place.
The same risk-aversion is reshaping what people wear to a rave. Noise levels in clubs can reach 120 decibels; sustained exposure above 70 decibels is associated with irreversible hearing damage and chronic tinnitus. (Loop, 2024) Belgian brand Loop — whose Switch earplugs retail at €54.95 and toggle between quiet, engage, and experience modes — has built a global following partly through design: the product looks like contemporary jewellery. UK earplug supplier ACS reported a 34.7% rise in sales since COVID. (Mixmag, 2024) Berlin jewellery brand MIGLĖ has taken the convergence further, collaborating with Happy Ears on a capsule collection of earplug jewellery. For founder Miglė Kazlauskaitė, the logic is direct: making health tools aesthetically appealing to club communities increases uptake, and higher uptake contributes to the kind of safe, inclusive spaces the scene claims to value. The earplug, in that framing, is not a concession to caution — it's an extension of community.