Last summer, actress Blake Lively launched a lifestyle website called Preserve. On Wednesday, she announced she would be shutting it down on October 9th.
“We have an incredible team of people who do beautiful work, but we launched the site before it was ready, and it never caught up to its original mission: It’s not making a difference in people’s lives, whether superficially or in a meaningful way,” Lively told Vogue.
“And that’s the whole reason I started this company, not just to fluff myself, like, ‘I’m a celebrity! People will care what I have to say’,” she continued. “It was so never meant to be that, and that kind of became the crutch because it was already up and already running, and it’s hard to build a brand when you’re running full steam ahead—how do you catch up?”
When the site came to be, many criticized it and compared it to Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop. Lively had previously expressed to Time a few months ago that she wished the site launched six months later than it did.
However, the site will not be gone forever. The 28-year-old actress already has plans to eventually re-launch the site.
“I know what it’ll look like, what I’m facing publicly, that people are just going to have a heyday with this,” she remarked. “But it’s so much worse to continue to put something out there—to ask my team to put something out there—that isn’t the best we can do. I’m going to take this hit, and the only way I can prove all the negative reactions wrong is to come back with a plan that will rock people. And I have that plan.”
“I’ve asked my husband to just play ‘Shake It Off’ on a loop—it feels really good to listen to it on a loop,” she added.
However, the new site might have a new name.
“I love the name Preserve,” Lively said. “But then, I never thought people would think Preserve had something to do with jam! “Like, ‘Oh, you sell jams!’ ‘No! It’s like preserving things and us and life and artisans!’”
