Pemulis Water & Power operates on a premise that runs counter to most modern branding: the convergence of nostalgia and novelty. Our brand leans on that weird spark you get when something feels familiar and unfamiliar at the same time; the kind of imagery or object that seems pulled from both a half-remembered past and newly imagined future. Water & Power becomes a fitting emblem for that tension: two forces pushing against each other to create something intriguing.
Our purpose has always been to find, gather, and offer interesting, idiosyncratic objects that feel like they belong to a larger Pemulis world. Our products rotate, but our logic remains the same. Every item touches one or more of our core themes—surfing, motorcycles, nostalgia, novelty, or some weird overlap that feels like it came from a subculture slightly off to the side. Our shop acts as a place for these things to accumulate, forming a unique, yet coherent universe.
Pemulis was created with a drive to design novel productions; to go against the grain of modern branding where most of it feels like the same post recycled indefinitely. Most visual culture currently gets pushed through an algorithmic meat grinder of constant output, with a paper-thin voice and shaved down language that reflects the bare minimum. The end result is a blur of content designed to vanish as fast as it loads.
Pemulis pulls its conceptions from somewhere completely different. Our brand draws from the era when magazine ads had real presence: Absolut Vodka’s evolving bottle mythology, Newport’s saturated scenes, Mentos commercials balancing sincerity and absurdity, Abercrombie’s stylized photography, and the theatrical campaigns that once filled the pages of Vogue. They had weight, personality, and enough attitude to stick in your head. Pemulis builds with intention, leaning into the slightly surreal, the deadpan and the visually ambitious. In a culture built to make you forget everything instantly, Pemulis tries to create commodities that you will remember for life.
THE NOSTALGIA CURRENT
Within the Pemulis world, nostalgia works as a kind of internal infrastructure. It traces back to adolescence: the period wherein certain images, brands, and subcultures burn themselves into your brain permanently. Such as the surfboard you stared at in a magazine, the Mentos commercial you saw a thousand times, and that ad you didn’t understand but still remember decades later. Those moments quietly build your personal, unofficial cultural history.
Surfing and motorcycles sit right within that emotional territory. People hold onto their old boards and bikes because the romance attached to them is inseparable from the objects themselves. Retro surf shapes lure in individuals who weren’t even alive when those designs first created. Vintage bikes and gear have a kind of gravity that modern designs almost never pull off. Pemulis taps into that reservoir.
THE NOVELTY CURRENT
Novelty is found when you stumble onto something that hasn’t been flattened by mass culture. There is an appeal to a small, strange, or foreign detail that seems to come from its own tiny universe. These discoveries are abundant in youth, but as you age, that same kind of novel detection becomes rarer, sharper, and hits with way more force.
Pemulis builds with that sensation, selecting and creating commodities that give off the indication of having emerged from an adjacent cultural pocket—recognizable, but not overexposed.
THE SHARED TERRITORY
Our brand sits right in the overlap between nostalgia and novelty. Our designs echo an older visual world but still comes across like something you just stumbled onto. A younger viewer sees something unexpected; someone older gets that quick flash of recognition. Both reactions are intentional.
The tone stays the same throughout: dry, observant, slightly amused, and driven by the image first. There’s irreverence in the mix, but also a real sense of intention behind the chaos. Pemulis aims to build a coherent universe rather than a sequence of disconnected products.
THE DOLPHIN
At the center of it all is the Pemulis dolphin keychain. A small floating vinyl trinket that would’ve looked right at home on a backpack, a set of surf keys, or the ignition of a rattling old bike. It’s tactile, a little ridiculous, and weirdly functional. The themes of water, engines, keys, and flotation all line up without needing any explanation. Our dolphin holds the emotional weight of a childhood object and the odd charm of something rediscovered.
It is the unofficial mascot of the whole Pemulis universe—an everyday object that carries more meaning than you’d think, shaped by the same currents: memory, discovery, and the pleasure of finding something that feels both old and new at once.