Reese Witherspoon turned 50 this year. Here's what I really admire.

Reese Witherspoon turned 50 in March.

I first fell in love with her in the summer of 2001. I was 21, living in New York on the Goldman Sachs training programme, and went to see Legally Blonde at the cinema with my Goldman girls. She was fabulous then. Twenty five years on she is better than ever.

But here's the thing I really admire. And it has very little to do with how she looks or what she's worn on a red carpet.

She took her love for reading and built a serious business out of it.

The Reese's Book Club playbook

For anyone who hasn't followed it closely, the model is genuinely clever.

Reese started a book club. She picked books she loved, mostly by women, mostly about women. Her followers loved her picks. Picks turned into bestsellers. Bestsellers turned into film and TV rights.

The bit most people miss is the order in which she did it.

She bought the screen rights to a lot of these books before she recommended them to her community. So by the time you fell in love with the novel, she had already secured the upside on the adaptation.

She then mitigated the downside by only greenlighting projects her community already loved. The audience was pre-validated. The IP was already de-risked. The marketing was, in effect, already done by the book club itself.

Big Little Lies. Little Fires Everywhere. Daisy Jones and The Six. Where the Crawdads Sing. The list goes on.

In 2021 she sold Hello Sunshine to a Blackstone backed media company for around $900 million.

Why this is the bit worth talking about

You can tell the Reese story two ways.

Version one is the one we usually get. Hollywood golden girl. Oscar winner. Aged beautifully. 

That version is fine. It's also the version where she's a face, not a founder.

Version two is the one I find more interesting. A woman in her thirties looked at an industry that wasn't making enough films about women, decided to fix it herself, built a content engine, used her audience as both the focus group and the marketing channel, and sold the whole thing for nearly a billion dollars while keeping the creative reins.

The bit nobody saw coming

When Reese started Hello Sunshine in 2016, the prevailing wisdom in Hollywood was that women's stories were a niche. Women over 40 were a niche. Books written by women, for women, were a niche.

She didn't argue with any of that. She just built a company that produced them anyway and let the box office and the streaming numbers do the talking.

Every single title she's championed shines a spotlight on women's stories. Big Little Lies is about female friendship and domestic abuse. Little Fires Everywhere is about motherhood and race. The Morning Show is about women in the workplace and the politics of who gets to speak. Daisy Jones is about a woman at the centre of her own story instead of orbiting somebody else's.

She didn't just put women on screen. She put their interior lives on screen. The ambition, the resentment, the friendship, the rage, the funny bits.

And she made a lot of money doing it.

The Flamingo cut

There's a version of female ambition that says: pick a lane, look the part, don't ask for too much.

Reese is the opposite of that. She is a Flamingo. She built on what she already had (a face people knew, an instinct for story, a love of reading) and turned it into something that paid her properly and changed the picture for other women at the same time.

She didn't beige herself down to be taken seriously in business. She didn't drop the pink to sit at the table. She brought the whole thing with her.

Elle Woods, frankly, would be proud.

Happy birthday, Reese

Women's Month had the right idea putting your birthday in March.

Twenty five years after I sat in a cinema in New York with my Goldman girls watching you bend and snap your way through Harvard, you are still showing high performing women how it's done. 

Happy 50th, Reese. Elle Woods 4EVA. 🦩