Amy Odell: I was surprised, in general, that the person whom a lot of people think they know, because we’ve seen her so much on talk shows, in interviews, and in magazines, is not the person many of my sources saw. She can be cold, aloof, and icy––people compared her to Anna Wintour. If you walk into her office and she’s doing something, she might not look at you––I was surprised by that. I was also surprised to hear about how her acting experience helped her as a businessperson.

How so?

A businessperson is all about meetings and relationships, and she can really turn on the charm and charisma when she needs to––to great effect.

That makes sense, given how much money Goop has raised to date––and from some high-profile funds and investors, too: Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greycroft, Fidelity Investments, G9 Ventures, etcetera.

Basically, she can remember what to say in a meeting—she has amazing recall from being an actress. She can read a script once and basically have it memorized, so when she’s doing a presentation, that must be a piece of cake for her. She can remember what to say and execute it flawlessly, like she’s performing a script—which is not to say she doesn’t know her stuff, but that’s a really important skill. I believe Goop’s raised just over $140 million. How many other celebrity brands or beauty brands raise that much?

It’s ironic to me that Gwyneth is one of the pioneers, if not the pioneer, of the wellness movement, and has built such an influential lifestyle brand out of it—but the company still isn’t profitable after 17 years. Where did she go wrong?

I completely agree. It’s kind of wild that she architected this industry with Goop by giving wellness a rhetoric, a language, talking about “toxins” and getting toxins out of our bodies and our lives with so-called clean living, clean eating, clean beauty, and then also giving it this gorgeous aspirational aesthetic that people wanted to buy into. We see this mirrored in so many different companies, even though Goop’s kind of moved away from wellness.

An outside investor told me they don’t think Goop will ever be successful, and that the company doesn’t really even need to exist anymore. They didn’t believe the company should have ever raised more than $20 million––because when you raise that much money, it basically allows you to spend in pursuit of growth at any costs.

Yes, correct. That also makes me think of Glossier, which has raised about $265 million, and it’s barely profitable. Part of the problem is that Goop, and obviously Glossier, are products of another time. Had they been launched today, they never would have raised this much money––and they definitely would have prioritized profitability from the beginning.

I think that’s what happened. They had all this money, and they spent it on a lot of different things: beauty, as you’ve covered, fashion, the wellness business. There were supplements… the Jade Egg.

Oh my gosh, the Jade Egg! But it’s still not profitable.

Well, Gwyneth said in Fortune, as you saw, that they’ve had profitable months, but a business isn’t considered “profitable” until it’s been a full year. Someone did tell me that the Goop clothing line could do $20 million this year.

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The Backslide

What would you say is the turning point when Goop went from its heyday to being sort of irrelevant?

The pandemic. But also, the problems with the company are, in some ways, classic founder stuff, and, in other ways, classic celebrity stuff. Gwyneth had some experienced executives in there who were not empowered to do their job, at least not really, and who were really afraid to tell her no. I also think—and a number of people who worked there brought this up to me—that even though the content was problematic, because it had a lot of not fact-checked, health misinformation, it was the heart and soul of the business, and Goop cut back on that. It became like any e-commerce website, and it lost a little bit of the connection to Gwyneth’s world. Because that’s what Goop really is.

She also likes a viral moment: When she turned 50, she painted her whole naked body gold, splashed it across the internet, and went on CBS Mornings to talk about it. There was the “This Smells Like My Vagina” candle, the Astronomer video last week, etcetera. So to your point about why it didn’t work––well, I don’t know, is that a good use of your attention? Another thing is that Goop has real estate, commercial real estate, in the most expensive places in the world, so that’s a big expense for the company. I don’t really know why they have all those stores, do you?

I understand having one or two flagships, but doing your own retail at that scale is so astronomically expensive that, for this type of brand, it doesn’t feel like the best use of capital.

And Goop has a huge office in Santa Monica that’s as big as a city block, which is another expensive piece of real estate, but Gwyneth wanted it. She felt like Goop should have a campus like Google… but that’s not to say that she doesn’t have strengths. She had good instincts about the wellness business, which is now a $6.3 trillion industry. I’ve been calling it Big Wellness because it’s absolutely enormous––even the global pharmaceutical industry is at $1.6 or $1.7 trillion.

I think that’s important to understand, but I also think Gwyneth and Goop contributed meaningfully to that, and provided a template for others to execute even better than Goop. Her strengths are that she has an instinct for what’s going to interest people about her, or for creating a viral moment. She has really good taste, and a really good aesthetic, and she’s translated that to Goop and the Goop stores. And she knows that she has, in some sense, an instinct for the products that people will buy from the Goop store—people who work there said that repeatedly. Publishing industry veterans who have been in the business for 20 years said she was a good editor and was doing the most detailed edits. She was good at that, and that surprised them.

Yes, that’s all valid. And lastly, what do you think is next there?

They could keep going as they are for a while. They could get acquired, although that would seem to me the less likely scenario, because the products really only sell when she’s personally promoting them. But is she now more interested in spending more time doing movies, or whatever it may be? She has lots of options. If she pulls back, are the products going to sell as well? Is it going to be as strong of a business? Is Gwyneth going to change her mind and move on to something else? She said she would never go back to acting, and now she’s going back to acting. That, to me, would make it a risky acquisition target.