It looks as though Goop.com’s 12-odd staff members will soon be the ones guinea pigging vaginal steams, apitherapy (bee stings for beauty and de-scarring) and more unconventional beauty treatments. During her speech at the 2016 Sage Summit in Chicago, lifestyle guru and Goop founder Gwyneth Paltrow announced her plans to step away from the beauty, cooking, health and travel website.
What began as a weekly newsletter in 2008 has grown into a full on — New York Times contributor Bee Shapiro put it best — “New Age meets wellness meets urban bourgeoisie” phenomenon. The site’s even spawned an e-commerce offshoot as well as organic skincare and makeup lines in collaboration with Juice Beauty, for which Gwyneth now acts as Creative Director of Makeup.
[ Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goopiest Instagrams ]
Despite the brand’s success under her tutelage, Gwyn holds that for Goop to grow, it must strike out on its own: “In order to build the brand I want to build, its scalability is limited if I connect to it,” she explained. “So I always think: ‘How can I grow the brand? How can I separate myself from the brand?’ and I think it’s going to be more its own brand.”
“My dream is that one day no one will remember that I had anything to do with it,” Paltrow concluded, while somber fans — we included — envisioned a future absent of Gwyn’s clean, witty, informative anecdotes.
[ Goop Has Some Tips for Stephen Colbert’s Lifestyle Brand ]
At this point, Gwyn seems as inextricably linked to goop as Oprah does to the morning talk shows. Even if she’s not logging face time, it’s hard to picture the two completely uncoupled. However, if this means a more accessible Goop that’s more Into the Gloss-like (read: refined, but geared towards the Kiehl’s as opposed to Aesop-washed masses), we’ll learn to live with the loss.
[ via The Guardian ]
UPDATE 9/8/16: Gwyneth Paltrow is decidedly NOT leaving Goop. She never wanted to wholly separate herself from the brand, she just wanted it to be more self-sufficient regardless of her involvement. In a personal essay for LinkedIn, the actress wrote, “Even though the world thought I had left Goop for a minute when my sentiment about wanting the brand to not need me was twisted by the press, business was unaffected. Which means that my original vision is possible. Even though I am solidly in the trenches every day, Goop is on its way to being much bigger than I am.” We sort of wish the actress had used the present tense in her speech so as to avoid all this confusion, but nevertheless we’re glad to hear she and the website will remain coupled.
