Pickles can play chess! New Tee's are here!

If you ever come across a sign that reads, “Brooklyn, Believe the hype,” it kids you not. I l like to think of Brooklyn as akin to the entire Hbp lineup, featuring endless depths and layers. Fresh like our New Dills, Brooklyn hosts young minds, and progressive ideas- whether its a matter of food, music, art, or even commercial projects, Brooklyn is a fertile land. Despite the reconfiguration of neighborhoods due the influx of young money coupled with the bohemian, Brooklyn has not lost its original flavor. There seems to exist a sentiment shared by both new-comers and traditional folk to preserve and celebrate what makes this borough so epic(count hbp’s among them). Like a well done sour pickle Brooklyn develops while keeping true to its origin. Preserving in this case is not a simply a matter of protecting and encasing old, historically rich sites, but rather a carrying forward of them, a transformation of their meaning. The Dumbo Brooklyn landscape, I’ve come to realize as I have spent time there selling pickles, embodies this notion quite well. One finds old worn down industrial buildings, some abandoned, others put to new use, adjacent to modern clean, simple architecture, full of life and out-growths of ongoing visions. Cutting across the horizon, the Brooklyn and Manhattan bridges, engineering marvels, taken in view from below, roar with passing cars and trains reminding us the world of Brooklyn is very much alive. Each part, old and new buildings, cobble streets, sea ports, Brooklyn-nites, tourists, and city skylines, are never given in full isolation, but as living in relation to each other. Like the strokes of a painting, they help form each other. It seems, than, that preserving is a matter of living more than it is one of dying. However much Brooklyn changes, grows, and layers, we fail not to call it by its right name. Like a pickle, however you slice it, Brooklyn is still Brooklyn.
That being said, we at horman’s best are in the business of preserving, and it is in exactly this spirit that we have collaborated with artist Jason Laurits of Forte Green Brooklyn. Jason is a tee shirt designer and screen printer and the following is a short bio from his website:

“While pursuing a career in music in his early 20s, Jason Laurits taught himself how to silkscreen for posters to promote his shows around New York City. His music, a mixture of rock and electronica, eventually took him to London where, to help fund his recordings, he used silkscreening to create one-of-a-kind t-shirts and successfully sold them at random indie fashion markets.
Eventually deciding to take a break from music, Laurits returned to New York City and attended the New School for writing. During this time he continued to sell his silkscreened tees, slowly growing a fan base. By the time he finished school, the now-named Paste, had enough potential for Laurits to put all his energy into developing it further.
Laurits wanted to take Paste toward a different angle from the oversaturated graphic t-shirt market. Instead of silkscreening conceptual images or those that evoke cooler-than-thou motifs, Laurits wanted Paste t-shirts to have a little more fun and a lot more narrative to them. Because of this approach, Paste has not only been featured in prominent stores across the U.S., Canada, Asia, Australia, and Europe, but also as part of several art exhibitions in the U.S., Ireland, and Switzerland.
The t-shirts, themselves, are made in California with Laurits’s own custom-colors, and are hand-silkscreened in Brooklyn. All graphics are designed by Laurits.”
Jason has been kind enough to get his creative pickle juices flowing and design hbp’s shirt graphic. As to how this links to our logo, “think. question. pickle.” Chess playing pickles, that’ll make you think. “Wait how do they move the pieces?” you may question. And well, pickle, that just fits in there naturally. We hope you enjoy. Shirts are available online hormansbestpickles.com or at our stands. And the come in men’s and women’s cut and in two different colors.