After restructuring, Gwyneth Paltrow‘s Goop is hitting the accelerator on beauty.
On Sunday, Goop will launch its first retinol product with its 3x Regenerative Retinol Serum. It will retail for $150 on Goop’s website and in Goop stores.
The product derives its name from the 3x Retinol Complex, a proprietary cocktail of granactive retinoid, encapsulated retinal and encapsulated retinol. Those join ceramide NP, benthi plant peptide, as well as a combination of beetroot, adzuki bean and licorice extracts.
Goop recently restructured the business to focus on three growth pillars: fashion, beauty and food. The move resulted in the company laying off 18 percent of its then-216-person workforce.
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Now, Paltrow said, the company is “back in growth mode.”
“After COVID[-19], we spent quite a long time dodging bullets, treading water and being as agile as possible,” Paltrow said. “Last year we started to see huge growth in our beauty business again, and that’s carrying on to this year.”
The brand’s G.label fashion brand has grown 51 percent year-to-date and beauty grew 40 percent last year. Overall revenues at the company are also slated to uptick in 2024, the company said last month.
Paltrow said that Goop, which she founded in 2008 as a newsletter, wasn’t immune to broader landscape shifts in recent years. “2020, 2021, 2022, Silicon Valley Bank collapsing — those were really hard years for us founders,” she said. “For the first time in a few years, I’m feeling super energized about the business.”
Paltrow recently closed a $15 million round of funding for Goop Kitchen, a food business currently only available in L.A. “We’re getting back to brass tacks, and it’s really working,” she said.
As far as beauty goes, every category expansion is meant to ladder up to Goop’s broader ethos, and Paltrow said she sees wide swaths of opportunity. “There’s the topical piece, there’s the ingestibles piece, there’s the overall health piece. These things contribute so much to beauty and our take on beauty is about being the best that you are,” she said. “There’s a real embracing of the ‘you’ part.”
Skin care is also significant to the business, evidenced by “all of the attention and funding that we put into our clinical trials,” she said. The brand’s new 3x Retinol Regenerative Serum, for example, boasts clinical trials that showed 100 percent of subjects saw the appearance of deep wrinkles and facial pores diminish, as well as improvements in hydration.
“We really only launch our dream products,” Paltrow said. “We assess the market and ask where we see a white space. But we only make things we’re obsessed about and can’t find. Sometimes, things take a really long time and lots and lots of iterations.”
Goop has also dabbled in makeup, launching mascara and bronzing gel earlier this year.
Paltrow sees expansion into retinol as table stakes. “The clinicals behind retinol are so compelling. It obviously works really well, and I’m impatient,” she said of her own standards. “For a long time, there weren’t any clean retinols on the market and we wanted to play with versions that wouldn’t make the skin super red or irritated.”