Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop cuts staff, tries to change strategy

Goop is laying off 18% of its 216 employees, citing a shakeup of its organization, WWD reported Thursday. The company focuses on beauty, fashion and food — notably its beauty brands Goop Beauty and Good Clean Goop, its clothing line G. Label and its Goop Kitchen restaurants.

That means it’s moving away from the wellness, home, travel and sexual well-being categories that once defined the brand.

Goop started as a newsletter featuring Paltrow’s favorite things, but then grew into a website and eventually a mini-empire.

Ten years after its launch, in 2018, it raised $50 million in a Series C round; it has raised a total of $134.5 million and was last valued at $433 million in 2020, according to PitchBook. Back then, it was largely a media and e-commerce company, touting alternative health products like jade vaginal eggs as well as its own line of supplements, inking deals with media giants like Condé Nast and hosting top-tier conferences that could cost thousands of dollars to attend.

In its many incarnations, it also had a Netflix series, a line of household goods and its own publishing house.

Lately the focus has been more and more on beauty and food.

Over the summer, Goop opened its first store to offer in-store treatments. Last year, it launched Good Clean Goop, a lower-priced skin-care line that can be found at Target and on Amazon. (A brand’s exfoliant costs $20, while a Goop Beauty exfoliant costs $125.)

Puck reported in June that the lower-priced line was in the “‘bottom 15’ at Target.” Neil Saunders, a managing director at GlobalDatal Retail, told Business Insider that while Target had increased awareness of the brand, “Goop needs to do more to really break through, especially with younger consumers.”

Goop Kitchen — a ghost kitchen, or delivery restaurant — was founded in 2021. It has multiple locations in Southern California and recently raised $15 million from investors including Travis Kalanick, the co-founder of Uber and CEO of CloudKitchens, at a valuation of $105 million, according to PitchBook.

Goop’s many twists and turns haven’t been without internal turmoil. In 2021, BI reported that at least 140 employees, including executives, had left the company in two years, with some saying they felt underpaid.

“Leadership training is where I would spend all my time,” one former employee told BI at the time. “Sometimes, when you have founders who are also CEOs, that passion can be a blind spot.”

While the brand has had three CEOs since its founding, Paltrow has been the CEO since 2017.

The brand told WWD that sales were higher last year than in 2022 and that they would increase again this year, but no figures were released.

Goop did not respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

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