Gwyneth is “heritage”

Gwyneth Paltrow and Brad Falchuk were photographed the other day in at Godmothers bookstore in Santa Barbara which opened last fall with all kinds of celebrities in attendance, including Oprah and Harry and Meghan Sussex. GP and Brad were there to support Amy Griffin’s book launch. The Tell is Oprah’s Book Club pick for March and this isn’t a surprise. Amy is a venture capitalist and has invested in a number of celebrity businesses including Hello Sunshine and, of course, Gwyneth’s Goop. You can read more about Amy’s The Tell in her new interview with ELLE. 

I mention all these connections because Gwyneth just did a new interview with Fortune that was published yesterday. Six months ago, Goop went through several rounds of layoffs and in my post about it at the time, I noted that while Goop’s food vertical had been doing well, they seemed to have dropped the ball on the beauty side of the brand. 

This Fortune interview, then, is timed to assure or reassure investors and consumers that the restructuring has worked and that Goop’s business model is still attractive and potentially profitable. This is GP in CEO mode and her main message appears to be that Goop is in refining itself. Hilariously, at least to me, she speaks about refinement in the most general terms. Like this sentence right here: 

“It was time to refresh everything and get back to the core of this beautiful, aspirational brand that from a curatorial perspective is finding the best of the best in service of our discerning customer.”

This is a lot of words that sound good together but really don’t amount to anything original. Every brand wants to be aspirational and take on a “curatorial perspective” to do better by their customers. Then again, lifestyle seems to be going more and more unspecific and general – this has been the main criticism of Meghan Markle’s As Ever and her show With Love, Meghan. GP was just there first.

Which is my next point…

Goop is going on 17 years – as Gwyneth puts it, they are entering their “heritage era”. She’s asked in the Fortune interview about how crowded the lifestyle space is now and how she sees herself among the competition and whether or not she has a “first-mover advantage”. This is a classic GP response:

“I haven’t really thought about that. Maybe I’m too close to it to know, but I do think we are the OG, and in that sense, we’re becoming kind of a heritage brand. There’s always intrinsic brand value there. When you’re the first mover, you’re category defining. So I hope so.

We’re bumping up against our 20th anniversary in the next few years. It’s amazing to me we’ve been around this long. We want to energetically own who we are and what we’ve accomplished—continue to innovate and accept our place in the landscape and lean into it.”

As usual, it’s the thing that grates most about Gwyneth Paltrow. She’s so f-cking smug but, like, she’s not wrong. 

It’s true that Goop has been around for almost 20 years. It’s true that she was one of the very first high-profile celebrities (she has an Oscar, she has been A List forever, please don’t argue with me about this) to launch. She is indeed an OG. And over the last 20 years, with the rise of the social media influencer during that period, and how lifestyle period has disrupted culture, Goop is probably “heritage” now. 

One of the original nepo baby It Girls of the 90s founded what will now be considered a “heritage” lifestyle brand – because OF COURSE she f-cking did. GP is trying to make Goop the Ralph Lauren of lifestyle. And, frankly, it’s smart for her to go out and call it this as part of her new “refined” brand messaging. Teeth-grindingly irritating? Yes, of course. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t true. 

As for what I was getting at with the connections at the beginning of this post, Gwyneth was asked about what resources she turns to as an entrepreneur managing so many changes. And here’s where the high school popped out. GP will always be that girl who is friends with all the girls that everyone wants to be friends with, and makes sure you know about it: 

“I have great help. I have great coaches, mentors. I have a group of female CEO-founders I’m on a group chat with. There are some public company CEOs on there, some very nascent companies. It’s a very safe space where we can go and talk through some of the harder things. I really would not be able to do this without the women in my life who are there in that capacity. We traverse these difficult things, and you forget that it’s going to be okay. So many people have gone through this before.”

It's the group chat everyone wants to be invited to. A private club, if you will. And I have no doubt it exists. But who else is in it? As if GP would ever tell: 

“It’s sort of like Fight Club. We’re not really supposed to talk about it. But it’s kind of fun at this point to be one of the women who has something to say to newer founders—like, whoops, don’t step in this pothole. It’s nice to pay it forward.”

Over the last few weeks, Gwyneth has come up when Meghan Sussex has been mentioned. Meghan’s new podcast, Confessions of a Female Founder, sounds like what might happen if the group chat became a podcast. This, then, is what I hope Meghan’s pod can achieve: violate the rules of the willowy blonde Female Founders Fight Club and actually open up the pathways to conversation. 

And finally, this white knit sweater dress that Gwyneth is wearing? Right on trend with the boho chic comeback as 2025 is 2005 all over again. 

To read the GP interview with Fortune without the paywall, click here. And join us at The Squawk today. (App link here)

PS. Since I’m coming to you from the future here in Korea, this post was written before Vanity Fair’s latest cover release featuring Gwyneth. Will write about it tomorrow once I read it.