Berlinwood puts its 2002 logo back on the bottom ply

Berlinwood was founded in Berlin in 2002 by Timo Lieben, and has made hand-pressed five-ply maple decks ever since, in 29, 32, 33.3 and 36 mm widths, sold and documented through the Blackriver shop. The brand's own account of its beginning, repeated in this listing, is that Lieben "created the first small wooden fingerboards in Berlin" and in doing so set the scene on the path away from plastic.

That is the brand speaking about itself, and it is worth labeling as such — this is a product page, not an archive entry, and no independent source in front of us dates or ranks those first presses against anyone else's. What the record does support is the shape of the shift. A fingerboard in the late nineties was, for most people, a molded plastic object with a graphic stuck to the bottom. A fingerboard after Berlinwood was a pressed wooden deck with plies, a concave, and a nose and tail that behaved differently from one another. Everything that followed — the pro models, the mold wars, the per-millimeter width arguments — is downstream of that change in material.

Berlinwood's catalogue at Blackriver still carries pro models for riders including Ramon Angelow and Jeldo Ulpts, and a retro collector's deck for Elias Assmuth. The graphic on this deck predates all of that. It is the logo from before there was a roster.

Specifics, all from the listing and from Berlinwood's own catalog:

• 29, 32 or 33.3 mm wide on Berlinwood's own page. FlatFace stocks the 32 mm.
• Five plies, hand-pressed maple, made in Germany. The listing says "handmade by professionals" and does not name the pressers.
• Nose and tail at different lengths and angles, which Berlinwood describes as following professional skateboard practice. In the hand that means the two ends pop differently and you learn which is which fast.
• A transparent graphic over a randomly chosen colored bottom ply. Worth being precise here: this is a colored veneer on the bottom of the layup with the artwork laid over it as a transparent heat-transfer graphic (Blackriver's page names the method), not a split ply where contrasting veneers are cut and recombined so the pattern runs inside the board.

What the listings do not say is also worth naming: there is no mold number and no stated run size. Berlinwood's own page does fill in the concave, low or medium, and puts a sheet of Riptape in the box. On October 10, FlatFace's 33.3 mm listing had come down and its 32 mm listing was still up.

FlatFace, for its part, has been in this relationship a long time: the Dracut shop was founded in 2003, a year after Berlinwood, and was the first US distributor of Blackriver ramps. A tribute to a 2002 German logo arriving on a Massachusetts product page is not a coincidence of stock — it is two decades of the same pipeline.

Reissue graphics are cheap sentiment when the only thing being revived is a font. This one is closer to a dated object. The 2002 logo marks the point at which a Berlin workshop started pressing the kind of deck the rest of the industry now assumes — five plies, asymmetric ends, a width measured to the tenth of a millimeter — and the fact that Berlinwood is still hand-pressing in Germany twenty-four years later is the part that gives the tribute its weight. The brand isn't borrowing someone else's history to sell a deck. It is selling its own, printed over a veneer it won't let you pick.

There is also a quieter argument in the randomness. A hand-pressed deck has never been a uniform product; batches differ, veneers differ, and anyone who has bought the same mold twice knows the second one is not the first one. Making that explicit — here is the graphic, the color is whatever the shop pulls — is an honest piece of merchandising from a workshop brand, and every batch of it scatters a few more one-off looking boards across the scene.

For anyone building an archive rather than a setup, that is the appeal: a board with the oldest mark the brand owns, in a color nobody chose.