Blake Lively has decided to shut down her lifestyle website and e-shop Preserve on Oct. 9, a little over a year after its launch. The Gossip Girl star admits that her endeavor did not take off as she had hoped.
“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,” says the 28-year-old actress to Vogue.
The website was launched around August of last year to coincide with the release of her Vogue US cover. But even before the release, the site was hit with criticism already. And though she didn’t directly blame Vogue’s editor in chief for it, the Age of Adaline actress tells Time, “I couldn’t call Anna Wintour and say, ‘I need six more months.’” But Blake did say that the website didn’t meet her personal expectations, “If I had my dream, I’d put it on hold for six months or a year and then relaunch it.”
The online portal features artisanal food and the stories of the people who made them. Although Blake was clumped together with her celebrity-turned-lifestyle-entrepreneur counterparts Gwyneth Paltrow for Goop and Jessica Alba for The Honest Company, people say that “It’s no Goop.”
But the thing about Blake is that she never gives up from a first failed attempt. She’s already cooking a comeback. “I have that plan. And I’m so excited about it, and that’s what gave me the courage to do this, to say, ‘You know what, I’m going to give myself one more shot at this, and I really have to do it as well as I can do it this time.’”
As to what that plan is exactly, no one knows yet. Blake drops a hint, however: It will be another website. “The new site will come out and half [of the people] will be nice and half will be mean again,” she says.
Photo courtesy of Timothy A. Clary via Page Six
