“I always say that when Good Good Good is quiet, that is when we are the busiest”, said Daniel Sher, founder and director of the Cape Town-based fashion label, about the two-year silence that their customers have endured since the brand’s last collection in 2022. With the imminent online launch of Good Good Good’s new Roots Collection, a refined perspective on the brand’s original mission to create premium functional everyday garments, Sher and his team have justified the time it’s taken to release something new by strengthening their foundations for the future. During this period of silence, the team has also reckoned with the loss and rebuild of their website, which crashed in early 2023. Having grown a keen base of followers and customers expanding beyond the borders of their home city, the relaunch of the brand’s digital home with Roots will mean that Good Good Good can reclaim its connection with both its domestic and international communities. In the meantime, the Good Good Good team has shrewdly utilised their time out of the online spotlight to conduct research and development with their loyal and growing local consumer base, using their sibling-business and brick-and-mortar flagship store, Duck Duck Goose, as a makeshift laboratory. By riding the coattails of their physical home’s popularity in Cape Town and the rest of the country, Good Good Good has been able to test new products and manufacturing techniques, disguised by duck-related motifs. With the release of Roots, the important intertwinings and differentiations between Sher’s two brainchild projects become clear.
Like the brand’s 2022 The Long Hello collection, the narrative behind Roots presents itself as a chronicle of Daniel’s trifecta of businesses and the man behind them. Since establishing Together MFG, Daniel’s own clothing factory situated in Cape Town’s old industrial district, his time and attention are stretched between the relentless driving pace of the manufacturing facility and tending to the bottomless needs of a physical retail space, all while balancing being a father to his two young children. Daniel, along with his brand, has embedded himself in the cultural and industrial make-up of his city. His customer-base doubles as his community, which has a front-row seat to his creative output whenever they walk past Duck Duck Goose at 120 Bree Street. Owing to this close relationship, with each new Good Good Good collection, Daniel provides his community with an earnest, episodic account of his experience in running a fashion brand alongside his weighty list of other ventures. For the people who aren’t able to keep his attention for a quick stop-and-chat between his missions across town, they don’t have to look further than the new Good Good Good collection on the rails in his store to get an idea of what’s been happening in his life. For example, 2022’s The Long Hello rolled out as an intimate insight into Daniel’s life as a new factory and store owner, as well as a new father, all in the context of a deadly global pandemic. Before the store and the factory, and before Daniel’s community took its current role as his unintentional collective confidant, he was privately able to play with new concepts and develop collections before briefly pushing them onto runways and into retail spaces that weren’t directly related to them. For Roots, Daniel and his team, now bigger and more equipped to handle the pressure that Daniel found himself under two years ago, return with another life update. This one, lucky for you as Daniel’s confidant, comes from a position of development and growth, rather than crisis.
Roots primarily takes shape around Daniel’s coming of age in the garment manufacturing industry. In 2015, Sher started working alongside his wife, Paige, in her parents’ factory, where Jacqui and Basil Smith had been manufacturing clothing for South Africa’s biggest department stores for 20-odd years. Renting a small portion of the factory in Maitland, Daniel and Paige produced clothes for their own brands alongside a few manufacturing clients, including the likes of Thebe Magugu, Rich Mnisi, and Wanda Lephoto. In June 2022, their own manufacturing operation outgrew the space, forcing them to move out of Jacqui’s factory. Before they could haul their machinery into Together MFG, however, Daniel decided to stay as close to Jacqui as possible while they were finalising the biggest production order of his career, from a certain LVMH brand collaborating with Thebe Magugu. By the end of that project, once the order was delivered without any returns or complaints, Daniel felt that the team was ready to fend for itself. 
That particular manufacturing job gave Daniel a new education in the precision with which luxury brands construct even their most basic garments. The notes from the T-shirt samples that flew between Cape Town and LVMH’s Parisian offices offered him valuable insight into the construction of a garment that he had already been producing for a decade at that point. Duck Duck Goose had been open for a year and a half by this time, and Good Good Good tees began to fill the streets of Cape Town. Over the following months, the number of his T-shirts out in the world would skyrocket, with the city celebrating its first summer without travel restrictions since the pandemic. Daniel started picking up on the patterns of his garments’ wear and feel on other people wherever he went. While the clothes were satisfying customers’ needs efficiently, Daniel couldn’t help but notice a handful of wilting necklines, the 480gsm fleece hoodies that were obviously too heavy even for the chilliest conditions in Cape Town, and his childrenswear that fit awkwardly on his friends’ kids. With his newfound LVMH-level of insight and candid everyday research, Daniel and his manufacturing team got to work on re-researching-and-developing these products, revisiting the brand’s roots and reinforcing the basics that he first started working on 13 years ago.
Simultaneously, the Good Good Good website had also autonomously decided to reflect on the hard work it had put into servicing the brand’s online community for six years by closing down and thwarting all efforts to revive it. Without a working online shopping platform to advertise to their customer-base, Good Good Good’s social media dried up. The silver lining, however, was that Daniel and his team could jump into their redevelopment undertaking free from the prying eyes of the internet. Two years later, with a brand new collection on a sparkling new webstore, Good Good Good has confidently emerged from its silence, assured that they have fixed what they needed to, and reinforced the roots that Daniel and his team had grown for eight years. Of course, the collection is fronted by a refined selection of basic T-shirts in four different silhouettes, alongside reworked fleece hoodies and sweatpants that assert the brand’s prowess in the realm of everyday basics. Crisp contemporary shirting is also featured for the first time since the first ever Good Good Good collection. A playful all-over-print set is reminiscent of the brand’s early collaboration with artist David Brits. The new range of childrenswear surely helps Daniel sleep at night, knowing that the moms and dads in the school carpark envy what his boys are wearing when he drops them off in the morning. Finally, a contemporary pair of trousers and a highly functional utility jacket display the technical advancement that has taken place at Together MFG in the last two years. While each garment in the collection is available in a selection of colourways, they don’t compare to the rich combinations of hues and textures of previous Good Good Good collections. However, now that the foundations are set with sturdy construction and trusty new silhouettes, Daniel is set to revisit the vibrancy of the brand’s archive in the near future.
Over the past two years, Good Good Good has channelled its appetite for vibrancy through Duck Duck Goose, which has cultivated its own recognition as a brand for its tongue-and-cheek graphic T-shirts and hallmark collaborations with Shelflife, Baseline Skate Shop and Spotify. Customers may be surprised by the presence of Duck Duck Goose-branded items on goodgoodgood.co.za. For Daniel and the team, this is a declaration that the two brands can’t be separated. Without Duck Duck Goose, Good Good Good would not have a home and a space in which to test new products. Without Good Good Good, Duck Duck Goose would not have a reliable anchor brand and T-shirts to display its playful imagery on. While Duck Duck Goose and Good Good Good serve different purposes, the former as a multi-brand store and cultural space and the latter as Sher’s sole platform for creative expression, Duck Duck Goose fulfils one of Good Good Good’s and Daniel’s core needs through its collaborative potential. “You can only write Good Good Good in a hundred different ways,” says Daniel, “but you can draw a duck doing a million different things”. If Daniel wanted to, he says, he would have opened a retail space called the Good Good Good store, stocking only his own brand’s items. Instead, he opted to house a curation of his favourite South African brands, aiming to amplify the voices of local designers and bring people together. As a proxy for Good Good Good to exercise its community-driven philosophy, Duck Duck Goose has succeeded to follow the path that Daniel had set out for it.
The journey of Good Good Good and its related offshoots can baffle the unknowing customer that walks into Duck Duck Goose. It admittedly might even occasionally confuse Daniel and his team themselves. Daniel Sher and Good Good Good’s roots run deep in the South African fashion and manufacturing industry, sometimes in convoluted and intertwining shapes. Sometimes, they have to stop and circle back to where they came from before continuing their growth. Wherever they go, Good Good Good remains rooted in its dedication to the improvement of its practice, and in its community.
You can view the full Roots lookbook here. goodgoodgood.co.za is now live, and the team will celebrate the release of Roots by taking over Cape Town listening bar One Park for the night on Saturday, 8 June.