Franchise is a magazine, gallery, record label, and streetwear brand. Founded in 2016 by Justin Montag and Chris Dea in the Bay Area, on the California coast, it’s a quarterly publication enclosing basketball culture, represented through the multi-faceted expressions of contemporary creative and artistic scenes, and narrated by the insider perspective of protagonists. Read more…
The imprint covers a great variety of stories, from Giannis Anteantetokounmpo’s family portrait to Victor Solomon’s stained glass and 24K gold ephemera, which earned global recognition when he has been commissioned to design the NBA All-Star Game MVP trophy entitled to Kobe Bryant, passing through street art and streetwear focuses featuring veterans like Eric Elms and Cali Dewitt. The magazine aims to represent the hoops culture from pick-up games at the playground to international professional leagues, sharing the experiences of the most-acclaimed basketball champions to under-the-radar streetball local celebrities. The relentless visual and cultural research led the magazine to expand its activities to a newly inaugurated art gallery in Chinatown LA, showcasing upcoming and acknowledged personalities featured on the spreads, a radio show curation on NTS, a record label, and most recently, an apparel collection. The collection encapsulates works from different visual artists, illustrators, and graphic designers like Jason Wright or Hassan Rahim, printed on heavyweight Made in USA t-shirts, reliving the most significant moments, celebrating the most impactful personalities, or describing the basketball-related artistic phenomena using the proper languages and codes of OG sub-cultural landscapes.