The Bree Street spot Daniel Sher waited five years to open in
An auditor with a clothing label on the side wanted one address on Bree Street. When it came free in 2020, he filled it with other designers' work too.
Daniel Sher spent his lunch breaks on Bree Street. After moving from Johannesburg to Cape Town in 2014, he took a job as an auditor and kept walking to Max Bagels for lunch. He fell for the street, made friends with the owners, and began to want a shop there. Not just any shop. In a December 2023 interview with Shelflife, he said he wanted that exact spot for five years before it became available.
He was not a retailer. He ran a small clothing label on the side and worked in clothing manufacturing, and later started his own factory, Together MFG. His label Good Good Good launched in 2016, the same year it made restaurant-themed T-shirts with Max Bagels. In 2020, during lockdown level 3, Matthew Freemantle, one of the bagel shop's founders, told him the space at 120 Bree Street was available.
A shop for other people's clothes
The obvious move was a shop for Good Good Good alone. Sher built something wider. The store would carry other independent South African brands, with his own label on the shelves beside them. He told CEC Online the point was to curate brands that sit well with his own and, in that way, add to a picture of what South African design looks like right now.
The name came over dinner. Designer Koos Groenewald, who had been floating Duck Duck Goose as a name for restaurant brands, suggested it for the shop. Sher liked how it suited the playfulness of his label. “Duck Duck Goose is literally a playground game,” he told Shelflife.
The game became the shop's logic. Explaining the idea in a January 2021 post on the store's blog, Sher said each independently owned South African brand in the store is a “golden duckling”, and the geese are the brands and products that customers choose to buy. According to Documented by Butter, a mosaic floor refers to the game, and the word goose sits at the changing room, where the decisions are made.
Opening in December 2020
Duck Duck Goose opened on 15 December 2020, in the middle of the pandemic. CEC Online described it as a wild decision, driven by an optimistic imagination of the future. Sher has argued for the physical shop ever since. He told the same publication it gave him ways to do things a pop-up never could, such as a standing sale for the rejects from the factory.
The shop also became part of the street. CEC Online notes that it livens up Bree Street, particularly on First Thursdays, and that DJ capability was built into its design. Over its first three years the team threw parties, ran a T-shirt design competition and travelled to trade shows. For the third birthday in December 2023, they released limited T-shirts made with Shelflife and Baseline Skate Shop, and held the party at One Park.
The store's own account of year three is frank about change. It closed for four months in the winter of 2023 for renovations and a rethink, took out the record shelf, and put more weight on luxury design and premium T-shirts. It also started the Duck Duck Goose T-Shirt Café, a travelling capsule concept, and the Duck Duck Goose Soundsystem, a music division that can be booked for events.
What it has become
The shop stayed on Bree Street while its reach grew. Sher went to Paris Fashion Week in June 2024 as a buyer, meaning it as market research, and made his fourth buying trip in January 2026. In September 2025 he showed brands at Tokyo Fashion Week through a Japanese sales representative. In a letter on the store's blog in April 2026 he calls showing “the best of niche South African fashion to the world” the store's core manifesto, and adds that access to buyers and media comes from being in the right rooms at the right time.
The line he gave Shelflife still describes the shop on the street: he wanted to make South African luxury fashion “as accessible as possible” for local and international visitors. The racks carry T-shirts, outerwear, caps, bags, jewellery, kids' clothing, books, magazines and toys from labels such as Kartik Research, Gottlob, Easy Listening, Solid Waste and Alex Zono, with a handful of international labels alongside them.
Find Duck Duck Goose at 120 Bree Street, Cape Town, Monday to Saturday, or order from duckduckgoosestore.com, which ships worldwide.