Golden Goose

Golden Goose was founded in December 2000 by Francesca Rinaldo and Alessandro Gallo in Marghera, an industrial port town adjacent to Venice, Italy. The brand emerged from a Venetian craftsman’s garage, where the two designers - then in their early twenties - began deconstructing and hand-stitching unique, genderless garments influenced by their travels and the skateboarding aesthetic they discovered in Los Angeles and New Mexico.
The defining moment arrived in 2007 when the founders created the Super-Star sneaker, deliberately replicating the worn-out appearance of skateboarders’ shoes. This “lived-in” philosophy - celebrating imperfection and visible signs of wear - became the brand’s defining aesthetic and customer proposition. Over two decades, Golden Goose has built a cult following around the notion of “perfectly imperfect” handmade products, expanding to footwear, apparel and accessories with the ethos of uniqueness and artisanal craftsmanship at its core.
The Meatpacking District flagship, opened March 2025 at 812 Washington Street, is the brand’s fourth direct retail location in New York City and represents a deliberate strategy shift: treating the store itself as a co-creation platform rather than a showroom. At 4,424 square feet, it functions as an immersive extension of the brand’s Venetian heritage, drawing an explicit parallel between the Meatpacking District’s 19th-century legacy of handcrafted butchery and the artisanal shoe-making traditions of Marghera. The store’s design philosophy - raw concrete walls paired with vintage wooden furniture, distressed finishes and an industrial aesthetic - mirrors the brand’s visual language and signals the centrality of craft labour to both the neighbourhood’s past and the brand’s ongoing production narrative.
The co-creation bar sits at the retail heart: customers work alongside trained artisans (called “Dream Makers” and “Sneaker Makers” in brand parlance) to personalise sneakers and apparel through hand-painting, embroidery, Swarovski crystal embellishment, distressing and custom lace designs. The store also features the Con Amore Corner, a hospitality zone offering bespoke gift wrapping, coffee, fresh flowers and seasonal treats. New York-exclusive merchandise - including Big Apple-themed charms for shoelaces and city-inspired souvenirs - underscore a localism strategy that connects the store to its community rather than deploying it as a generic brand container.
This retail approach reflects a broader Golden Goose strategic move, articulated across its global flagships (notably the Golden TV concept store in Milan’s Via Verri and the immersive Haus of Dreamers heritage space in Marghera, which opened in 2024). The brand’s positioning centres on the belief that direct-to-consumer retail should be “a place for creativity and community,” not transaction, with each location designed to celebrate the intersection of local culture and the brand’s Venetian craft DNA.