LONDON, United Kingdom — Having just opened her first London store in September 2018, Oscar-winning actress turned chief executive, Gwyneth Paltrow, sat down with Imran Amed to discuss all things Goop.
From products and media to advertising, partnerships and events, Goop is certainly multi-faceted. But Paltrow remains clear in her vision: what she calls “contextual commerce” — having a reason behind everything being sold or produced. “We want to create a very curated site where we can come and save people time,” she says. “There’s a reason why it’s that skirt.”
Paltrow discusses how she navigates the backlash to some of those choices, controversies she attributes to fear of the unknown and her willingness to embrace avant-garde products and practices. “When I started doing yoga in the ’90s, people wrote incredibly vitriolic articles that I was a witch and that it was Satan worshiping … now of course there’s a yoga studio on every corner,” Paltrow says.
From a 10,000-person email newsletter to a wellness empire now valued at $250 million, Goop has certainly come a long way. Had she known how difficult it was going to be, Paltrow says she might not have jumped off the bridge into the Goop waters. But, ten years on, “I feel so exhilarated and optimistic and terrified and on fire,” she says. “What I love about it is how much I don’t know and how much there is to learn.”
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