Marc Jacobs slipdress, $695, marcjacobs​.com LACHLAN BAILEY FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE, STYLING BY GEORGE CORTINA

Gwyneth Paltrow Wants to Convert You
Newly remarried, the Goop CEO is living her best life—and believes she can help you live yours better, too
By Elisa Lipsky-Karasz
Dec. 4, 2018 8:54 a.m. ET

ON A JULY DAY two months before Gwyneth Paltrow is due to be married—for the second time, to writer and TV producer Brad Falchuk—she is holed up at her Amagansett, New York, compound, reveling in the East Coast summer and avoiding wedding preparations. (No, she hasn’t chosen a dress yet.) Sipping iced green tea and looking out across acres of rolling lawn, she seems like an incarnation of a word-association game about Gwyneth Paltrow: tawny, tan, toned. Lithe. Lissome. Limber. She’s just come back from the beach wearing a black bikini and sarong, laughing and apparently not the least bit worried about trailing sand into her gray-and-ivory living room, the one with the two Ellsworth Kelly drawings over the fireplace, a handmade BDDW stereo and linen-covered slipper chairs.


ON THE COVER Gwyneth Paltrow, photographed on the beach in Santa Monica, Calif., by Lachlan Bailey and styled by George Cortina. PHOTO: LACHLAN BAILEY FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE, STYLING BY GEORGE CORTINA

Paltrow and her ex, Chris Martin, bought this house in 2006 for $5.4 million. Since their separation in 2014, she has redecorated the place, dispensing with its Hollywood Regency style, which included a giant black-and-white needlework of the British crown in the foyer. Now it feels like an elevated version of a store from her lifestyle company, Goop—complete with a gray-and-ivory kitchen. After bounding upstairs to change into denim cutoffs and a pink shirt, she curls up on a lounge chair and explains one of her catchphrases. Not “conscious uncoupling,” the term she applied to her breakup with Martin, for which she was mercilessly teased. Today she’s talking about “contextual commerce.” This, it turns out, is when potential Goop customers are flooded with newsletters, blog posts, print magazines, conferences, events, podcasts and Instagram ads that surround Goop products in a cocoon of content.

“We sort of made it up. It’s the why of why you’re buying something,” says Paltrow, 46. “It’s really about finding things that we love, whether it’s a restaurant down the street here or a face product or whatever, and we write about why we love it, and then it converts really well.”

What she means is that readers are enticed into the Goop world by search-engine-friendly headlines like “The Gorgeous Furniture Line That Makes Us Want to Lounge Forever” ($5,500 greige sofas from London-based line Pinch), “What Drinking Collagen Might Do for Your Skin” (improve it, with a $95 one-month supply of GoopGenes collagen powder) or “Ten Minutes to Yourself” (best spent taking a bath). The last one features a $4,700 free-standing tub from Kohler as the centerpiece of the post, which was sponsored by the kitchen-and-bath brand. Readers can buy most of these things with a couple of clicks. Conversion is the holy grail of marketing: the point at which people are willing to type in their credit-card information in exchange for a one-month, $90 supply of Goop’s “Why Am I So Effing Tired” supplements, a $499 firewood tote from Goop’s recent capsule collection with home furnishings company CB2 or $22,560 one-of-a-kind sapphire-and-diamond earrings by L.A.-based jewelry company Vram. Entering those 16 digits is an analog speed-bump that makes most people think twice—the current global conversion rate for online shopping is 2.86 percent.

It turns out Goop is extremely efficient at converting people, both to the company’s neo–New Age way of thinking and to piling products into virtual shopping carts. Paltrow first woke up to her powers of influence in 2012, when she was still living with Martin in London and Goop was a niche website selling towels, bikinis, jeans and tees, among other items. She partnered with J.Crew by modeling eight outfits curated from the fall collection. The day the Goop newsletter with the J.Crew feature was blasted out, “we sent them like 10 percent of their traffic. We were just a tiny little website. So for us, that was this huge metric,” she says. (It was 8 percent, impressive nonetheless.)

The following year, Goop incorporated, and by 2014 the company was operating out of a barn-cum-office at her Brentwood, Los Angeles, home, where she moved full time. (The original 15 employees are known as Barn People.) In 2015, a Series A fundraising round garnered $10 million; the next year a Series B round netted $15 million, and Paltrow was named CEO. Soon thereafter, she raised $50 million from venture-capital firms New Enterprise Associates, Lightspeed and Felix Capital, among others.


BODY OF EVIDENCE “I remember when I started doing yoga and people were like, ‘What is yoga? She’s a witch. She’s a freak,’ ” Paltrow says. Miu Miu sweater, $945, select Miu Miu boutiques, Jacquemus swim brief, $125, jacquemus​.com PHOTO: LACHLAN BAILEY FOR WSJ. MAGAZINE, STYLING BY GEORGE CORTINA

Goop says it has tripled revenues in the past two years and is on track to double them this year, in part from direct-to-consumer sales of Goop-branded products, which are up 80 percent year-over-year. (The company does not disclose its revenue or profits.) It also curates and sells other brands, as well as partnering with firms like CB2 to expand Goop’s reach. In 2015, Goop moved to its current office in Santa Monica and will soon relocate to a nearby complex to accommodate a rapidly expanding staff. There are stores in Los Angeles, New York and London, with more European locations and an Australian expansion in the works. Even the contextual content earns its keep, with advertising partners that include Cartier, Saks and Prada. Often, the different divisions work in concert: The revenue team identifies an enclave of devoted Goop fans in, say, Dallas, Texas, and hosts a Cointreau-sponsored dinner celebrating a Goop pop-up store that the retail team has stocked with beauty products, table linens, jewelry and a calming mist for kids called Chill Child. The content team covers all the happenings on the Goop website.

Tony Florence, a general partner at NEA and one of Goop’s three board members (the others are Paltrow and Frederic Court of Felix Capital), also noticed Goop’s draw around 2012. During a board meeting for a firm he’d invested in, as he was reviewing recent performance, he noticed a spike in sales owing to a single mention on Goop—a company he’d never heard of. He started cold-calling. “I finally got connected with their IT manager,” he says. A few years later he met Paltrow and invested in Goop’s Series A round. “It was the first time I had seen a founder articulate a really big vision to use content to drive commerce,” he says. NEA has invested in each round since.

Paltrow came of age at a time when actresses were expected to aim for an Oscar (hers came in 1999, at age 26, for Shakespeare in Love) and then, perhaps, parlay that into a makeup contract (she did that, too, signing with Estée Lauder in 2005). “I felt like I had hit all of those benchmarks. I’m very competitive with myself and I thought, Well, what am I supposed to do now?” she says. “On some level I had gotten the message, ‘If you’re not achieving something that’s quantifiable, you might not be worth that much.’ Somehow, that wire got fused together in my head. So, I was like, How do I keep achieving something?”
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