It’s never been entirely clear if Gwyneth Paltrow is in on the joke, especially if it’s on her. She seems too aloof, too controlling of everything. If an essential element of humor is the ability to see the absurdity of life, how do you account for her straight-faced shilling of $27 “psychic vampire repellent” and $120 “bio-frequency healing” sticker packs?
But then came that Astronomer crisis commercial.
Millions saw Andy Byron, who was at the time the chief executive of Astronomer, in an illicit kiss-cam embrace with his human resources executive, Kristin Cabot, at that Boston-area Coldplay concert last month. Publicly shamed, they both lost their jobs. But then, with the help of Ryan Reynolds’s production company, Astronomer released a video featuring Ms. Paltrow, the Coldplay lead singer Chris Martin’s ex-wife, to turn the crisis into a marketing opportunity for the heretofore obscure data management company.
Ms. Paltrow, sitting in a spare room, wearing a simple pale blue office shirt, her hair casual and her makeup minimal, delivers the lines — “Yes, Astronomer is the best place to run Apache Airflow, unifying the experience of running data, M.L. and A.I. pipelines at scale. We’ve been thrilled so many people have a newfound interest in data workflow automation” — with apparent sincerity, and a bit of a smirk. It went viral.
With Astronomer, Ms. Paltrow did what she always does: transform an apparent P.R. disaster into a marketing moment. Ms. Paltrow has long been a polarizing figure, but she has been authentic — unapologetically rich and unwavering in her beliefs about everything from jade “yoni” eggs to the superiority of raw dairy products (both of which medical experts advise against). Her unwillingness to let criticism break her has only seemed to fortify and expand her fan base, allowing her to sail through one backlash cycle after the other and still have brands like Astronomer lining up to work with her.
Ms. Paltrow launched her lifestyle brand, Goop, in 2008 as the Great Recession unfolded. Facebook was four years old, Twitter was two and Instagram was two years away. While her actor peers were busy pooh-poohing social media, she leaned into influencing before anyone was calling it that. She wanted to capture email addresses for a newsletter of her recommendations, so she put up a website with the tagline “Nourish the inner aspect.”
“My life is good because I am not passive about it,” Ms. Paltrow wrote. The press mocked the nascent enterprise, but the attention only led to a flood of subscribers and mass awareness of Goop.
Bloggers of the day bristled at Ms. Paltrow’s expensive recommendations. They weren’t much different from what you’d find in a magazine like Vogue, but she provided a direct and regular connection to someone who actually lived that way. In early Goop missives, she suggested investing in a little black Chanel dress because it could be passed down to one’s daughter and offered a recipe for fried oysters with curried crème fraîche with the tip, “Feel free to use any kind of caviar.”
“I am who I am. I can’t pretend to be somebody who makes $25,000 a year,” she told Elle U.K. shortly after Goop started. And she has never tried to, going on to sell everything from $34 toilet paper to a $396 piece of cheese.
Goop didn’t just sell material goods; it also sold a certain type of self-improvement work that similarly drew both praise and derision. Ms. Paltrow and Mr. Martin chose to announce their breakup in a newsletter in 2014, a time when other stars without an online platform might have sent a statement to People. This allowed Ms. Paltrow to control the message down to the headline: “Conscious Uncoupling.”
Along with the written statement from her and Mr. Martin, Goop published an explainer article by the wellness gurus Habib Sadeghi and Sherry Sami that gave readers permission to consciously uncouple themselves.
“The idea of being married to one person for life, especially without some level of awareness of our unresolved emotional needs, is too much pressure for anyone,” Dr. Sadeghi and Dr. Sami wrote. The result was a fresh round of outrage and coverage. “Now Gwyneth Paltrow’s trying to have herself the perfect divorce?” wondered Dan Abrams on “Nightline” at the time. Goop received so much traffic, the site crashed. The following year it promoted the book “Conscious Uncoupling” by Katherine Woodward Thomas, who had coined the term some years earlier.
Some of Goop’s viral moments were intentional. When it launched a travel app in 2016, it needed to reach 10,000 downloads to satisfy a sponsor. Ms. Paltrow had the idea to call it “G. Spotting” in order to attract ridicule, which she suspected (correctly) would result in press attention and downloads. Condé Nast Traveler’s story about the app asked: “What sort of a name is G. Spotting?”
In 2017, when Goop put a jade “yoni” egg up for sale in its store, stating that it offered women a slew of unproven health benefits, medical experts vociferously disputed the claims. California district attorneys even sued Goop over them, but the company settled for $145,000 and admitted no wrongdoing. The publicity only boosted sales of the product. You can still buy one for $66 (no returns accepted).
Goop promoted many treatments that experts have warned consumers against: coffee enemas, vaginal steaming, a raw goat milk “cleanse.” Meanwhile, the company only grew to encompass a wholesale business, product lines, live events, a ghost kitchen, a book publishing imprint and more.
No amount of backlash has seemed to dampen Ms. Paltrow’s appeal as a spokesperson. Goop’s corporate partners have included Netflix and Celebrity Cruises, while brands like Copper Fit, Saint Laurent and Swarovski have hired Ms. Paltrow. Her refusal to wither in the face of controversy or negative press may endlessly frustrate medical and public health experts, but it has also made her all the more appealing to her fans, who just can’t look away.
Maybe she is in on the joke. Maybe she isn’t. Maybe we don’t want her to be. What’s definitely true is that she’s laughing all the way to the bank.
Source photograph by Marc Piasecki/Getty Images.
Amy Odell is the author of the Back Row newsletter, “Anna: The Biography” and “Gwyneth: The Biography.”
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