Opinion: The battle of the wellness titans: Gwyneth Paltrow v Meghan Markle

Gwyneth Paltrow has turned Goop into a behemoth to match her glossy Hollywood credentials – but the Duchess of Sussex is coming for her crown. Photo / Getty Images

Opinion:

In any war, there can be only one winner. While football fans have long been engaged with the rivalry between Manchester United and Liverpool, wellness aficionados now have a similar rivalry with which to occupy themselves as they sip chai lattes and chant on their bamboo yoga mats. In the blue corner: Gwyneth Paltrow, Oscar-winning actress, founder of Goop and titan of wellness, worth £200 million ($393m). Now 50, she is a compelling advertisement for her own brand. And in the red corner: Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, 41, former actress and founder of The Tig.

Markle might have been out of the lifestyle influencer game for a while, her focus having been elsewhere on account of marrying a prince, birthing two children and causing havoc within the British monarchy by persuading the fifth in line to the throne to move to California.

But the news that she is to relaunch The Tig, the wellness and lifestyle website she started in 2014, has had many wondering whether she is coming for Gwyneth’s crown. Perhaps Meghan will soon be launching her own jade eggs, festooned with a royal warrant.

When it comes to achieving her goals, Meghan has form and she has a lot in common with Gwyneth – both actresses have married famous British men and had two children. But can she really topple Gwyneth, queen of lifestyle monetization? Read on to see how the two measure up, and whether the odds will ever be in Meghan’s favour.

The brand names

Meghan named The Tig after her favourite wine, Tignanello, a “full-bodied red” created in Tuscany that retails for up to £123 ($241) a bottle. As for why Goop was called Goop: who knows? Gwyneth has said the double O is strategic – successful internet companies have double Os in their names and she “wanted it to be a word that means nothing and could mean anything”. So it could be in reference to any kind of goop, but knowing Gwyneth’s penchant for talking about her vagina it’s probably best not to probe.

Paltrow has a huge head-start over her new rival. Photo / Getty Images

The strategies

That trope about how there can be only one winner? It doesn’t really apply to the wellness industry, a pie worth so much money that all comers can have a slice. According to a recent report by McKinsey, the global wellness market is worth upwards of US$1.5trillion ($2.4t) with annual growth of up to 10 per cent. Post-Covid, spending on personal wellness has only increased, with more people prioritising their health than ever before.

With spoils so rich, it’s little wonder that the wellness market is becoming increasingly crowded, creating the need to be strategic about how you compete. As befits her glossy Hollywood credentials, Gwyneth has gone for the highest of high-end propositions since launching Goop from her London living room in 2008: think $43 ($68) Shhhowercaps, $44 ($70) Fur Oil and $75 ($120) vaginal jade eggs. Goop makes 70 per cent of its total revenue through product sales, while its own-brand ranges, including Gwynnie’s G. Label clothing range and Goop dietary supplements, are the company’s fastest growing categories, with 50 per cent year-on-year growth.

Meghan’s The Tig was more modestly pitched and was aspirational rather than unaffordable, though this may well change with the relaunch. For the three years that The Tig was active (it shut down in 2017) products took a back seat to lifestyle and travel content: recipes (Aegean-style kale salad), beauty advice (known as #TigTips) and wholesome content about chickens. Fast forward to 2023, however, and few would bet against Meghan launching her own products, particularly clothing and accessories, given that she can be assured of blanket media coverage that leads to most items that she wears selling out.

Details filed with the US Trademark and Patent Office indicate that The Tig could make a comeback any day now, going head to head with Gwyneth’s £200 million ($393m) behemoth. The report claims that the new website may include “commentary in the field of personal relationships”, a statement guaranteed to strike fear into the heart of the Windsors. However Meghan chooses to relaunch, she’ll have her work cut out competing with Gwyneth, a peerless self-publicist who knows exactly how to dominate the airwaves. It can surely be no accident that, shortly after news of The Tig’s relaunch, Gwyneth was back to doing what she does best: talking about her orifices. With her vagina already exhausted, she moved on to her rectum, detailing on a friend’s podcast how she had “used ozone therapy rectally”. The therapy, which involves administering ozone gas into the body to treat a disease or wound, is “pretty weird but it’s been very helpful”, she smiled. Over to you, Meghan.

The credentials

I mean, they both look well. Their skin glows, their hair is glossy and neither of them look in imminent danger of dropping dead from a heart attack. Is that enough? In the wellness business, it probably is. This is an industry built on baloney, propped up with spurious claims and flooded with outlandish products that promise users hope in a jar. Qualifications? They don’t have any. But what they lack in diplomas, they make up for in bullish confidence. Besides, who needs to be a health expert when you can be an expert in media manipulation?

For the three years that The Tig was active, products took a back seat to lifestyle and travel content... but you wouldn’t bet against that changing for the relaunch. Photo / Getty Images

The USPs

Both are twice-married, both have two kids and both have glamorous, powerful friends. When it comes to marketability, Gwyneth has her Hollywood connections and status as an Oscar-winner, while Meghan’s acting credentials aren’t quite so elite. But for the legions of women obsessed by the royal family, Meghan’s (relative) rags to riches story is compelling. She’s a woman of colour who married a prince, a backstory that trumps being a woman of Hollywood royalty who married the lead singer of Coldplay.

The backlash

Meghan’s haters are outspoken and well-documented. Few women provoke such ire as to inspire a whole episode of South Park (The Worldwide Privacy Tour, in which she’s referred to as a “sorority girl, actress, influencer and victim”). By contrast, Gwyneth has only been mildly lampooned on The Simpsons, in an episode where Marge gives a friend some Paltrow recommended tea and says “I think you take it orally”. Yet Gwyneth also has her fair share of critics. She’s frequently lambasted for her overpriced products and unorthodox wellness regimes (in 2018, Goop agreed to pay $145,000 ($232,160) in penalties to resolve allegations that it made unsubstantiated claims about three of its products, including a herbal tea that “helped prevent depression”). She’s also currently being pilloried on social media for revealing how she fasts until midday, lunches on bone broth, exercises for an hour then has “lots of vegetables” for dinner, a regime which some experts claim shows signs of disordered eating. The door is wide open for Meghan to start posting healthy recipes comprised of actual carbs, like California’s answer to Nigella.

Staying power

Both are jaw-droppingly tenacious. Criticism doesn’t bother Gwyneth: in fact, cynics would say she courts it. “I don’t care about the haters,” she told CEO magazine in 2021. “They are irrelevant to me. It’s like [the presenter and podcast host] Brené Brown says: ‘I’m not making this work for people who aren’t in the arena.’ Haters don’t mean anything because they are not my people.”

Meghan’s attitude is far less dismissive. She devoted a whole documentary series to how she feels about her ill-treatment, as well as an Oprah interview, though more recently she’s preferred to speak through “sources”. Given her wish to stay out of the spotlight, it will be interesting to see how she navigates the issue of promoting The Tig.

The odds

Evenly matched. Gwyneth is a glowing, cashmere-clad businesswoman with strong convictions, even if some are a bit wacky. Meghan, meanwhile, is a humanitarian who styles herself after Diana, Princess of Wales and is likely to eschew Gwyneth’s more outlandish products and claims to focus on more wholesome subjects. In these godless, apocalyptic times, we’re all susceptible to the glossy allure of self-belief. The competition is on. If nothing else, it is going to be entertaining.