At the Outta Wax pressing plant there are five key characters. The first four are Sara Pette and her brother John, Pette’s best friend Alex Stillman, and a dog named Tulip found outside the warehouse who is now the CEO. The fifth character is the south side of Minneapolis.

In a former mascot and costume building in the Phillips neighborhood, Outta Wax Record Pressing & Lathe Cutting greets guests with a big red door reading “It spins!”

Inside, Pette and Stillman have spent the last six months making and packaging thousands of records in their own little universe. 

This has been a huge, five-year undertaking. On March 2, 2020, Pette was scrolling Facebook and saw a post that made her pause. 

“Who wants a free record label?” it read. She thought to herself, “Me. I really do.”

Then, the world went on lockdown for COVID-19. She had a bit more free time and decided to pursue it.

“I was just like, you know, eff it. I’ll do the record label,” Pette said.

She got the backstock, finalized a deal with a handshake, and then Piñata Records was hers. Piñata was founded by Trevor Engelbrektson, a Minneapolis musician and crewman who died in 2019 in a tour van accident. 

In 2021, Pette and her brother started exploring a dream. What if they opened a pressing plant too? Alex Stillman got on board, Pette went to a pressing plant in Florida to train, and then the equipment was ordered, and New York-based John became the CFO.

Nevertheless, Stillman and Pette are women in the industry, and they felt like a lot of it was gatekept by men. They imagine a future where small plants across the world can work together and share information.

“We don’t come from manufacturing, so it was really hard for us to find mechanical engineers that would work with us or take us seriously,” Stillman said. “We were ghosted, like, quite a bit, and or like, I don’t know, it was just, it was really difficult. We also don’t look like manufacturers.”

Stillman and Pette come from the DIY punk community on the south side. They met, unsurprisingly, from being in a band together in their 20s. After 15 years of friendship, Outta Wax only made them closer.

“It’s funny because we spend all day with each other and we still hang out afterward. Or like, I’ll say, ‘See you in a couple of hours at your house,’” Pette said. “I feel like it’s actually really enriched our relationship. I just am really lucky to get to hang out with Alex all the time.”

Stillman, who worked at Extreme Noise Records, said the DIY punk community has been vastly influential. 

“I think it has really shaped my whole life, like feeling kind like a weirder kid or having different interests,” Stillman said. “Punk is just like the one that connects with my ethos because it’s really community-driven and kind of living outside of the conventions of the music industry or normal consumption of stuff …  I still have shows in my own house at 37 years old, and it’s great. I love it. It just made sense to DIY another aspect of the whole system.”

The first full production record was a local band they both love called “Cortez The Killer.” The band’s LP was never released, the digital files were only passed around to friends. Pette thought it was fitting to release the record on her label and have it printed at Outta Wax. 

Most of the clients are independent artists who can come and watch their records being made. Turnaround time is about 12 weeks, and there is currently a backlog of orders. Outta Wax’s lowest-priced package is about $1,000, but Pette and Stillman said they are willing to work with artists to serve them however best they can.

They said they hope to be a pillar of the community by offering co-working spaces, supporting local music and tabling at DIY events.

According to the duo, the corridor along the Midtown Greenery used to be known as a manufacturing area. When they approached the business council and neighborhood association to introduce themselves, the council and association members were excited a new item would be made in the area. 

“I think the only other thing that is in large production in this neighborhood are tortillas, which is really funny because it’s the same kind of, like round, disc, flattened situation,” Stillman said. “Phillips gets kind of a bad rap and is overlooked a lot of the time. So it's nice to be like, yeah, you can do really amazing things here. I can't imagine really living anywhere else.”

During the process, Stillman and Pette often consider the environmental factors of vinyl. Records are meant to be preserved, deeply loved and passed down. While the discs are, of course, plastic, the most environmentally damaging part of the printing is shipping. 

Stillman and Pette are currently working with a company in Europe that is developing bio-plastic for vinyl records called EVO vinyl. It is sugar beet-based, and Outta Wax is hoping to be the first pressing plant in the U.S. to use it.

Most of all, Stillman and Pette want to make sure that vinyl records are here to stay. Whether you got invested by a Taylor Swift limited-edition vinyl, a family member’s passed-down collection, or the No. 1-selling record of all time, Stillman and Pette want you to keep listening. 

“My record collection will be there if s*** goes down, you know,” Pette said. “It’s a collection, humans always have collections … I think it really grabs people.”

“Whatever gets people in the door, I’m so down,” Stillman added. “There’s a reason why it has sustained for 90 years as a medium, it’s an archive of our lives.”

This story originally published on the MPR News website on January 31, 2025.