Trinity Mouzon Wofford
Making room for lunch.
Golde cofounder Trinity Mouzon Wofford is building a life around a colorful old house, family meals and work that leaves room to enjoy them.
Between two and three in the afternoon, Trinity Mouzon Wofford keeps her calendar clear for lunch. The block dates to a period when running Golde meant calls stretching across the day. It remains a small, practical boundary: an hour that belongs to eating.
She and her husband, Issey Kobori, started the company in their Brooklyn apartment in 2017. Their original ambition was to bring in $2,000 a month, enough to cover rent. The business grew into something much larger, but the question of what it should make possible for the people running it never went away.
Mouzon Wofford was 23 at launch. As a shopper, she had felt caught between an earnest, crunchy wellness world and a glossy one priced beyond her reach. Golde offered a more welcoming way in. Its colorful presentation made an everyday drink feel inviting rather than like an assignment in self-improvement. Today, the range includes matcha, hojicha, turmeric latte blends and tools for making them at home.
By 2022, she told Beauty Independent, Golde had reached seven-figure revenue profitably with two full-time people and raised more than $1 million. Hiring and paying people well were part of the reason to bring in capital. Her investor group included fellow founders, with women and people of color making up most of the cap table. It was a business that had already demonstrated demand before expanding its payroll.
In 2021, the couple left Brooklyn for the Hudson Valley. Their home is an 1865 Victorian that had been stripped back and painted white. They kept the kitchen cabinets and worked with what was there, adding buttery yellows, red lower cabinetry and older pieces with histories of their own. Kobori made curtains from secondhand fabric. A pendant light came from his great-grandmother.
The house draws on Victorian, Japanese and Shaker influences, without demanding that every corner be finished. They have painted the rooms themselves, lived with colors while deciding what comes next and moved part of a sectional into the bedroom. Hand-me-downs and things they make sit alongside antiques. The room can change because the people using it have changed their minds.
Both work from home, and meals with their two daughters give the day its shape. They have described sitting down together three times a day. In the evening, beeswax candles turn dinner into a ritual. There is care in the setting, but also permission to keep adjusting it: a house can be useful, beautiful and still in progress.
In the kitchen, herbs grow indoors and apples from her mother’s trees become vinegar. Homemade bread goes to neighbors; raspberries come back for the children. Mouzon Wofford has come to value that exchange over the idea of doing everything herself. The pleasures of home extend beyond the property.
Her cookbook, Eating at Home, published in April 2026, carries those interests onto the page. She wanted it to stand on its own, rather than function as a Golde cookbook. Working with coauthor Rebecca Firkser also gave her a reason to loosen her grip: sharing the recipe work made the project better. The photographs were made in her house, with family life continuing around the crew.
The book’s spring tour put that domestic philosophy on the road. Kobori and their daughters joined every stop of a 28-day trip, including a drive from Portland to Los Angeles. Alongside bookstore conversations, Mouzon Wofford organized small lunches in friends’ homes. She wanted people around a table, and found that bringing the children helped deepen the connections along the way.
Traveling as a family was not frictionless. Neither was filling the rooms: she promoted the events, called on friends and worked with independent booksellers. Most of the talks sold out. The tour gave her the satisfaction of meeting readers face to face, and of seeing a project about slowing down create a busy, shared adventure.
There is ambition in all of this, from a company that began with the rent to a book carried across the country. There is also a fairly specific picture of what the work is for: people at the table, something good to eat, and enough space in the day to notice.