Goop As Gold

She continues to incur the wrath of the medical profession, but Gwyneth Paltrow is having the last laugh as goop, her a$330 million alternative lifestyle business, thrives through covid-19 with rumours of an imminent initial public offering.

- Paul Merrill

The crisis that set the wheels in motion for the eventual launch of such oddities as psychic vampire repellent, at-home coffee enemas, as well as 18-karat gold dumbbells, involved gelato.

It was 1999 and Hollywood superstar Gwyneth Paltrow was filming psychological thriller The Talented Mr Ripley in Venice when she had an understandable craving for ice cream.

Now, the Italian floating city is not known for its shortage of such snacks, but the Oscar winner didn’t want any old choc-chip sundae; no, she wanted the very best. And despite the presence of a quarter of a million Venetians, she had no idea who to ask.

A similar thing had happened the previous year in London on the set of Shakespeare in Love when she’d fancied a coffee. The final straw was during a shoot in Paris when she needed a recommendation for where to get a bikini wax.

“I’ve personally been steered wrong so many times,” she says, “I unwittingly became the recipient of phone calls from friends saying, ‘Where should I eat here? Where should I go?’ so I started collating all this information.”

Fast forward nine years and Paltrow had squirrelled away enough tidbits to start producing a weekly newsletter from her kitchen table in London. She called it Goop – the first and last letters being her initials, and the middle two because someone advised her that successful websites often have a double ‘o’ in their names.

The first missive contained recipes for turkey ragu and banana nut muffins.