If you’ve heard of Gwyneth Paltrow’s lifestyle brand Goop, you probably think of it as a vanity project. However, it’s now reached the point where Paltrow spends almost as much time on Goop-related ephemera as she spends on acting, which makes it doubly embarrassing that the company is apparently losing money hand over fist.
According to a report from Radar Online, Goop has been operating at a loss for several years, in part thanks to the large salaries being paid out to Paltrow and former CEO Seb Bishop, who left the business earlier this year.
Goop is best known for its recipe and lifestyle website, weekly newsletters, and tie-in cookbooks. Most of Goop’s advice seems based on the assumption that all readers have a Paltrow-esque food budget and an overabundance of free time to source organic buckwheat flour and concentrate on “mindfulness,” meaning that it’s regularly on the receiving end of a fair bit of mockery and hate-reading. Still, there’s evidently a market for Paltrow’s high-end fashion recommendations and diet tips, as Goop made almost $1.9 million in 2012.
The problem is, Goop also spent almost $100,000 on its website, $79,000 on its free newsletter, and more than $1.5 million on “administrative expenses” that same year, along with various other costs. And $587,653 of that “administrative expense” went toward paying Paltrow and CEO Seb Bishop, which is about triple the amount they were paid the previous year.
Could it be that this mess is the scandalous Gwyneth Paltrow story that Vanity Fair failed to publish earlier this year? It certainly puts a different spin on Goop’s public image, anyway.
Photo via elhormiguerotv/Flickr
