Leaving Hollywood Behind

Gwyneth Paltrow opens up about questioning what her goals were as an actress. She tells Bozzi that she didn't like acting as much as she thought she did:

"I think that when you hit the bullseye, when you're 26 years old and you're a metrics driven person who, frankly, doesn't love acting that much as it turns out...I was kinda like, 'okay, I, I don't,' it wasn't like, I felt like this isn't worth doing. I sort of felt like, well now who am I supposed to be? Like, what am I, what am I driving towards?"

She then goes on to explain how being in the spotlight at a young age took a toll on her, along with the difficulty of traveling for film roles:

"I think part of my, part of the shine of acting wore off, you know, being in such intense public scrutiny, being a kid who's like living every breakup on every headline, like being criticized for everything you do say and wear, and also the, the, you know, you're, it's so transitory, you're always all over. It's hard to plant roots. Like I'm such a homebody, you know, me, I like to be with my old friends and cook and squeeze my kids. Like I don't want to be alone in a hotel room in Budapest for six weeks. Like, it's just not who I am."

Paltrow even goes to say how she didn't have a great experience with her boss as Miramax:

"So if you compound those things with the fact that like, you know, to be totally candid, I had a really rough boss for most of my movie career at Miramax. Like, so you take all those things."

Working On goop Through The Pandemic

in 2008, Gwyneth Paltrow started goop as a weekly newsletter done out of her home. The lifestyle brand has since expanded and she has now started a podcast out of it and even opened up stores in New York, LA, San Francisco, and London, where events and master-classes are held, as well as becoming a place to shop the products Paltrow lives by.

In her conversation with Bruce Bozzi, she talks about the future of the brand:

"I think, you know, with Goop, there's so much opportunity because we're a lifestyle brand and we kind of have the latitude to go into a lot of different areas. So for me, it's really been about trying to identify what makes us special as a business. Why do we uniquely exist in the world? Why do people, why do the people that love us come to us and what are the products, both digital, physical that we can bring to the world? ... I mean, we, it was such an interesting lesson because as all digitally native brands, you know, we've all been taught to, you know, acquire customers on social media, on Facebook and Instagram. And there's this model that, this metric that all the venture capitalists look at, which is the, the LTV to CAC. So basically how much does it cost you to acquire a customer on Facebook and then how much are they going to give you over their lifetime with you? And it was this metric that we were all being driven towards for such a long time."

When the pandemic hit, goop's plans had to change a bit, and here's what Paltrow had to say about that:

"When COVID happened, you know, we completely stopped our spend and why we had to re-engineer the whole P and L and, you know, certain businesses fell off a cliff and certain businesses did okay, like e-commerce. But the fascinating thing to me was that our business, our, our content and our e-commerce grew without spent without acquiring customers. And I said, 'you know, this is a clear example of what we do, like why we do what we do because people come to us for content and for the experience. So what we need to be focusing on is converting the people who already come into customers and showing them all the incredible things that we make and curate as opposed to going off platform, to try to find what ultimately is an unprofitable customer.' So there were lessons that were learned from this year that have been, that I will keep with me as, as a founder and that really do help define what the business looks like going forward, but more so how we get there."