Golden Goose is a leading Italian designer of contemporary luxury casual wear and accessories for both men and women, mostly known globally for its Golden Goose sneakers brand.
Invest in a recognized contemporary/“trend-setter” brand with a niche positioning within the attractive and rapidly growing sneaker market (backed by long-term trends such as “casualization” and increased demand of true quality/craftsmanship/uniqueness), led by a cohesive and strong management team fully aligned with Apheon’s ambitious growth plan, with significant organic growth potential through geographic expansion and opportunity to penetrate untapped regions via a mix of select wholesale clients and new directly operated flagship stores in world leading cities. Solid financial performance with outstanding growth track-record, coupled with good degree of visibility on future results thanks to business model predicated upon wholesale selling campaigns.
Italy
Consumer
Golden Goose Deluxe Brand is a leading Italian designer of contemporary luxury casual wear and accessories for both men and women, mostly known globally for its Golden Goose sneakers brand.
Since its foundation, the company’s development strategy has been built on a high-end market positioning, proposing a contemporary, unique and consistent style over time with a distinctive brand identity.
Golden Goose’s products are distributed worldwide through a highly selective wholesale and retail distribution network in key markets such as Italy, the UK, France, the US, Japan, Korea and, more recently, China.
Our primary goal was to maximize the company’s organic growth potential. As such, we re-designed the distribution model in the company’s core geographies, evolving from an agency model (which was terminated) to a far more attractive direct distribution model, with specific selling campaigns leveraging the company’s directly operated showrooms (Milan, Paris and Tokyo). In addition, we launched “pre-collections”, which proved instrumental to better serve the most demanding wholesale customers such as department stores in the US and in Japan.
We also focused on accelerating the company’s international expansion by opening 5 flagship stores in key fashion markets (i.e., mainland China, the US and the UK), 12 new franchised stores in high-potential markets such as South Korea and Japan, and securing a pipeline of 5 additional stores for the future.
Management had historically been solely focused on expansion. At some point, they realised the need to further professionalize processes and reporting, both at central and retail network level. We helped them in this initiative with a series of comprehensive KPIs.
In addition, we supported management in the optimisation of operations, products and services, achieving significant improvements across different areas including supply chain, quality control procedures and internal processes.
Finally, we reinforced the management team and the creative department.
Our manifesto: contributing to the development of sustainable finance
To succeed with this strategy, Apheon believes a holistic and collective approach is fundamental.
Holistic: it is essential that all aspects of ESG are equally and continuously supported. This is why we are active at every stage of the investment cycle by applying proprietarily developed methodologies and initiatives which are built on 5 priorities covering the broad ESG spectrum:
