You'd be forgiven for not even knowing that Gwyneth Paltrow's nebulous lifestyle brand Goop had opened a brick-and-mortar retail shop in SF called Goop Labs, at Fillmore and Sacramento Street in Pacific Heights. The shop opened in November 2019 with its four-figure price tag ladies apparel and nether-parts scented candles, but the pandemic shut down the very high-end retail concept just four months later. The shop never reopened and apparently never will, as the Mercury News reports that the Pac Heights Goop Labs has permanently closed.
On Wednesday, the Merc reported that “the shop on Fillmore Street was boarded up, with a ‘For Lease’ sign and graffiti-covered boards across the once-elegant display windows.” A company representative confirmed the store’s permanent closure to the Mercury News.
If you never got a chance to peek in, the store’s designer Ronen Lev has photos of the space on their website. In the true ‘what does that even mean?’ fashion you’d expect from a Gwyneth Paltrow-oriented brand, the shop’s description says, “We wanted the store to feel free from complexity, opting for quality and refined simplicity over adornment so that everything in the store appears honest, thoughtful and beautiful.”
The infamous jade vagina eggs were sold in the store, though as SFGate noted upon the store’s opening, “There was no branding, no price and no information about the product at all. Just mystique sold in a plain brown box with a ‘G’ on it.” This is likely because the company was forced to pay civil penalties for making false medical claims about the eggs’ benefits.
(The eggs are still sold online, now only claiming they can “harness the power of energy work, crystal healing, and a Kegel-like physical practice.”)
We don’t mean to mock businesses that close. The SF Chamber of Commerce estimates that 50% of the city’s small businesses are still closed, and shelter-in-place has been an economic calamity. But in this case, it's one particular store that seemed to put all their eggs in one basket.