Gwyneth Paltrow Has Always Been Selling What Money Can't Buy

In a new book, Amy Odell writes that the actress and businesswoman used her fame “to commodify her taste and lifestyle, and sell it back to us."

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Gwyneth Paltrow has always been selling What Money Can't Buy
by Dana Thomas. Dana Thomas is the best selling author
of Deluxe, How Luxury Lost Its Luster and the Substack
newsletter The Style Files, read by Catherine Vessilopolos. Throughout the
nineteen nineties and early two thousands, Gwyneth Paltrow was the

(00:22):
platonic ideal of the it girl and Hollywood nepo baby,
dating Brad Pitt and Ben Affleck and winning the Academy
Award for Best Actress for her role in Shakespeare in Love.
Then in twenty o eight, Paltrow engineered a career detour
nobody quite saw coming. She launched a website and free
weekly newsletter recommending her favorite restaurants, travel destinations, luxury hotels,

(00:46):
fashion boutiques, and day spas, a Gwyneth hot list. You
could say, thus was the birth of Goop, a trail
blazing platform in wellness, style and beauty that in less
than a decade grew into a sprawling media and e
commerce enterprise. It has at various times sold clothing, beauty products, vibrators, homeware,

(01:07):
including a headline making Vagina scented candle and a meal
delivery service, and produced travel guides, cookbooks, a newsletter, a podcast, conferences,
and a Netflix series. Built on Paltrow's beauty, charm and pedigree,
Goop became the authority on what we put in our
bodies supplements, how we treat our bodies, sleep, detox as

(01:29):
an exercise, and what we put on our bodies serums
and creams, writes journalist Amy O'Dell in her new book Gwyneth,
the Biography, published by Gallery Books this week. Paltrow gave
wellness a narrative and a beautiful, tasteful aesthetic. She repositioned
it as a luxury and showed that it can be
monetized beyond charging for facials, massages, and beauty products. She

(01:53):
spearheaded the transformation of what was known as the global
spy economy into big wellness, a six point three trillion
dollar global industry rooted in pseudoscience and species health claims.
Along the way, odell writes, Paltrow became one of the
biggest and most polarizing cultural influencers of the twenty first century.

(02:14):
In Gwyneth, which is based on more than two hundred
twenty interviews with Paltrow's childhood pals, film colleagues, close friends,
and former group employees. Odell shows that Paltrow helped bring
the wellness movement and alternative medicine into the mainstream, to
the horror of doctors and academics who regularly debunked Goop's
declarations in print and on camera. For a long time,

(02:38):
both Paltrow and Goop were able to slough off the
medical community's criticism like so many dead skin cells, because
the brand's customers would buy what she was selling no
matter what. Paltrow was Goop's superpower, the company's founder, chief executive,
and ambassador who claimed to practice what it preached and
embodied all that it promised, connected to her customers and

(03:01):
subscribers with her straight dope talk. One of her Goop
gift guides, for example, was called Ridiculous but Awesome, and
she told her goopies that she likes her wrinkles and
assured them that if they bought her message and the
product she hawked on Goop, they could live and even
look like her. As Odell posits, Paltrow used her fame

(03:21):
to commodify her taste and lifestyle and sell it back
to us, even though her life is the very definition
of something money can't buy. At the same time, in
the business community, the former it girl came across as
the ultimate zeitgeist channeler, able to swiftly adapt to cultural
shifts and bail on initiatives that didn't work. She refashioned

(03:43):
herself as the Oprah Winfrey and Martha Stewart of the
clean living space, creating a new template for celebrity entrepreneurs
such as the Kardashian Jenners, Rhianna, and Hailey Bieber to
follow with goop. Odell writes that Paltrow gave a master
class in demanding the attention economy that now rules culture.

(04:03):
Her appearance in a video this week as a temporary
spokesperson for Astronomer, the company at the center of the
Coldplay kiss cam scandal, only underscores this point. But all
was not well at the wellness brand. Employing the same
dogged reporting she brought to Anna the biography, her twenty
twenty two best seller on longtime Vogue editor Anna Wintour,

(04:25):
Odell discovers that under the veneer of quiet, perfection and
rarefied taste, Paltrow's erratic aloof and at times wicked behavior
created a toxic work environment of epic proportions. What was
seen from the outside as flexibility and adaptability was in
fact Paltrow's dizzyingly short attention span, resulting in zigzag decisions

(04:47):
that confounded and exhausted employees. Her queenly demands, like having
her test kitchen chef prepare her lunch daily and expecting
employees to respond to her internal communications instantly, further alien
aid the people who worked for her. When her orders
or standards were not met, she'd turn snippy and cold.
I can be mean, Paltrow has admitted, I can ice

(05:09):
people out. Perhaps not surprisingly, Goop burned through staff. While
Goop churned internally, its outward appearance largely remained as flawless
and smooth as Paltrow's complexion. She'd meet with potential investors and,
by expertly playing the role of a steady, hands on
chief executive, convinced them to give her millions for Goop.

(05:31):
She'd pose for selfies too, which no doubt helped seal
the deals. Odell reports in the book that in twenty eighteen,
Goop was valued at an astounding two hundred and fifty
million dollars. Yet she writes it has never experienced sustained profitability.
As Paltrow's father, the director and producer Bruce Paltrow, once
told her about the difference between the public perception of

(05:54):
her and her true self, You've got the whole country
fooled until she didn't. Eventually, government authorities cracked down on
Goop for spurious health claims regarding products it sold on
its site, like the egg, an ovum shaped stone in
jade or rose quartz that Goop expert Shiva Rose recommended

(06:15):
inserting in the vagina to increase orgasm and invigorate our
life force. The medical community condemned the egg, warning it
could lead to bacterial vaginosis or toxic shock syndrome. California
district attorneys sued Goup over its unproven statements, and the
company was fined. The site continued to sell the egg

(06:35):
without those claims. Once it became clear that Goop was
not the unicorn that investors initially thought it would be,
they began to turn away. They weren't the only ones. Though.
The wellness industry is booming. It is expected to reach
nine trillion dollars worldwide by twenty twenty eight, and the
full throated embrace of supplements and doing your own research

(06:57):
has become official US policy under Health and Human Services
Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Junior. Goop's business has stagnated. Last year,
the newsletter Puck reported that Goop sales have been flat
since twenty twenty one, and in twenty twenty four, the
company laid off about one fifth of its two hundred
and sixteen person workforce, including several employees in the content department.

(07:23):
As a result, the site has significantly reduced its editorial
component and amped up e commerce, and Odell reports that
there is talk in house of selling the company. Paltrow
did say in a March twenty twenty five interview that
she's not thinking about an exit right now. Is it
worth anything without Paltrow? She is the reason most consumers

(07:44):
patronize Goop. Will she stay hard to say, though her
commitment to the company is clearly less ardent than it
once was. She's spoken publicly about wanting to slow down
and the toll that being a CEO has taken, and
she has pivoted back to film full time, with two
new movies out later this year, including one with Timothy Chalome,

(08:06):
which begs the question Who does Gwyneth Paltrow really want
to be America's sweetheart, an IT girl, influencer, entrepreneur, tycoon. Maybe,
As with her film career, all have simply been roles,
and once she plays them, she moves on. Despite Goop's longevity,
Paltrow still defies comparison. She's, not, after all, very much

(08:30):
like Oprah or Martha they both made billions, and she's
not much like the Kardashians either. Her Beverly Hills by
way of Spence Saint Froi means she's never been accused
of vulgarity or dismissed as famous only for being famous.
What certain is this? Whatever she does next, we'll be
paying close attention