Skip to content
 

Welcome To Chocolatetown: Hershey Bears Unveil New Alternate

Posted in:

[Weekend editor’s note — Due to a WordPress glitch, today’s lede on the Richmond Kickers’ rebrand was accidentally published yesterday afternoon. This post, which was scheduled to go live later in the day, has been moved up to accommodate. We apologize for the mixup. -AE]

Hershey, Pennsylvania is known for two things: chocolate and the Hershey Bears. Now, they’re together.

Well, I mean. The Bears and chocolate have always been together. The Bears have been playing in Hershey since 1933 and have been in the American Hockey League since 1938. For their entire history, the team has been owned by the Hershey Entertainment and Resorts Company, the spinoff company founded by Milton S. Hershey to run Hersheypark, his chocolate-themed amusement park. Chocolate and the Bears go all the way back. They call their colors chocolate and cocoa, for God’s sake!

On Friday afternoon, the AHL team revealed a new alternate, and it made its on-ice debut a few hours later. The jersey features a script reading “Chocolatetown” with “USA” in the tail underneath. Beneath the script is a bear head logo, which the team has had in rotation since 2012.

During the 2001-02 season, the Bears wore a similar design, with a script “Hershey” above a full-body bear logo.

I dig the Hersheypark anniversary patch.

The real showstopper here is the shoulder patch, though. Depicting the Bears’ home arena, Giant Center, Hershey Chocolate World and (some of) the roller coasters of Hersheypark. I think this patch is phenomenal — it artfully depicts these Hershey landmarks together (they’re not oriented in precisely this way in real life, but are in easy walking distance to each other) and just clicks for me.

This is the Bears’ fourth new sweater this season, after launching new primary home and road uniforms and a special uniform celebrating their back-to-back Calder Cup championship, worn for the first two home games of the season.

Overall, I’m not super crazy about the uni — “Chocolatetown” is probably too long to be rendered in a baseball-style script like this, and the readability of it isn’t great from a distance. But what do you think?

 
  
 
Comments (6)

    I appreciate the aesthetic of Hersey Bears for these reasons:

    -Long history with many uniforms with old-time details that work great if they want to throwback.
    -An AHL that keeps its own identity rather than adopting the look/name of their parent club. Can be rare.
    -They embrace brown as team colour with pride, which I wish more teams would do.

    A whiff. Agreed, patch is nice. But script font is generic, and the tail renders it even smaller to read.

    I have zero design skills. But wonder what ‘Chocolatetown’ would look like on an angle, Rangers-style (still a lot of letters, though …)

    “Chocolatetown” would be best handled as a roundel, with the longer word on top, and “Town” on the bottom, and a crest in the center. Short of that, I would have vertically-arched the compound word as two words, as the basketball Tar Heels have handled “North Carolina”.

    FYI:
    Link provided in text reading “primary home and road uniforms” takes me to your post from yesterday, not to a link about / pic showing Hershey Bears.

    You could never get that much detail in a traditional embroidered patch. But I’m still not ready to say that all patches can be printed now. I’m a little bit of a traditionalist!
    But yeah no, that’s a stale bar from 5 Halloweens ago to my taste. It’s a very long word for a baseball script, and baseball scripts don’t work on hockey jerseys for me.

    True, the script is a bit unwieldy in that format but they are the Hershey Bears with a brown and white uniform so it’s easier to decipher. It’s nice to see a team with “earthy” colors (brown, green, tan, etc) and stick with them. The patch is very nice but I too love that HersheyPark patch from the past uniform. I also noticed no ads on this sweater, unless that isn’t showing up in any photos.

    Other than the town and color scheme being, ummm, Hershey, there are no ads on the sweater.

    patches should be embroidered, unless they are huge, in which case they should be chain stitched.

    printing/dye sublimation is such a bummer.

    I guess this is their fifth jersey because they wore one with a mashup of throwback logos a little while back.

Comments are closed.