How Gwyneth Paltrow Turned Goop Into a $250 Million Obsession
Last time we talked about Google Maps For Money.
This week I’m curating an article from The Profile on how Gwyneth Paltrow turned Goop into a $250 million wellness business.
Here's how Paltrow’s once-mocked ideas about health and wellness became part of mainstream culture.
This guest post was written by Ali Montag, a writer based in Austin who authors Letters from Home & Away. Below, Montag breaks down Paltrow’s always-controversial brand strategy that’s turned her into a business powerhouse.
Read on the below excerpt to get the gist of the article!
Meanwhile, don’t forget to check out our featured business below, Sweet Duet Chocolate, and if you would like to engage with founders from our community, whether through money, time, or expertise, please CLICK THE BUTTON BELOW!
How Gwyneth Paltrow Turned Goop Into a $250 Million Obsession
By Ali Montag
…
To understand Paltrow, her success, and the staying power of Goop, an absurdly important brand in health, beauty, and wellness, we have to understand attention. This is the attention economy, after all: Politicians drum up support on Twitch and win elections on Twitter. Tech founders write on Substack. Celebrities sell lipstick on Instagram. Everything is a funnel.
Monetizing eyeballs
When Paltrow launched Goop as an email newsletter in 2008, using off-the-shelf software and writing her lists of recommendations, recipes, and product reviews for five years for free, she became an early student of the attention economy. She learned that backlash, which follows her relentlessly, doesn’t have to be the sunk cost of celebrity. It can be part of the plan.
“I can monetize those eyeballs,” Paltrow told a group of Harvard business students in 2018.
In the early years of Goop, which sells everything from detoxifying superpowders to $1,300 diamond rings, Paltrow coined the term “contextual commerce.” The Wall Street Journal defined it as the process by which “potential Goop customers are flooded with newsletters, blog posts, print magazines, conferences, events, podcasts and Instagram ads that surround Goop products in a cocoon of content.” Before plenty of other CEOs caught up, Paltrow understood: attention would be the most important ingredient in the modern commerce recipe.
In that context, Paltrow’s lighting-rod-like public perception wasn’t a risk, it was an advantage.Whatever you feel about Gwyneth, you feel something. Perhaps you rolled your eyes at the idea of conscious uncoupling, or perhaps you were outraged at the marketing of jade eggs. Perhaps you found it annoying that in a single column, a person could promote both a detox cleanse and a Saturday night cigarette for “the right amount of naughty.”
Perhaps you were horrified by her Netflix show, “The Goop Lab,” which covered topics like psychedelic mushrooms, breathing exercises, cold exposure, and anti-aging. Perhaps you were a little bit intrigued.It doesn't matter. It doesn’t matter how you feel about Paltrow—or whether or not the products work, or whether psychics can talk to the dead, or if “energy work” is a reasonable way to heal trauma—as long as you’re paying attention. In the end, attention wins.
“I have always been a person who says what I believe to be true and I have always been unafraid to say things that might be provocative,” Paltrow wrote in 2020. “I have talked about many things over the years that people called me crazy for: yoga, reiki, macrobiotics, gluten-free food, anything about vaginas... The negativity that surrounded each one lives on on the internet. It became just part of the cycle: I, or we at Goop, introduce something unfamiliar, there’s a big reaction, before gradual cultural adoption.”
Paltrow is just expressing her curiosity, asking questions and offering her perspective. If that provokes a backlash—well, that’s kind of the point.
“The Gwyneth Paltrow business story is not about Gwyneth Paltrow as much as it is about your reaction to Gwyneth Paltrow,” The New York Times’ Taffy Broddesser-Akner explained.
And there’s plenty to react to: Paltrow is the queen of wellness, but her favorite food is french fries. Mario Batali once said, “She eats like a truck driver.” She launched her newsletter in the height of the Great Recession in 2008, but her first recommendations were for an $1,850 Hermes watch and a $1,350 Mulberry bag. She married Brad Falchuk, but decided to spend the next year living separately anyway. It’s catnip for the Internet. There have been at least 100 takedowns written about Gwyneth Paltrow. And yet, she’s still illuminating our iPhone screens, and Goop is only gaining subscribers.
There are also questions about efficacy. (Lots of questions about efficacy.) How much of this “wellness” stuff is real?
In the first episode of “The Goop Lab,” Goop’s former chief content officer Elise Loehnen explained the brand’s mission this way: “What we try to do at Goop is be open minded and explore ideas that may seem out there or too scary, so that people can have access to the information and make up their own minds.”
It’s not journalism, she contends, it’s exposition. "We're just asking questions! We're not giving advice!" Hearing her quote, I briefly thought of the early days of the Trump campaign in 2015, the tossing out of unfounded ideas and errant theories. "We didn't say it was true! We're just saying maybe it is!"
In those days, when Jeb Bush was considered the most likely contender against Hillary Clinton, establishment pundits were dismissive of Trump. The campaign didn’t make sense: “He’s a Republican, but he’s pro labor?” “He wants to cut taxes, but increase federal spending?” “He’s courting Evangelicals, but his house is made of gold?” “He can’t be a conservative. He’s from Manhattan!”
…It didn’t matter that he was confusing, Kara Swisher noted. That was the point. He was interesting. “When he was using Twitter, I remember thinking, ‘Woah. That’s smart,’ she said. In the attention economy, the more outrageous, the better.
Amplifying the ‘extraordinary’
Surrounded by a constant barrage of news, tweets, statistics, and opinions, it’s not the most accurate or technically precise information that wins out. It’s the most engaging. Who wants to read a peer-reviewed study on efficacy when YouTube videos are just so darn nice to watch?
Consider this reporting from Vice: “In 2018, a team of researchers at MIT published the most comprehensive study to date on how mistruths spread online, based on a survey of about 126,000 rumors shared on Twitter by roughly 3 million users over the span of 11 years. They found that falsehoods consistently beat out the truth on the platform, spreading ‘significantly farther, faster, deeper, and more broadly than the truth in all categories of information.’ False claims are 70 percent more likely to be retweeted than true ones, they found, and far more likely to go viral.”In summary: “People are more likely to amplify something extraordinary.”
What Goop is doing may not win Paltrow the presidency, but it is extraordinary. Sometimes confusing, outlandish—yes—but extraordinary. And it works: Paltrow’s once-mocked ideas about health and wellness are now a part of the culture: How many of your co-workers have dabbled with intermittent fasting? Shrooms? Cleanses? Thank Gwyneth Paltrow.
In capitalism, if no longer in politics, there is an inevitable pivot to the middle: There are no more jade eggs at Goop. The company added a team of scientists and health experts to fact-check claims. The $4,000 Cartier watches are sold next to more accessible items like vitamins and sunscreens under $50. Goop is launching retail partnerships and Paltrow is angel investing.
But it’s worth asking: What comes next? For the next upstart brand aiming to push the boundaries of wellness, what extraordinary content will be required to capture an audience’s attention? What could possibly out-Goop Goop?…
No one knows. Certainly I don’t. But it isn’t a question for celebrities to answer—It’s something to ask ourselves.
https://theprofile.substack.com/p/gwyneth-paltrow-goop
Featured business: Sweet Duet Chocolate
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Location: Los Angeles, CA
Founder(s): Annie Woo; Heath Finn
Founded year: 2020- products launched Nov.
🍫 Tell us about yourself, your company, and how you got started.
I started a farmer's market stand as a cottage food operation in 2018 with about 20 different kinds of all-vegan confections: bonbons, bars, caramels, and chocolate-dipped fruits. The labor of doing everything on my own became difficult to keep up, so I decided to go narrow and deep. I selected the popular chocolate-dipped fruits line, gave it a recipe upgrade, solved all the "problems" (substituting refined sugar with date nectar, sourcing fruits with no added sulfites, lecithin, dairy, etc.) to meet my own health standards but also to be ahead of the "trends" - and Sweetduet was born. During this revamp, I met my partner and investor, who provided the seed money, and we are now a few months into our launch. I am a multimedia artist, so all the contents, including packaging, are done in-house to save money.
🍫 How did you acquire your first batch of customers?
A lot of word of mouth from family and friends. In the last few months since the launch, I have gone door-to-door selling to about 150 retail stores around SoCal-- we are in 13 and counting. Sadly, a huge portion of these stores is struggling. Meanwhile, our e-commerce website with google ads has been slowly bringing in some new, fresh traffic.
🍫 Did your business pivot in the pandemic? Or, how did your business start during this time?
We were basically born into the pandemic. However, our original plan (pre-pandemic) was to rely heavily on physical locations, specifically smaller regional health food store chains, which proved to be difficult during Covid. We didn't have plans to open e-commerce right away but saw it as a priority a few months into the pandemic and glad we did as we are getting positive results with repeat customers there.
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In 2021, I would like to continue to put 50% of our time into pursuing physical locations as I had been as more locations are beginning to open up. This would also mean developing relationships with distributors and brokers. I want to put the other 50% of our efforts honing our online presence on Instagram, Facebook, blogging, youtube, and Pinterest. From our experience in these last two months, there couldn't be a better time for us to have launched Sweetduet: people are looking for comfort during this time. The clean and nutritious aspect of my chocolate seems to be even more entice our target audience during this time.
🍫 Any other lessons/advice you’d like to share with other fellow entrepreneurs?
I don't think I've walked the path long enough to have much to say except that everything you've ever learned in your life will suddenly become relevant when you walk the entrepreneur path.
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Love and support is all we can ask for, and maybe 100 million dollars :)
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