From the start, Goop knew what readers were clicking on and was nimble enough to meet those needs.
It's a Monday morning in November 2017, and students at Harvard Business School in Boston are convening in their classroom to find actor Gwyneth Paltrow. She is sitting at one of their desks, fitting in not at all, using her phone, as they take their seats along with guests they have brought to class that day: wives, mothers, boyfriends. Each seat fills, and some guests have to stand along the back wall and sit on the steps.
The class is called the Business of Entertainment, Media and Sports. The students are here to interrogate Paltrow about Goop, her lifestyle-and-wellness e-commerce business, and to learn how to create a "sustainable competitive advantage", according to the class catalogue. She moves to the teacher's desk, where she sits down and crosses her legs. She talks about why she started the business in 2008, about how she's only ever wanted to be someone who recommends things. The first iteration of the company was just a series of lists – where to go and what to buy once you get there – via a newsletter Paltrow emailed out of her kitchen, the first one complete with recipes for turkey ragù and banana-nut muffins.
One evening, at a party in London, one of the newsletter's recipients, a venture capitalist named Juliet de Baubigny, had told her, "I love what you're doing with Goop." GP, as she is called by nearly everyone in her employ, didn't even know what a venture capitalist was. She was using off-the-shelf newsletter software. But, Paltrow says, de Baubigny became a "godmother" to her. She encouraged her vision and "gave permission" to start thinking about how to monetise it. GP didn't want to go broad. She wanted you to have what she had: the $US795 G. Label trench coat and the $US1505 Betony Vernon S&M chain set. Why mass-market a lifestyle that lives in definitional opposition to the mass market?
Goop's ethic was this: that having beautiful things sometimes costs money; that finding beautiful things is sometimes a result of an immense privilege; but that a lack of that privilege doesn't mean you shouldn't have those things. Besides, just because some people cannot afford something, doesn't mean that no one can and that no one should want it. If this bothered anyone, well, the newsletter content was free, and so were the recipes for turkey ragù and banana-nut muffins.
By the time she stood in that Harvard classroom, less than a decade later, Goop had become a clothing manufacturer, a beauty company, an advertising hub, a publishing house, a podcast producer and a portal of health-and-healing information. It will soon become a TV-show producer. It is a clearing house of alternative health claims, sex-and-intimacy advice and probes into the mind, body and soul. There is no part of the self that Goop doesn't aim to serve. "I want to help you solve problems," GP says. "I want to be an additive to your life."
Goop is now worth $US250 million, according to a source close to the company.
The minute the phrase "having it all" lost favour among women, wellness came in to pick up the pieces. It was a way to reorient ourselves: we are not in service to anyone else, and we are worthy subjects of our own care. It isn't about achieving; it's about putting ourselves at the top of a list that we haven't even previously been on. Wellness may be a result of too much having it all: too much pursuit, too many boxes that we'd seen our exhausted mothers fall into bed without checking off. Wellness arrived because it was gravely needed.
Goop's first newsletter left GP's kitchen right when the global financial crisis was collapsing the economy around us. It wasn't just the homes people no longer owned and the jobs people no longer had. It was the environmental crisis. It was the endless exposure of corruption. Whom exactly were we trusting with our care? Why did we decide to trust them in the first place? Who says that only certain kinds of people are allowed to give us the answers?
These phenomena gave an easy rise to Gwyneth Paltrow, who was at first curating teas and lingerie and sweaters she thought you'd like. But people were looking for leaders, and she was already committing public displays of ostentatious wellness: she showed up at a movie premiere with cupping marks on her back; she let bees sting her. Suddenly Gwyneth Paltrow, the movie star, had become a major player in an industry that is big business.
The Goop campus in Santa Monica consists of four squat, grey buildings. It's June and a diverse group of about 200 young, exuberant, well-dressed people are working hard to plan the coming weekend's event, the In Goop Health wellness summit. GP sits at her desk behind the glass walls of her office, which is spare and also decorated in shades of grey. Her golden hair falls over the paper she is reading. She is wearing a tank top, shearling-lined white Birkenstocks and Goop x Frame wide-legged palazzo jeans. (Back when she wore them at Harvard, I'd never seen anyone else wear them. Now she's making them, and everyone I know is wearing the same style.)
We eat salmon rolls. She is trying to be low-carb today, but it isn't happening. There is too much going on. The wellness summit, a day-long immersion in Goop-endorsed products, panels, doctors and other "healers", is a "heavy lift for the team". The summits are great, don't get her wrong – all three so far have sold out, with tickets ranging from $US500 to $US4500, the latter including two dinners with GP – but lately she has been wondering if the summit does everything it needs to. She worries that she's just serving the same customers over and over.
In January, she met a woman who took a very long bus ride from rural Pennsylvania to the Goop summit in New York. "Seventy-nine per cent of our US customers aren't in New York or Los Angeles," where these summits are held, she says; they're in secondary markets. So how do you bring them in? There have been pop-up Goop stores everywhere from Dallas to Miami. And there are digital passes to the summit.
But you can't taste a plate of ancient grains and avocado in citrus dressing on a computer. You can't feel someone push warm oil over your skin with a jade roller through an iPad. You can't eat a piece of chocolate that will supposedly not just regulate your hormones but restore your sex life on your phone. You can only watch some panels and one-on-one conversations. So she's thinking, somewhat incredulously, that they may take the wellness summits on the road. She's incredulous because she still remembers sitting in her kitchen in London, celebrating a day when $US45 came in, the result of an early advertising partnership.
Guests at an In Goop Health wellness summit in California earlier this year.
The newsletter had started out as kind of mainstream New Age. It had some kooky stuff in it, but nothing totally outrageous. It was concerned with basic wellness causes, like detoxes and cleanses and meditation. It wasn't until 2014 that it began to resemble the thing it is now, a wellspring of both totally legitimate wellness tips and completely bonkers magical thinking. From the start, Goop knew what readers were clicking on and was nimble enough to meet those needs by actually manufacturing the things they wanted.
When a story about beauty products that didn't contain endocrine disrupters and formaldehyde got a lot of traffic in 2015, the company started Goop By Juice Beauty, a collection of "clean" face creams and oils and cleansers that it promised lacked those things. When a story about "postnatal depletion", a syndrome coined by one of the Goop doctors, did even-better-than-average business in 2017, it introduced Goop Wellness, a series of four vitamin "protocols" for women with different concerns – weight, energy, focus etc – and sold product worth $US100,000 on the first day.
The weirder Goop went, the more its readers rejoiced. And the more Goop was criticised – by mainstream doctors with accusations of pseudoscience, by websites like Slate and Jezebel saying it was no longer ludicrous, it was dangerous – the more faithful those readers became. Elsewhere, people would wonder how Gwyneth Paltrow could try to solve our problems when her life seemed almost comically problem-free. But every time there was a negative story about her or her company, all it did was bring more people to the site – among them those who couldn't find help in mainstream medicine.
With assaults coming from all sides, Goop began to dig its heels into the dirt, and not only because dirt is a natural exfoliant that contains selenium, which is a mineral that helps with thyroid function and which many of us are lacking. Goop grew ever more successful. Now Goop is a cause, and GP is its martyr.
Gwyneth Paltrow and her fiancé, Brad Falchuk, on the cover of Goop magazine’s second issue.
The quartley Goop magazine was introduced in September 2017 with a picture of GP's bikini-clad body covered in mud and just one cover line: "Earth to Gwyneth". She does things like that to demonstrate a kind of self-awareness around what she knows is the rap on her, that she's a privileged, white rich lady who is into some wackadoo stuff. That issue, like the second (the one with a cover photo, pictured, of her and fiancé Brad Falchuk, a writer and director, and the words "In Deep"), was a product of a partnership with Condé Nast that cost $US15 on newsstands. At first, it seemed like a perfect fit. "Goop and Condé Nast are natural partners, and I'm excited she's bringing her point of view to the company,"said Anna Wintour, Condé Nast's artistic director and editor-in-chief of Vogue, when the deal was announced in April 2017. The print product would be a collaboration: Goop content overseen by a Vogue editor.
It didn't work out. "They're a company that's really in transition and does things in a very old-school way," GP says. The parting was amicable. "But it was amazing to work with Anna. I love her. She's a total idol of mine.
"We realised we could just do a better job of it ourselves in-house. I think for us it was really like we like to work where we are in an expansive space. Somewhere like Condé, understandably, there are a lot of rules."
The rules she's referring to are the rules of traditional magazine-making, all upheld strictly at an institution like Condé Nast. One was that Goop wasn't allowed to use the magazine as part of its "contextual commerce" strategy. The company wanted to be able to sell Goop products (in addition to other products, just as they do on the website), but Condé Nast insisted that they have a more "agnostic" editorial approach. The company pointed out that it published magazines, not catalogues.
GP wanted to know why. She wanted the magazine to be a natural extension of the Goop website. She wanted the reader to be able to do things like text a code to purchase a product without even having to leave her inert reading position and wander over to her computer. A magazine customer is also a regular customer.
But the other rule is – well, the thing couldn't be fact-checked. Goop wanted Goop magazine to be like the Goop website in another way: to allow the Goop family of doctors and healers to go unchallenged in their recommendations, and that just didn't pass Condé Nast standards. Those standards require traditional backup for scientific claims, like double-blind, peer-reviewed studies.
In 2016, a division of the Council of Better Business Bureaus began an inquiry into Goop for deceptive marketing claims about the life-optimising powers of Moon Juice products, which appeared on the Goop site as a key ingredient in a smoothie that GP drank every morning. (Goop voluntarily stopped making these claims.) And mid last year, the watchdog organisation TruthInAdvertising.org (TINA) sent GP a letter that referred to numerous instances of deceptive marketing claims that the site's products cured, treated or prevented inflammation, autoimmune diseases and more. Goop adjusted some of its claims in the short period the letter allotted, but TINA found its response inadequate and reported Goop to the California district attorney's offices in both Santa Cruz and Santa Clara. (Neither office would comment on the matter.)
A gynaecologist and obstetrician in San Francisco named Jen Gunter, who also writes a column on reproductive health for The New York Times, has criticised Goop in 30 blog posts on her website since 2015. A post she wrote last May – an open letter she signed on behalf of "Science" – generated more than 800,000 page views.
These numbers, though, pale next to Goop's. As of June, there were 2.4 million unique visitors to the site a month, according to Goop. The podcast, mostly hosted by Goop's chief content officer, Elise Loehnen, and featuring interviews with wellness practitioners, receives between 100,000 and 650,000 listens a week.
Back in the days of its partnership with Condé Nast, Goop had wanted to publish articles about autoimmune diseases and infrared saunas and thyroids on its own terms. And by going it alone, it could – sort of. But after a few too many controversies, and with investors to think about, GP made some changes. Goop hired a lawyer to vet all claims on the site. It hired a Condé Nast editor to run the magazine. It hired a man with a PhD in nutritional science, and a director of science and research who is a former Stanford University professor. And in September, Goop will hire a full-time fact-checker. GP chooses to see this as "necessary growing pain".
But something strange happened. Each of these pronouncements set off a series of blog posts and articles and tweets that linked directly to the site, driving up traffic. At the Harvard Business School class, GP calls these moments "cultural firestorms". "I can monetise those eyeballs," she tells the students. Goop has learnt to do a special kind of dark art: to corral the vitriol of the internet and the ever-present cultural ambivalence about GP herself and turn them into cash.
Or maybe it's just that Paltrow has disrupted the contract between the celebrity and the civilian who is observing her. In a typical women's magazine profile, the implicit pact is that the celebrity will not make the reader feel bad by implying that the reader could have everything the celebrity has, if only she worked harder: "It's all in my genes! What can I say?" the celebrity proclaims.
But GP is different. She talks openly about the food habits and exercise obsessions that allow her to look the way she does. People think they want celebrities to speak honestly, but we're not really that happy when they do.
Paltrow doesn't know why people feel the way they do. She says the decision to stop her acting career to pursue Goop was not difficult, but it had nothing to do with her reputation. "I really liked acting. But at a certain point, it started to feel frustrating, in a way, not to have true agency, to be beholden to other people to give you a job, or to create something, to put something into the world."
What can she say? She finds it hard to talk about herself like this. How can she really understand who she is in the culture anyway? She's the only one who can't see herself clearly. All she knows is what she hears, and she once heard that she eats in front of the mirror naked.
She doesn't understand the hostility so many people have towards her. She doesn't think she's perfect. She is the way she is because of hard work. How can people hate her for that? It's just hard work. It's just intention. The content is free, and it's all right there. Go to her website. Do some meditation. Eat better. Take some time for yourself. Hydrate.
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We're so hard on one another, GP says. We're so hard on ourselves, too. "That's all we do as women," she says. "We just kick the [expletive] out of ourselves. It's like that inner critic is so vicious, and it's like: why do we do that? It's so nuts."
She continues: "People say that there's no link between emotions and consciousness and physical illness. And yet look at the plethora of autoimmune diseases around you. One man to 10 women have autoimmune [illnesses]. We literally have turned on ourselves."
Edited version of a story first published in The New York Times. © 2018 The New York Times.
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