Sitting in our apartment on a beautifully crisp Cape Town Sunday afternoon (22 March 2026), my kids beside me on the couch getting their weekly TV fix with a Sunday arvie movie, I finally have a gap to write a long overdue recap of the last 18 months in the form of a founder’s letter.
It’s been just under 2 years since I took a research trip to Paris Fashion Week in June 2024, the purpose of which was to determine whether there was an opportunity for our brand Good Good Good, and our store Duck Duck Goose to prosper beyond our country’s borders.
[with Calla, one of the first friends we made in Paris, in front of her store in the Marais]
2024’s maiden voyage into Paris Men’s Fashion Week as a buyer for Duck Duck Goose allowed me the opportunity to visit some of our favourite independent brands in their showrooms during market week. This gave me an in-person opportunity to see how the brands we admire present themselves in terms of their product, story telling, location and agent representation. What was supposed to be a research trip to determine if and where our brands could fit into the global wholesale market quickly turned into a new opportunity: to stock these brands at Duck Duck Goose, and in so doing, become their first stockist on the African continent.
For those who have been following our store’s journey since our opening in December 2020, you will know that we started with a brand list that was exclusively South African. The brands that joined our store that day needed to buy into the vision and ambition of our store and they had to have product ready for us to sell on our opening day. To showcase the best of niche South African fashion to the world was (and still is) our store’s core manifesto.
Having just scratched the surface of the global wholesale landscape in Paris, we felt that our store was ready to add some of the world’s most celebrated independent brands to our existing offering of homegrown brands, which we had pushed solely for 4.5 years. When we placed our first orders with these international brands, our intentions were as follows:
- To showcase some of the best global brands next to some of the best South African labels, subsequently showing our customers that our homegrown brands hold up alongside the world’s best in terms of quality, design and storytelling.
- To become the first African stockist for these brands, and to make the shopping experience at Duck Duck Goose a global one, with a South African flavour at its core.
- In so doing, we would amplify the voices of our store and our brands to a wider global audience.
Getting these brands into our store wasn’t easy. Many of them are represented by world class agents who are very protective and selective about where their clients are stocked. One wrong move by an agent or brand rep and the brand’s first voyage into the African continent can be a painful move shrouded with regret.
It therefore took, and still does take, a significant amount of convincing to get new brands on board with allowing us to buy stock from them for 120 Bree Street.
[photos above of Josquin & myself in Nicholas Daley's & Gottlob's respective showrooms]
In January of this year we concluded our 4th buying trip during Paris Fashion Fashion Week. Throughout these 18 months, we have also been showcasing our anchor brand, Good Good Good, through various Parisian trade shows and showrooms. Being a South African-based brand presents the obvious challenge of being significantly distanced from the global fashion cities. By taking up space, presenting our collections and showing up during these fashion weeks, we have made a very small dent in bridging this gap. Access to buyers, media and potential collaborating brands & businesses can only be achieved through being in the right rooms at the right time.
It is through these efforts to take up space in Paris that we were introduced to our Japanese sales representative, who, after taking an immediate liking to our brands, offered us a contract to showcase our brand to his network of buyers in Tokyo in September 2025.
[our sales agent, Justine, in our latest showroom in Tokyo]
For Good Good Good, Japan has always been on our radar as a potential market. In fact, our first ever international stockist was Edifice La Boucle in Tokyo, who bought 76 pieces from us in 2018. So, we decided to take up space in Tokyo in September 2025, and we are so glad we did. We showcased 3 projects to buyers who walked through our showroom’s doors, namely Good Good Good, Duck Duck Goose & Solid Waste. On that same Tokyo trip, we even managed to host an event coupled with a T-shirt collaboration with Loom, a Tokyo listening bar and kitchen in Hatagaya (blessings to our Paris connect, Shige, who is part of the amazing Japanese brand Khoki, for connecting us to Masaaki and the lovely team at Loom).
Fast forward 6 months, and we’ve just returned from Tokyo with the fruits of that September 2025 trip under our belt:
For Duck Duck Goose, an exclusive T-Shirt collaboration with the mighty United Arrows & Sons, as well as a selection of other Shaun Hill-illustrated Duck Duck Goose T-Shirts hanging at their storefront at Shibuya Parco.
For Good Good Good, a selection of our strip-stripe T-shirts, along with a couple of our hero Tera Tera jackets, sit alongside the Duck Duck Goose products.
To celebrate the launch of our brands at United Arrows & Sons, we returned to Loom in Hatagaya, with Cape wines from Leo’s Wine Bar, biltong from Frankie Fenner Meat Merchants, and a custom painted window by our friend Shige, who originally connected us to the space. It was heart-warming to see the room fill up with friends from our first trip, and new friends made in the last 3 months while travelling to Paris and Tokyo.
10 years ago, I travelled with my wife and co-founder, Paige, to Tokyo for a vacation that also doubled up as a research trip. Our trip to Tokyo happened a couple months after we had just launched Good Good Good. One of our first stops on the retail circuit was to visit the United Arrows & Sons branch in Harajuku, which was under the creative direction of Motofumi “Poggy” Kogi, aka Poggy The Man. Blown away by the curation, display and service, we left the store with the dream of one day stocking our brand in such a store.
[our billboard at the United Arrows & Sons storefront!]
Fast forward 10 years, and we’re now collaborating with and stocking that same store. It almost feels like the default thing to say would be “I can’t believe that this has actually happened”. But the truth is, in order for this to have happened, someone had to believe that it would actually happen. That person is me. That person is also my wife. Together, we have persevered through the challenges of owning a clothing factory in a country without the necessary infrastructure to support brands and stores with aspirations such as ours. Together, we have persisted to never give up on our dreams of creating a South African brand/s with key international stockists and collaborations. Together, we have taken up space in rooms where our names were not known (and to a large extent, are still unknown).
Although this represents a significant moment in our brand’s journey, we know that we’ve only just dipped our toes in the water. Keeping up with the momentum we have built is, of course, the next challenge. Backed by our brilliant team (you all know who you are) and our amazing customers (you all know who you are too), we’re setting our sights and plans toward the next 10 years with Good Good Good, Duck Duck Goose, and now our factory’s new project, Solid Waste.
XoXo
Daniel