Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop has had a beauty line for years, making their own branded skincare and beauty products, sometimes in collaboration with existing beauty brands. Last year, Goop Beauty launched Good Clean Goop, a supposedly “affordable” beauty line with all of the core tenets of Goop: “clean” branding and eye-rolling at broke peasants. Gwyneth repeatedly looked down on consumers who cannot spend hundreds of dollars a month on skincare. She repeatedly made a point of saying that Good Clean Goop was basically a watered-down version of what she wanted because they couldn’t put expensive ingredients into the products because then the peasants wouldn’t be able to afford them. Is it a huge surprise that Good Clean Goop isn’t doing well? Perhaps not. But what surprised me is that, according to Puck, Goop Beauty is doing poorly across the board.
Goop’s overall sales, which include Goop Beauty, have been more or less flat since 2021, I’m told. Paltrow’s wholesale beauty businesses aren’t doing great, either. Despite WWD recently citing “Amazon overall and the wholesale business as key strengths for Goop Beauty,” I’ve heard that U.S. retail sales for the brand were only in the six figures at Amazon and Sephora for the month of May. (Summer Fridays did millions in sales at Sephora during the same period.) A spokesperson for Goop said that Goop Beauty’s sales overall are up 17 percent year-to-date.
Good.clean.goop, a more affordable and wholesale-only skincare brand that launched simultaneously at Target and on Amazon last October, also underperformed. I’ve heard the line is in the “bottom 15” at Target, which de-escalated some partnerships following the blowback to its LGBTQ+ Pride campaign last year. A source with firsthand knowledge of Target’s beauty business told me that the retailer had “reputational concerns” regarding Paltrow being a polarizing figure and decided to “take a step back” in terms of marketing and in-store placement of the brand.
“They got so conservative because of what was happening with Pride that everything was put on hold. Gwyneth ended up opening up the brand to Amazon, and it was not an exclusive launch. The brand lost momentum––it was put on a back endcap in the store, and it never really got traction,” this person said. (A spokesperson for Target declined to comment.)
There was also confusion around the market, pricing, and buyer for good.clean.goop. The line didn’t necessarily appeal to Paltrow’s wealthier core demographic, but it was still too expensive for the not-yet-Goop’d customer who doesn’t want to spend $30 to $40 on skincare, especially in the absence of serious marketing and prime placement in Target’s stores. “At the end of the day, it may not be priced correctly for what it is,” an executive at the retailer said.
Then the parody went mainstream. Goop Beauty lost its first-mover advantage when clean, nontoxic, and “free of” beauty marketing became inescapable. With every skincare brand chasing “clean” status––which, for the record, is purely a marketer’s gimmick since most ingredients on the “dirty” lists would never make it into beauty products in the first place––there was little setting Goop apart.
I fundamentally believe that Gwyneth is a bandwagoner who merely takes credit for inventing/pioneering most things, but Puck correctly points out that Goop really missed so many opportunities to stake out their claim in the beauty/skincare market earlier on. Now the gap left by Goop has been filled by Fenty Beauty, Rare Beauty, Kylie Cosmetics, etc. Puck goes on to suggest that Goop’s “midlife crisis” is the result of Gwyneth failing to “install proper executive leadership, or even a seasoned C.E.O. with the operating chops to streamline the company’s various product lines.” I absolutely agree with that. Gwyneth has always expressed a desire for Goop to be a stand-alone entity eventually, and not be synonymous with Gwyneth’s name. But Gwyneth has still centered herself within the company, and for good reason – because she IS Goop. But that also means that she’s sort of half-assed it when it comes to building the company and ensuring the company’s independence.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images.