BRIAN KENNY: Welcome to Cold Call, the podcast where we dive deep into groundbreaking Harvard Business School case studies. In the world of luxury where exclusivity is currency and craftsmanship is a language of its own, some brands choose to shine with polished perfection while others dare to stand out by embracing imperfection itself. Today we’ll explore a company that has reimagined what luxury can feel like, inviting customers not just to purchase an item, but to co-create an experience.
At a pivotal moment in its growth, this brand faces pressing strategic questions. Should it deepen its roots in the high-end sneaker market that fueled its rise? Should it expand its ready-to-wear and accessory lines to evolve into a full lifestyle label? Or should it widen its global footprint, entering new regions to meet the demand of an increasingly international fan base? And at the heart of it all, what should truly drive the next phase of its growth?
Today on Cold Call, we welcome Professor Juan Alcacer and his co-author, Alexandre Daillance (MBA 2025), to discuss the case, “Golden Goose: Reshaping Luxury.” I’m your host, Brian Kenny and you’re listening to Cold Call on the HBR Podcast Network.
Juan Alcacer’s research centers on strategy, growth and innovation. He is a repeat customer here on Cold Call. Juan, welcome back.
JUAN ALCACER: It’s a pleasure to be here again.
BRIAN KENNY: It’s been a while. We talked about the case-
JUAN ALCACER: Oktoberfest.
BRIAN KENNY: Oktoberfest. And that was probably several years ago, so it’s great to have you back. Don’t be a stranger. We need to have you back more often.
JUAN ALCACER: It’s a pleasure. It’s always fun to be here.
BRIAN KENNY: And Alexandre Daillance is the co-author of the case. He is an entrepreneur, having founded several fashion brands and he’s a recent graduate of Harvard Business School. Alex, welcome.
ALEXANDRE DAILLANCE: Thank you for having me. Thank you, Brian.
BRIAN KENNY: Thank you for joining us all the way from Paris today. I will have the least interesting accent of anybody on the podcast today. I’m pretty sure of that. It’s great to have you both here. I was intrigued by this case. I had not heard of Golden Goose before I read the case, and now of course I’m seeing it show up everywhere and people that I know know a lot about it. So thank you for writing the case. Thanks for being here to talk about it. I think people will be really pleased by what they hear. Juan, I’m going to start with you. I always like to know what initially attracts a faculty member to writing a case. So what drew you to Golden Goose as a case study and what are the broader themes about the evolution of the luxury market does the company allow us to examine?
JUAN ALCACER: Yeah, what drew me to this particular case is because the company breaks every rule that you know about luxury goods. It is a total rogue company in a way, and that’s the reason that is appealing in the sense that that allows you to explore what a differentiation strategy is. And other trade-offs behind a differentiation strategy. So that’s the main point. The second point is that because this is a luxury good, you get to talk a lot in the classroom about the growth strategies of luxury goods, and you realize the challenges that that represents. Because with a luxury good, how do you grow without losing the soul of the company, without losing what makes you distinctive? So that trade-off between scaling and keeping the essence of the brand is super important. And the third point in the case that was also very appealing for me is that Golden Goose is an example of what is happening in the industry as an overall. So in a way, it’s also a case that allows you to talk about industry evolution and how firms adapt to changes in the industry, in the trends in the industry.
BRIAN KENNY: And what’s your cold call when you start the discussion in class?
JUAN ALCACER: So it varies tremendously depending on the audience. So with my MBAs, it is just talking about what… I ask them if they have any Golden Goose sneakers and they tell me a little bit about the experience. With executive education people, almost nobody knows the brand, so I didn’t know the brand when I started to write the case, it was Alex who introduced me to the brand. So for them, I basically asked them, what do they think about the company?
BRIAN KENNY: Alex, let me shift over to you for a second. You know so much about this industry and this space from having worked in it, I’m wondering what surprised you most about Golden Goose’s rise? They rose from, I think the case says in 2013 they were a $20 million company and then by 2024 they were a $650 million company, which is remarkable. What surprised you most about that?
ALEXANDRE DAILLANCE: So I think what’s interesting is fashion by nature is usually about trends and cycles, and I worked in the fashion industry myself, as you mentioned earlier, and it’s common, even expected for a new brand or at least a specific product to follow fashion after several years, even months nowadays, where Gen Z is so quick to jump on the next thing. However, unlike many brands, this is not what happened with Golden Goose and more specifically sneakers. That’s what made Golden Goose’s journey, I think so special in Silvio’s tenure as a CEO, so impressive.
I remember the first time I was considering buying Golden Goose was in 2020. I considered buying a pair of sneakers and I asked my friends their thoughts on the brand, their thoughts on the product, and they told me they thought the product would be–was for sure–trendy now, but likely to fall out of fashion within the next six months.
Yet the following year, Golden Goose sneakers were still trendy, and today, five years later, Golden Goose sneakers are more trendy than ever. So what surprised me the most I would say about the brand’s journey so far is that while many trendy products of fashion, Silvio and his team were able to turn their sneakers into now real icons that became women’s and men’s classic, just like the Converse Chuck Taylor or the Nike Jordan. And I think these, to finish on this point, can be explained by the fact that Golden Goose customers truly love the brand values and feel associated to its strong community that customers from the brand are not just buying a product but buying more of a feeling.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, the case opens up with a quote from Silvio Camparo, who is the CEO of the company. He says, “Clients are shifting focus from looking good to feeling good.” And so I’m wondering, I’ll stay with you, Alex, on this. I’m wondering how this insight shaped Golden Goose’s distinct approach to luxury. We talked about embracing imperfection, they really take it to an extreme.
ALEXANDRE DAILLANCE: Yeah, I think exactly. I think this mindset really shaped the entire philosophy of the brand from its very foundation when Silvio joined as CEO. I think from the very beginning, Golden Goose rejected the traditional luxury playbook built around perfection, distance and polish, and instead try to lean into the “perfect imperfection” that the brand has been pushing as a narrative, which you see kind of everywhere in the brand. It’s very intentional from the distressing on its sneakers, the artisanal flaws that can be seen even on it’s ready-to-wear now, and later, the co-creation experience that led the customers to leave their own mark on the product as well.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, yeah. Juan, let me come back to you. The case explores the explosive growth of the sneaker industry, which when I was young, sneakers were not anywhere near as fancy and complicated as they are today obviously. I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about the emergence of high-end sneakers as a luxury category and how this macro context creates the opportunity for a brand like Golden Goose to emerge.
JUAN ALCACER: Yeah, so the macro context essentially created the perfect runway for Golden Goose. When you look at the past decades in fashion, there is this trend of people dressing more casually. And it goes not only to shoes, but it goes to jeans. We saw these waves of jeans or high-fashion jeans. So that trend has been going on as I said for two decades now, and sneakers was part of that. So what you see across time is that the fashion brands tried to adapt by taking these objects that are more casual and exciting and you start basically producing them.
So what you see is also the sneaker market just specialize in the athletic gear, and you have new companies like Hawkeye entering the market and the incumbents like Nike is still having an important place, but then you have the luxury brands. But there is this intermediate point between the athletic gear and the very luxury brand that was empty, and that’s basically the genius of Golden Goose, that they found this area that nobody was in that space and that space is basically luxury sneakers, but not the traditional sneakers because the sneakers that were coming from the luxury brands were standards, were predetermined, were perfect.
And there was not any connection, emotional connection between the customers and the items. So Golden Goose found this intermediate point and that’s the reason that it’s a wonderful differentiation strategy. They found that empty space in the market where they were able to create a very strong link between the product and the customers through experience, through this idea that Alex was talking about, about imperfect imperfection, but also this idea of co-creation, that basically puts the whole luxury industry upside down in the sense that the traditional luxury industries, designers that four times per year show that what people may want to buy. Here it’s just the opposite.
BRIAN KENNY: Also, for those of us who get brand new white sneakers and hate to see them get dirty, they’ve taken that stress away from us because the sneakers are distressed.
JUAN ALCACER: It’s just fashionable.
BRIAN KENNY: Alex, let come back to you. I’m wondering, the co-creation piece is particularly interesting, and we know that from the case that a lot of women buy Golden Goose shoes. Can you talk a little bit about the demographic of their customers and the implications that has for Golden Goose?
ALEXANDRE DAILLANCE Yes, for sure. I think it’s a very interesting question. It was one of the statistics I was the most keen to learn about when we started writing the case with Professor Alcacer. I think this can be explained by three main reasons. I think the first one is that the “Superstar,” which is Golden Goose’s most famous sneaker reference, has more a feminine silhouette. It is less chunky than most of the sneakers from Nike, Adidas, or even luxury brands such as Alexander McQueen for example.
And I think women are naturally drawn towards Golden Goose products more than guys just based off the design of the sneakers. It’s elegant and I think they also deeply value the handmade made-in-Italy aspect of the Golden Goose sneakers. The second reason is that women usually tend to buy more and are willing to spend more money than men when it comes to luxury fashion products.
On average Golden Goose sneakers have a premium price point above $500 as you pointed out earlier, and more women are willing to pay that price on average compared to men. The third and last reason is that, as we know, celebrity endorsement nowadays can sometimes significantly influence the consumption of fashion products. And while Golden Goose had had a significant amount of male celebrities wearing its products, they also had a very large number of female influencers and celebrities such as Taylor Swift, Selena Gomez, Jennifer Lopez, who have been big supporters of the brand for the past 10 years, and who have obviously quite a significant amount of influence when it comes to influencing younger females and females at large.
In terms of implication, it means that Golden Goose definitely has a competitive edge for the future for female-centric product categories, such as women’s bags, jewelries, maybe fragrances as well, where they can leverage their CRM capabilities to cross-service products on the website and in the stores and develop products that can best match their customers’ needs.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, the case mentions the fact that it takes four hours to make a handmade pair of these sneakers, so you can see why the price point is so high. Juan, I’m wondering if you can talk a little bit about how this reinforces the brand. We know that luxury brands depend on scarcity and exclusivity, so how does that play into the Golden Goose strategy?
JUAN ALCACER: It’s a super important item in the strategy and they achieve exclusivity in two ways. One is, they cannot produce many units. The idea that this is handcrafted and it takes so long, it basically reduces the number of units that you can sell, but also every unit that is sold is tailored, is customized to the individual. So that’s the part of co-creation. So even if you have the basic sneaker, it’s going to be different because you decided to add, I don’t know, stars or put some Swarovski crystals there, so it is going to be your sneaker, so that creates more exclusivity.
But imagine that you have a luxury sneaker coming from a brand like Gucci or something like that, it’s going to be three or four models. So everybody’s going to be using one of those three, four models. With Golden Goose, it’s your sneaker, it’s your own design, it’s your own taste on that. So that created also that exclusivity that you’re not going to see anybody using exactly the same sneaker that you’re using.
BRIAN KENNY: And probably a more emotional connection for the customer, right?
Interference?
JUAN ALCACER: Yeah. It’s what we have seen here also with what is called the IKEA effect. Anything that you do and you feel more connection, you feel more emotionally about that object that you have created, that you have helped to create.
BRIAN KENNY: Alex, I’m wondering how this plays into their ability to learn more about their customers. We’re talking all the time these days about AI and learning machines and how they capture customer information and they use it to sell more products to customers. It sounds like Golden Goose might be learning a lot about their customer’s personal preferences just by the way they customize their products with them. Can you talk a little bit about how they think about CRM and how it factors into their business strategy?
ALEXANDRE DAILLANCE: Yeah, so what really stood out to me about the CRM and Golden Goose is how deeply embedded it is in the company that you’re making. So most brands, from big groups such as LVMH are carrying usually, say they’re customer centric but in the case of Golden Goose, the whole brand actually runs the business that way. CRM isn’t just a separate function sitting on the side, it’s driving product decision, geographic expansion, and even in-store experience. One thing that’s clear in the case is how much trust the company places on the customer data.
So for example, store printing aren’t just based on intuition or trends. They open the markets where CRM shows strong engagement. Brazil, for example, Golden Goose noticed high online orders for Brazilian customers and also so strong traffic of Brazilians abroad in their Madrid store, the Miami stores, and that directly influence the decision to eventually open a store in Sao Paulo and in Rio de Janeiro.
So CRM at Gold Goose also shapes product strategy, the merchandising team uses real-time insights on the stores to understand what’s selling, what’s underperforming, and where to reallocate the inventory to maximize the sales across the different stores.
A big part of this works because sales associate are also trained to collect that data. So Gold Goose hires people who are usually warm, approachable, and so customers naturally feel free to share more feedback to them. It’s a very intentional loop where the data improves the customer experience and a better experience leads to more data. So what stood out to me overall is that CRM isn’t just a marketing tool for them, it’s really the backbone of the business. It’s driving the loyalty, it’s driving the growth, and giving Gold Goose an edge that most luxury brands don’t have yet.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, I mean that all makes perfect sense, and most of us, when we think about luxury brands, particularly fashion brands, we picture runways and we picture fancy places where they unveil the next year’s line of fashion. That’s not how Golden Goose does it. They take a completely different approach, Juan. I’m wondering if you can talk about the approach that they’ve taken and what it tells us about their approach to marketing in a luxury environment.
JUAN ALCACER: Yeah, Golden Goose is a great example of how luxury goods are shifting and the strategies are shifting. It used to be, as you described, more of a broadcasting. I’m going to tell you what the season is going to be, these are the colors, this is the things that you’re going to be using in the next season, to something that is more, I belong to the fashion, I belong to the process of designing the product.
So this shift from more centralized to more decentralized is key to understand the success behind Golden Goose. And what is interesting, relating to what Alex was saying, is that when you look and when you talk to everybody in the company, it’s the creative side and the analytical side together because it’s not necessarily that they go just and ask people, it’s they use that data and they refine the product and they refine… They decide where to open the stores based on the data that they’re using. So it’s not necessarily that they become just a pleasers of the customers, it’s that they use that data to engage with the customers in a way that not many of the luxury brands do have. Luxury brands tend to be very distant, very cold in a way, very perfect.
That’s the opposite of Golden Goose. Golden Goose is trying to bring the customers, try to get the customers inside and to create that emotional connection between the product. The one thing, for instance, that one of the lines of revenue that they’re developing is the recycling of the shoes. So you basically buy the sneakers and you go to a concert of the Rolling Stones or whatever, and you have the emotion of using those sneakers while you are looking at the Rolling Stones playing.
And then after five years your sneakers are really falling apart and then you just send it back and then you pay to basically to refashion the sneakers. So that connection that is not only at the moment that you buy and you co-design, it stays with you through the whole process of the lifecycle of the product.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, I mean we know a lot about the values of millennial generation and Gen Y and Gen X. They care a lot about the kinds of things you’re describing, that Golden Goose does. And I’m wondering, this is a bit of conjecture maybe on your part, but do you perhaps see this as a transition in the luxury fashion market where a new set of values is taking over from what used to be “it’s fine to broadcast to me and I’ll pay because I just want that exclusivity,” to, “I really care about how this is made and what’s happening to it and my role in it?”
JUAN ALCACER: Definitely. And Golden Goose has been very good at capitalizing these trends just when they were starting. So the idea of hand crafting also means that these shoes are basically mostly manufactured in the north of Italy with good wages paid to the workers. In fact, they have to, because there is no tradition of designing sneakers in that area, they have to basically train all the workers.
So they also have a very strong program for education, and those values are transmitted to the community and people feel good at paying $500, $600 for these sneakers because it’s not only that you are getting the sneakers and you’re going to have these sneakers for a long time, and when you are basically tired of them, you can send them back and they’re going to be recycled or refurbished and sell again.
It’s also that you’re creating communities, and the communities, they make a very, very strong effort to connect with the stores in the different local communities. So all these events that they’re having have artists from that region or from that city or from that neighborhood within the city. So they’re always creating this connection in many different ways, by paying attention to the trends in the new generations, but also by being present on what matters to that particular community. The buyers in Hong Kong are going to be very different from the buyers in Brazil, and they pay attention to those things.
BRIAN KENNY: So a localization strategy. That makes a lot of sense. Alex, let me come back to you. So the case really centers around three strategic pathways that Golden Goose is looking at. One pathway could be expanding sneaker services, another is scaling ready-to-wear, and then the third is accelerating graphic expansion. As you did your research on the case, I’m wondering what some of the trade-offs were as they prioritized one of these pathways over another?
ALEXANDRE DAILLANCE: So if we start looking at expanding sneaker services, I think the upside is pretty obvious. I mean, sneakers are the core of the business, very present, more than 80% of the sales currently as of 2025. So you’re doubling down on what’s already working. And we know from the case that service like co-creation not only increase retail sales, but they also increase the repeat purchase rate, which is very important.
The challenge that comes with that though is that expanding the services, we’ve been expanding the size of the many Golden Goose stores around the world. Only a very small fraction of the 225 stores they have today are capable to offer the customization, co-creation we mentioned earlier. So obviously this could be very capital-intensive and very time-consuming as a process. So even if that option makes sense strategically, it would require meaningful financial commitment and couldn’t be implemented immediately. The second option is scaling ready-to-wear and accessories. There’s a lot of potential here. It’s obviously a natural evolution for a fashion brand.
The total addressable market is obviously huge, and 70% of Golden Goose customers are women, as you mentioned earlier. So diving into maybe handbags or jewelry could be very attractive. These product categories also tend to have very strong margins. At the same time, these product categories, whether it’s ready-to-wear and accessories, are extremely competitive. And as Professor Alcacer mentioned earlier, currently Golden Goose has this unique edge where the price point with sneakers is very unique. They don’t have that many competitors. But if they try to really fight in the ready-to-wear and accessories category, that will be a very different story with many, many competitors.
And for them to stand out will be very difficult. And even though they’ve had some decent traction, as we’ve seen throughout the case with growing numbers of sales coming from these new categories, it’ll be very tough for it to become maybe half of its revenues on the long term.
The last option is geographic expansion. So the opportunity here is obviously big and there’s still markets, like the Middle East, South America and India where demand for Golden Goose is strong and the brand has, through its CRM capabilities is able to identify where to open and how to maximize performance.
The limitation, however, once again, is the cost and the time it takes. So opening new stores is expensive and some regions of the world can have some bureaucratic challenges, such as India, where for some reason it takes 18 months to open a store compared to only two months for the US. So while the upside is attractive, it’s not the quickest and the cheapest level for growth.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah. I’m also wondering, scalability, when you’ve got such a personalized approach to creating the product, does that not hamper your ability to scale?
JUAN ALCACER: That’s at the core of the issues with our growth in luxury goods. The more you try to sell it, you are basically losing in terms of exclusivity and probably losing on the quality of what you are doing.
So to produce more of these sneakers, you’re going to need by far more workers, more crafters that are not that easy to find. So for instance, when we’re talking about opening stores in other parts of the world, like in the Middle East, with a world that is becoming less open to free trade with tariffs and things like that, probably you’re going to have to basically have manufacturing spots in many other parts of the world. You’re going to have to train these people because it’s a craft.
And the north of Italy is very good at finding that and training these type of people. But probably you cannot have the same type of human capital in other places. But what you’re asking is basically at the core of the challenges of growing a brand, that the more you’re growing, the more common it becomes, the less exclusive it becomes, and the more likely is that you are not going to basically connect with the customers or provide the quality of the product that you normally have done in the past.
BRIAN KENNY: Yeah, yeah. This has been a great conversation. I knew it would be. I’ve got time for one more question for each of you. I’m going to end with you, Juan, because you’re the faculty member, you get the last word. But Alex, you’ve spent a lot of time in this industry, as we had talked about before, and I’m wondering, given the insights that you have about Golden Goose, if you had to predict based on all the data that you’ve captured for the case, which markets or product categories present the greatest upside for them? Where would you advise Silvio to place his bets?
ALEXANDRE DAILLANCE: Yeah, I think looking at all the data in the case and all the interviews Professor Alcacer and I were able to conduct with the brand over the past month, I think I would focus on the geographic expansion of the brand, at least on the near term. I think with the unique CRM capabilities that we mentioned that Golden Goose has been able to develop over the past years, I think they can have, let’s say a quick winner looking at the different territories that can be interesting for them to supply. Using their CRM capabilities, they’re able to basically say, “Okay, here, Brazil seems to be a good territory for us. We’re going to open a store in Sao Paulo, let’s open a store in Rio.” They’ve done that over the past month, it’s done really well. We can now do the same potentially in the Middle East in countries such as Saudi Arabia, Korea, Bahrain, et cetera, and as well as other countries in South America, which Silvio mentioned was an interesting market for them as well. So I think on the pure near term, I would dedicate significant amount of economic resources and time to open more stores and then potentially down the line look more closely into launching these new lines of products such as women’s bags, which arguably could be a very interesting option for the brand, but I see it more as a medium-, long-term prospect as a level of growth.
BRIAN KENNY: And theoretically, they could do the co-creation thing with accessories as well, right? So the handbags could be co-created?
ALEXANDRE DAILLANCE: That’s correct. That’s correct, yes.
BRIAN KENNY: Juan, do you agree with Alex’s advice?
JUAN ALCACER: Yes. That seems to be the way to increase revenues without changing too much the essence of the brand. It’s repeating a little bit more the same type of things that you were doing, maybe adapting it to the local taste and trends and be sure that you have the right people to do the co-creation and so on and so forth. But it seems to be closer to the core of what the company is.
BRIAN KENNY: And I guess the challenge in all of this is balancing that growth with maintaining the experience of buying a Golden Goose product.
JUAN ALCACER: Exactly.
BRIAN KENNY: Never an easy thing.
JUAN ALCACER: Yes. That’s the big challenge, and that’s what is beautiful about the case in my own view.
BRIAN KENNY: So Juan, let me give you the last question here. It’s a pretty straightforward one. I always want to know what you would like our listeners to take away from a case. So what would you like them to remember about the Golden Goose case?
JUAN ALCACER: Yeah, so besides the academic parts of it, that is just to understand strategic differentiation, understanding the trade-offs in growth. I think this is a good example of disruption and we normally think about disruption, about technology, AI that is going to be changing something, or quantum computing that is going to be changing the way that we conduct business.
I see this case as a disruption in the luxury goods, and it’s coming, because they were thinking about the customers in a different way than everybody else. So it is a change in the business model, not in the technology per se, although they used a lot of technology to make the decisions that they’re making. But in a way, it’s disrupting the way that the industry has behaved for many, many, many years. So I would like people to think about this as an example of disruption that is not associated to technological changes, but is associated to changes in the business model, in the core business model, and the core values and the core assumptions of an industry.
BRIAN KENNY: So disruption can come in many ways, I guess.
JUAN ALCACER: Absolutely.
BRIAN KENNY: Juan, Alex, thank you for joining me on Cold Call.
ALEXANDRE DAILLANCE: Thank you, Brian.
JUAN ALCACER: It’s a pleasure to be with you again.
BRIAN KENNY: If you enjoy Cold Call, you might like our other podcasts: Climate Rising, Coaching Real Leaders, IdeaCast, Managing the Future of Work, Skydeck, and Think Big, Buy Small. Find them wherever you get your podcasts.
If you have any suggestions or just want to say hello, we want to hear from you. Email us at coldcall@hbs.edu. Thanks again for joining us. I’m your host Brian Kenny, and you’ve been listening to Cold Call, an official podcast of Harvard Business School and part of the HBR Podcast Network.
