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Hi, and welcome back to Line Sheet. Today, Rachel Strugatz is in the driver’s seat with a
report on the latest from Goop. How’s that G. Label rebrand going? Is Gwyneth returning to acting full time? What is actually gonna happen to the damn business? Can Goop Kitchen save it all? (No, because it has a different cap table.) You get the gist.
Up top, a note on how the frigid weather is big-time boosting functional luxury brands, the fate of Saks Global’s off-price business, what Paul Andrew’s exit from Sergio Rossi says about the future of the
Lanvin Group, and new murmurs around Pieter Mulier, Versace, and Alaïa.
Thanks for all the great feedback regarding my Couture report. One of the most interesting things about the week was hearing from shopping V.I.C.s. Speaking of which: Tomorrow on Fashion People, my guest is Chantal Fernandez, a writer at New York magazine and my former work wife and collaborator on the book Selling Sexy, who wrote a great piece last
year about the increasing importance of V.I.C.s to fashion brands. We get into how much they spend, how much the brands spend on them, whether any of them are as cool as Danielle Steel or Lynn Wyatt, and plenty more. I also share my verdict on Chanel Couture. Listen here and
here.
Mentioned in this issue: Gwyneth Paltrow, Goop, Ulta, Sephora, Julia Hunter, Burberry, Stone Island, Saks Global, Neiman Marcus, Bergdorf Goodman, TJ Maxx, Versace, Pieter Mulier, Prada Group, Paul Andrew, Sergio Rossi, Kering, LVMH, Chloe Malle, peptides, and
more… |
Four Things You
Should Know…
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- The
functional fashion boom: As the general soft-luxury market continues to, uh, soften, the extreme cold weather and snow in the U.S. has benefited outerwear brands, which are constantly managing for the long-term effects of global warming. I’ve long reasoned that companies like Burberry and Stone Island, which sell light- and mid-weight jackets, were better positioned long term as temperatures rise. But nature is unpredictable, and frigid temperatures in places like Dallas this month
have been a boon to makers of puffer jackets. Outerwear is weather-reliant, but it’s not as trend-reliant, and these unexpected boosts often make up for bad patches down the line. (Reminds me of the farming industry.)
Anyway, I hear that January is shaping up to be Stone Island owner Moncler’s best month ever in the U.S. I reached out to a rep for Moncler, which is staging a show in Aspen this weekend. They had no comment.
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- Saks
Global’s off-price exit: Today, the beleaguered owner of Saks Fifth Avenue, Neiman Marcus, and Bergdorf Goodman announced that it’s going to close the majority of its off-price stores, including all Neiman Marcus Last Call stores and most Off-Fifth stores. Much of the online merchandise will be liquidated, according to court documents.
There are two factors at play here. First, the online off-price business operated separately from the brick-and-mortar, and had a separate set of
problems from Saks Global writ large, which explains the liquidation of the online assets. Second, Saks Global itself does not have enough inventory to fill those stores, and would have to buy different products to populate them—a distraction while the company is trying to get the full-line business right. Leave it to TJ Maxx, I say. - Versace news is coming: I’ll have more reporting on this in the coming days, but all intel points toward the new Versace
designer announcement happening soon. (A rep for the brand declined to comment.) As reported by me and, subsequently, WWD, the holdup has been around shoo-in creative director Pieter Mulier’s contractual obligations to Richemont-owned Alaïa. Remember, the Prada Group couldn’t contract Mulier until after the deal closed, which finally occurred in early December. Non-competes in France are much more complicated than in Italy, and while money can fix a lot of
problems, it can’t always speed up processes. In any case, it sounds like they got somewhere; I will keep reporting on this as I learn more.
- An inevitable breakup: Word got out this morning that shoe designer Paul Andrew was not renewing his contract with Lanvin Group–owned Sergio Rossi. Paul is a great shoe designer and I loved the collections, but anyone could see the writing on the wall. The Fosun-owned group is a mess and trading
as a penny stock, down 85 percent from its I.P.O. in December 2022. I have long wondered why Fosun hasn’t sold the brands, which include Lanvin, Sergio Rossi, Wolford, and St. John. They’re formidable on their own, but have had trouble competing against the bigger, more well-funded groups.
In the case of Sergio Rossi, the shoemaker had an incredible factory, which was built when it was owned by Kering. (It housed a complete archive of the late shoe designer’s work, including his designs
for Yves Saint Laurent.) The Lanvin Group is selling the factory to Milan-based distributor Massimo Bonini. I am not sure Fosun will end up selling any of these brands, but it’s obvious they should.
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Gwyneth Paltrow’s beauty-slash-wellness-slash-lifestyle brand has struggled to reinvent
itself amid a series of executive shake-ups, missed revenue targets, and the unpredictability of Gwyneth, herself. Now, Goop is doubling down on its beauty business—and trying to get in on the peptide craze. |
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Earlier this week, Goop unveiled its latest attempt to kickstart the business: a rich moisturizer infused
with NAD+, the suddenly inescapable gray-market peptide that’s alleged to slow or reverse the signs of aging. Of course, NAD+ is hard to deliver through the skin, which is why everyone you know is injecting it. But Goop Beauty’s Youth Boost, its new $105 cream, attempts to get around the limits of biology by including a precursor molecule that’s more “bioavailable” in skincare. “We started talking about emerging science around longevity and topical NAD,” Goop founder
Gwyneth Paltrow recently told WWD. “And it works topically as well.”
Will it actually help you look younger? “Topically, sure, it will hydrate,” one top derm told me, who clarified that Paltrow’s comment was sort of like claiming that “standing in the rain will yield the same effects as drinking water.” (This is not medical advice.) Regardless, the more important question for Paltrow is whether Youth Boost can help revitalize Goop’s brand and business. |
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Paltrow’s company, after all, has been struggling. Despite recent revenue growth, Goop has rarely achieved
profitability and is saddled with the twin burdens of a weighty and impatient cap table—investors have sunk more than $140 million into the company—and an often distracted founder. In 2024, Goop brought in Julia Hunter, the former Jenni Kayne C.E.O. turned Westview Ventures managing partner, to help orchestrate a turnaround. When I spoke to
Hunter some 13 months ago, she told me the company would be prioritizing its beauty and fashion lines, as well as Goop Kitchen—a separate joint venture that was then showing promise. The plan involved a redesign of Goop Beauty’s packaging, which started to roll out around the same time last year, and a focus on D.T.C. while doubling the company’s small wholesale business via an Ulta Beauty partnership.
Alas, it didn’t quite work out that way. Hunter is gone. (“Gwyneth Paltrow has been and
continues to be the C.E.O. of Goop,” a company spokesperson told me.) Gwyneth told her employees they had to relocate to L.A. or find new jobs. And the G. Label brand, which relaunched in September as Gwyn, doesn’t appear to have moved the needle. “The original plan was to really redo the fashion and then really rebrand,” said an insider. “They acted super fast and did this slapdash thing that was basically just new tags with the new name,” this person added. As for the new name, the
decision to call it Gwyn was made by Paltrow, of course. |
Goop’s push into wholesale appears to be more promising, even if it’s very… un-Goop. Last summer,
when Goop Beauty launched at Ulta, several people sent me Paltrow’s content alongside commentary ranging from the partnership seeming off-brand to the varying degrees of unlikelihood that Paltrow had ever been inside the beauty retailer. It’s been almost six months, and I’ve been trying to get a read on the brand’s early performance. I asked a few reputable data companies for any insight related to Goop Beauty’s performance at Ulta, and one told me that they weren’t tracking it because the size
of Goop’s business at Ulta falls below their “internal threshold.” (The Goop spokesperson said that Goop Beauty “continues to see positive momentum at Ulta and views the partnership as an integral part of our long-term growth strategy.”)
I’ve been asked why Goop even went with Ulta, which seems even more misaligned than its previous partner, Target. Most of the skincare in Goop’s main line costs upward of $100, and I’m not sure how much overlap there is between the
typical Ulta customer and Paltrow’s core audience. Plus, Goop likes to control its brand narrative and experience, and there is very little of that at Ulta, either.
But Goop may have had little choice in the matter. It’s incredibly hard to achieve real scale as a prestige beauty brand without a strong business at one of the leading specialty retailers. A Sephora insider was pretty sure that the LVMH-owned business was not reinvesting in its relationship with Goop, which they said
was doomed from the start due to the latter’s subpar buy-in on the partnership. Goop Beauty’s priority seems to have been growing its D.T.C. business, and the numbers prove this: In August 2025, I reported that Goop Beauty’s Sephora sales for the previous 12 months had totaled about $1.5 million, according to YipitData. (Goop’s revenue was around half that.) At the time, a person close to Sephora said that Goop “never supported Sephora in a big way,” a strategy that kept Goop Beauty “too narrow,
as opposed to expanding Goop’s audience and client base.” (Goop, for its part, maintains that its Sephora partnership was “strategic and productive.”) |
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Anyway, it’s unlikely Ulta will be the answer to Goop Beauty’s wholesale problems, even if it likely provided
the company with an initial revenue bump. “Ulta can’t sell certain types of product. It’s more mass,” an industry veteran told me. “It’s the death of all of these brands.” |
Despite the challenges at wholesale, I’ve heard that brand partners still benefit greatly from
Paltrow’s buy-in. A longtime vendor said that “Gwyneth’s Picks,” the part of the website that features Paltrow’s own suggestions, carries real weight, and a “nice sales spike” is customary for featured products, especially when Paltrow personally posts about the item on Instagram or includes it in Goop’s gift
guide. “You can’t tell Gwyneth what brands or products to pick—she has total autonomy,” a Goop insider said. “We can’t push anything in front of her. She picks it, and then it’s live.” I’ve heard a similar sentiment about Goop’s own beauty line: Items that Paltrow promotes, talks about, or appears in campaigns for always perform better.
It’s not surprising that an endorsement from Paltrow is powerful. Yes, she’s a marketing mastermind with an uncanny ability to control a news
cycle, and she’s also one of the original influencers in the truest sense. Paltrow’s a tastemaker with actual exquisite taste, and she’s managed to generate obsessive interest around her workouts, wellness regimens, and what she’s eating (or not) for decades. That’s what makes Goop Beauty’s underwhelming business all the more disappointing: Perhaps more than any other celebrity brand, Goop was a natural extension of its founder’s influence. Goop Beauty should have been Rhode for Elder
Millennials and Gen X. But no one tells Gwyneth what to do. |
Vogue is running a contest where the winner and a friend get to meet Chloe Malle
and attend the magazine’s Spring Issue party. (I suspect it will be her first.) Chloe is pretty great so maybe I will enter!
[Vogue]
Bain says the China luxury market is going to rebound in 2026. Woohoo! [Reuters]
Real estate and tech entrepreneur Xavier Niel, partner of Dior C.E.O. and LVMH heir Delphine Arnault, is apparently in the running to buy BHV, a
French department store chain owned by the Galeries Lafayette Group. [La Lettre]
Makeup brand M.ph by Mary Phillips, which launched at Sephora last August, just named Hannah Beals as C.E.O. This is a very serious hire for such a new brand: Beals spent about a decade at
Ouai, where she most recently served as C.E.O. [BoF]
Should Sephora spin out of LVMH and become a public company? [WWD]
LVMH increased its stake in Loro
Piana to 94 percent. [WWD] |
Until tomorrow,
Lauren
P.S.: We use affiliate links because we are a business. We may make
a couple bucks off them. |
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