The scoop on Goop
How does Gwynnie’s first British store measure up?
‘Sex is something that Gwyneth has been really forward on’
You can call Gwyneth Paltrow many things. Wacky. Privileged. On her own planet… But hands-on? Maybe hands-on in an A-lister kind of way – occasionally floating into the office and posing for a selfie (#lovemyjob #Goop and kissy emoji face to 4.5m fans) before vanishing in a waft of Aveda Chakra mist – but hands-on in that attention-to-detail way that every boss at the top of their game seems to have, surely not?
“Oh man, is she!” Elise Loehnen, Paltrow’s right-hand woman and her lifestyle brand Goop’s chief content officer tells me, as she prepares to launch its first pop-up store in London. “It’s the same, if not more, than when I first met her. She’s on it – she approves every single item of the buy, every story… We’ll be in the office and she’s like ‘guys, drove past that restaurant on the corner and I think they’re going out of business so let’s make sure we update the site’. I literally don’t know how she does it.”
It’s 10 years to the day since Paltrow started Goop, originally a newsletter sent to a handful of friends from her kitchen in Belsize Park, where she was living with her then husband Chris Martin. Since then, it has exploded into a multi-million-dollar, multifranchise business. Along with the mothership Goop.com, there is fashion, beauty, vitamins and pop-up boutiques… Is there anything still left to be Goop-ed? Well, yes, Notting Hill, which today gets a shop of its own – open until the end of January.
“It’s our first international pop-up store,” Loehnen explains. “It needed to be London, obviously, not only because of the anniversary, but also it’s the home of Goop. It had its first five years here.”
Loehnen, 38, a magazine journalist, first met Paltrow five years ago when she was ghostwriting a book for trainer-to-the-stars Tracy Anderson. At the time, Anderson was also working on a fitness studio with Paltrow, and Loehnen found herself liaising with her. One thing led to another and when Paltrow moved back to LA, they met up and started talking about scaling the newsletter into a website. “I really like her curiosity. She’s an incredible student. She never approaches any problem thinking she has the answer, and she does everything differently.”
Did Loehnen always know that Goop would become so successful?
“Yes. I saw that she had these 700,000 readers, who were incredibly engaged. They like her, they don’t come because they think ‘ooh, I want to be Gwyneth!’, they just think she has really incredible taste. It’s very clear she’s trying everything that she talks about – she goes to those restaurants, tests the recipes… They think: ‘If it’s good enough for her, I know it’s really good’.”
According to Paltrow, the company’s name is “a nickname, like my name is GP, so that is really where it came from. And I wanted it to be a word that means nothing and could mean anything.”
At the same time “wellness” was becoming mainstream and, with it, a raft of New-age healers and herbalists selling headline-grabbing products like “sex bark” and “moon juice”. One of the most infamous: $55 jade and rose quartz eggs sold through the site, which Goop claimed when inserted vaginally, “can balance hormones and regulate menstrual cycles, among other things”.
Goop was more than ready to embrace the weird and the wacky. Suddenly, “creating conversation” was the name of the game – clickbait that saw the tills ringing. “I can monetise those eyeballs,” Paltrow is reported to have told an audience of Harvard students. “It’s a cultural firestorm when it’s about a woman’s vagina.”
For years, apart from some fingerpointing and eye-rolling at the expense of some of the items (rose gold champagne tumbler for $2,590 anyone?), it seemed that Goop could do no wrong. Then, in March this year, a woman died from an allergic reaction to Goop-endorsed “bee sting” therapy. Shortly after came news that a partnership with Condé Nast to publish their magazine had fallen apart over “alleged disagreements about fact checking and endorsing Goop products”.
“Just rumours,” says Loehnen. “It was always the idea to do a two-issue trial.”
Then a growing army of doctors criticised Goop for giving a platform to New-age practitioners profiting from health claims that weren’t sciencebacked. The jade eggs, in particular, Dr Jen Gunter, respected gynaecologist and one of Paltrow’s fiercest critics raged, were not only “garbage”, but they could lead to toxic shock syndrome.
Early this month, Goop settled a Californian lawsuit for £112,000, in part over the jade eggs editorial. While Goop maintained that the settlement did not indicate any liability but, rather, an “honest disagreement”, a spokesman did add: “The law, though, sometimes views statements like this as advertising claims, which are subject to various legal requirements.” Loehnen acknowledges that this case has been an “interesting learning” as an editorial team – “we didn’t realise that someone’s opinion needs to be science-backed when there’s a product involved”. They are now, she says, a lot more fastidious about which products they endorse: “We’ve created a whole portal and system, just to dot every ‘i’ and cross every ‘t’.”
They also put signs on stories – “ancient modality”, “speculative but promising” – to indicate where they are not endorsing things they have published. “We wanted to orient people, because although we do talk about things that are incredibly conventional and practised by every single doctor, we also talk about things that are maybe not even in clinical trials, or are completely inexplicable but have done amazing things for people…”
So, will we see a more grown-up Goop, I wonder? What about the crazy, frivolous things on the site – the $3,500 gold-plated sex toys, the $27 “psychic vampire” repellents? “Oh, we’ll carry on with them,” she laughs. She describes the gift guide they do every year as “intentionally ridiculous”.
“Our readers like it. I’ve seen some sneak peeks of the one coming out in November. There’ll definitely be some eyebrow-raising, hilarious things. And we also do a sex issue, which is always boundary-pushing. Sex is something that Gwyneth has been really forward on.”
So if Goop is to continue pushing boundaries, albeit more cautiously, are there any really bonkers things that it wouldn’t touch? “Oh yes, for sure. There are certain things that are like ‘the world is not ready for this’. We talked briefly of one – it’s called Helminth Protocol – anyway, it’s essentially a pill of parasites that you take. It’s within the faecal transplant family. And it’s not actually ‘fringe’, it’s being aggressively studied…
“The idea is that people decimate their microbiome and need to repopulate their microbiome with helpful microbiome, and now they’re thinking we have helpful parasites that we’ve eradicated… It’s really interesting… but it’s disgusting! I’m sure we’ll explore it, but it’s definitely cringey for many people. I don’t know if the world is ready to eat parasites, but we’ll see…!”
Goop store opens at noon today at 188 Westbourne Grove, London, W11. 10am-6pm Mon- Sat, noon-6pm Sun; goop.com