People are SURPRISED AT MY SENSE OF HUMOUR
The Oscar winner, mum, and original boho chick on what it takes to be CEO of a multi-million dollar business
These days, Gwyneth Paltrow is better known for her love eggs and vagina candles than she is for her Oscar-winning performances. The 48 year old, who started her lifestyle brand Goop back in 2008, entirely revolutionised the way we look at health and wellness back before oat milk was even cool. It’s easy to take the piss out of Gwyn’s Goop-y sensibilities – she recently detailed her morning routine, which included dry brushing her entire body, before doing transcendental meditation with husband Brad Falchuk – but underneath the hippie exterior, there is an incredibly smart businesswoman. Just ten years after its launch, Goop was worth over $250million. Plus, all the LA talk comes with a healthy dollop of self-deprecating humour. The mum of two recently sent Kim Kardashian a wand vibrator along with a candle emblazoned with the words, “This smells like Kim’s orgasm.” See, LOLS? She also told Kelly Clarkson her favourite song when she’s feeling down is Cardi B’s WAP. Her humour has been passed down to her 16-year-old daughter Apple (she’s also mum to son Moses, 14, and co-parents both with ex-husband Chris Martin). Last year, Gwyn shared a photo of a jokey reminder Apple wrote in her mum’s notebook, which read, “Make more vagina eggs and candles.”
But how has the wellbeing queen coped during these unprecedented times? Time to find out…
Have you joined the WFH tribe? Yes, there’s no sign of us opening the office any time soon. So, we’re cosy at home. It’s been 12 months now – we’re very used to it. It’s been a rough year all round, but have you and your family managed to find the joy of being isolated together? I think we tried to turn lemons into lemonade very quickly, you know? It’s been an incredibly challenging year for all of us in many ways, and for
some of us more so than others. But I think we will look back at the family time that we’ve been able to have, and just the slowing down of life and being able to really sort of just be where you live. And, you know, it’s funny, when you rush around all the time, you can avoid dealing with a lot of stuff. So, when you’re home, you’re sort of present. It’s been a very interesting year on a lot of levels. You made your acting debut in high school, but were there the makings of an entrepreneur in teenage Gwyn even then? In high school, I was very focused on being an actress. My mom [Blythe Danner] is an amazing actress, and I had grown up watching her do incredible theatre productions, one after the other, all the classics – Chekhov and Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams. She was so selfpossessed and so incredibly powerful onstage. So I just wanted to be that. I was always interested in business and I’ve always been fascinated by it – I always read the business section of the New York Times first – but I didn’t know until later that I really would give myself the latitude to even think about starting a business for a couple of decades. Do you think actors and entrepreneurs share the same DNA in a way? Yeah. Somebody asked me this question a few years ago, and it really struck me that, I think, all artists are, at heart, entrepreneurs, right? I mean, there’s so many parallels between what it takes to create and the insane self-belief you need to do
that. In fact, I think of artists as entrepreneurs, but their businesses are what they’re creating. Goop started off as a newsletter, essentially, coming straight out of your kitchen. Did you feel like no one would take the “business” version of you seriously? Yeah, very much so. I mean, it took many years. I think as women, we tend to approach that entrepreneurial drive with some, you know, mitigation or trepidation. We think like that on some level. I mean, it has changed a lot, but certainly in my generation, we weren’t really shown that we could be entrepreneurs and start businesses in that kind of a way.
So, it required a lot of boundary expanding, which I forced myself into doing. And a decade later, you’re being asked to teach a class at Harvard Business School... It was an amazing experience to go there and to talk about the business, to present the business and to be in the hot seat. And, in fact, I go to Stanford [another prestigious US university] every year to talk to the business school there. I love being able to talk to students and answer questions, and hear how they’re starting to frame up what businesses they’re thinking about starting and how they’re deciding to become entrepreneurs, as well as hear the kinds of things that they want to know about. Certainly, Harvard was my first experience
‘We know the power of a good joke or a racy product name’
of that, and I was a little intimidated going in there, I’m not going to lie. But I think when you have to cultivate the kind of self-belief that it takes to be an entrepreneur, you can quickly sort of click into, “OK, I’m here. I better just do this and do it to the fullest extent possible.” When Goop first started, your gluten-free cookbook was seen as avant-garde. Now it’s everywhere! What role do you think Goop played in that shift over the last decade? That’s a great question. I mean, I will say I give the credit to my editors, but I think that Goop played a super-important role in that, because we were publishing this information and we were making it OK for other people to publish that information, and question the same things that we were questioning. So, I think we’re largely credited for always being at the forefront in the wellness space. I really feel that what started to happen was people would try things… It’s like, “I don’t feel great. I’m not getting the answers I want. Let me try to eat better or let me try to exercise…” or, whatever the case may be. And, once you implement some kind of programme and you genuinely start to feel better, you start to understand that you have that autonomy over your health. Like, you can be a participant in your wellness. Have you seen a shift in the type of products people have been buying throughout the pandemic ? Yeah, I mean, we saw crazy interest in homewares – pots and pans, cookbooks, soft furnishings, pillows and candles. People really seemed to look around and be like, “I need something to make this space more exciting.” People were cooking a lot more, too – we definitely saw that – and, obviously, comfortable loungewear sold very well. You know – things that you can wear that maybe have a little puff sleeve, but you could wear sweatpants and slippers on the bottom. What’s next for Goop? I would love to get into the CBD [medical derivative of cannabis] space. I think that there are some really interesting studies around CBD and the efficacy of it, especially when there’s a little bit of THC [the component that gives a slight “high”] . But I think we’re a way away from that. The regulation is still very difficult. Filming for The Goop Lab on Netflix, how were you able to get the team to participate in things like testing psychedelics? We sent out an Excel spreadsheet to the team – “Who wants to participate in any one of these episodes?” And I thought, “I hope someone’s going to want to do this stuff!” It was amazing how many volunteers we had. We had way more demand than we did supply. The people who work at Goop are very forwardthinking, very curious. They’re people who are ready to try things to see if it might be beneficial for them. So, it was easier than you would think.
It’s clear you have a sense of humour when it comes to your marketing strategies. Just scrolling through your website, one can come across vagina candles and psychic vampire repellent… Well, the people who know me well know that my irreverent sense of humour is very much at the core of who I am. Sometimes, I think people are surprised by that, because I look a certain way or whatever assumptions they make about me. But humour has always been a part of the Goop brand and marketing. We’ve always had pithy, funny subject lines. We’ve always wanted to name our products things that were funny and appealing and also said really clearly what they did. I think humour is a great way to connect with a customer and for them to understand that you’re in on the joke and have a relaxed, open approach in your marketing. You know, in the early days when we would write about something and it would get a lot of attention, that was not our intention. Like, we were not trying to create some kind of a publicity stunt whatsoever, but we did see that it drove a lot of interest and traffic to the site. Not that we do stunts all the time, but we do know the power of a good joke or a racy product name. n