What’s going on with Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop layoffs & stagnating sales?

All year, outlets like Puck and Women’s Wear Daily have been sounding the alarm about Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle brand, Goop. While Goop was one of the first celebrity lifestyle brands/newsletters/sites, it has been widely copied and adapted with greater success. Goop has seen stagnating sales, clueless product launches and reports of a toxic work environment. They’ve been hemorrhaging staff, including a 40-person layoff after Labor Day. It feels like this started when Gwyenth tried to patronize the peasants with an affordable beauty line (Good Clean Goop) which everyone hated and no one bought, and Gwyneth didn’t even seem to like. That might have been the beginning of the end. So what’s next for Goop?

Goop took Gwyneth Paltrow from Oscar winner to being one of the “first movers” in the e-commerce space, in business parlance. Now, however, amid recent layoffs at the lifestyle brand, is the gilt off Gwyneth? Just after Labor Day, about 40 employees were let go at Goop, as first reported by the fashion business bible Women’s Wear Daily. Among the departed was chief marketing officer Lauren Johnston, a former Google marketing executive who’d been hired only eight months before. Adding to this, Puck revealed this summer that Goop’s affordable beauty and wellness line, Good.clean.goop, was in the “bottom 15” at Target.

“There will always be a generation of women for whom Gwyneth feels like a kooky old friend or a goddess guru whose every piece of advice they follow,” Bethan Holt, fashion director at the Telegraph, told Page Six. “But that doesn’t necessarily follow through as major business success any longer, even if Goop has long been a byword for the modern celebrity lifestyle empire.”

Still, Holt said, “Gwyneth herself is bigger than Goop … it’s been a brilliant vehicle for her to re-brand herself beyond acting, but arguably she doesn’t actually need it any longer.”

(Despite this, Page Six is told that Paltrow is often in the office and her daughter Apple, 20, has been an intern.)

A well-placed fashion branding expert added: “It’s important to note that Gwyneth was the first ‘mover’ in this e-commerce space, with her newsletter and her weird products that were really based on her personality, but I’m not sure what the next iteration for Gwyneth and Goop is. What she does is not that unique anymore.”

Part of the problem, the branding expert said, is that “People have copied her and it’s almost impossible to retain that market share — no-one can at this point. Consumer habits have changed. Gwyneth stayed relevant to her customer, but now she faces the question: Does she age with her customer, or does she try to skew younger?”

Her executives, too, are figuring out whether it’s time to move on to the potential next big thing. In June 2023, Shaun Kearney left his post as chief design and merchandising officer at Goop to join Harry Styles’ lifestyle brand, Pleasing. A seasoned fashion writer who has covered Goop believes that there’s so much competition now among celebrity-led companies that some of them are doomed to sink.

“We’re in a cost of living crisis and people don’t have the money to spend on frivolous and cutesy stuff,” the writer said. “Obviously, it’s still Goop and it’s still Gwyneth, but it’s not the cash cow it used to be. I just think it’s lost its pizzazz online and lost its light. It needs to work out as a brand what it stands for. It needs to recalibrate.”

[From Page Six]

For years, Gwyneth has said that she hopes Goop will get to the point where her involvement and name isn’t central to the company. As in, Goop is a stand-alone thing not associated with Gwyneth’s particular image or input. It’s a double-edged sword though – you could argue that Goop’s success is due to Gwyneth’s particular (elitist) vision, but you could also argue that Gwyneth’s myopia is the reason why the company has stagnated. The culture is moving on, the audience and customer base wants something else beyond Gwyneth’s disordered eating and pseudoscience.

Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.