In July, actress-turned-entrepreneur Gwyneth Paltrow took to a stage in Chicago and said that in order to grow Goop, the lifestyle brand she founded in 2008, she’d need to step away from it.
Running the business had been “an amazing journey” but it was time for her to back off. “In order to build the brand I want to build, its scalability is limited if I connect to it,” she said. “So I always think: ‘How can I grow the brand? How can I separate myself from the brand?’ And I think its going to be more its own brand.” She added: “My dream is that one day no one will remember that I had anything to do with it.”
Fast forward several months and Paltrow appears to be taking a different approach. She has said she’s now CEO of Goop.
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Her new position was first announced rather matter-of-factly in a New Yorker article about Goop’s expansion into vitamins. The story says Paltrow talked with some Goop employees about the new role last week when it appeared on a mockup of a Goop newsletter. Her new job hasn’t been formally announced, but Goop confirmed the news to Coins2Day sister site Motto on Thursday. According to the New Yorker, Paltrow told employees in the meeting that the board made her CEO. “It wasn’t my fault,” she said. “It wasn’t my decision.”
In August, Goop got a cash infusion of more than $10 million and moved the brand’s headquarters from New York to Los Angeles. At the time, the New York Post reported that CEO Lisa Gersh, whose family is based in New York, would leave her C-suite role to become a strategic adviser and that she wouldn’t be directly replaced.
Goop hired Gersh, formerly CEO of Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia, in 2014 to help the brand marry content and commerce. Paltrow and Gersh told Coins2Day that they planned to bring advertisers to the site and launch the sale of Goop-branded goods. It currently sells clothes, fragrances, skincare, and vitamins.