Blake Lively Is Closing Preserve

Everything on Blake Lively’s lifestyle website is on sale — but not because of the changing seasons. As of October 9, Preserve will close so the actress can, according to Vogue, “rebuild, rebrand, and eventually reveal—on her own timeline—what her project was always meant to be.”

In the summer of 2014, the 28-year-old launched her own GOOP-like e-commerce slash blogging venture. But the entrepreneurial undertaking did not go as well as planned, despite backing from Anna Wintour and a splashy premiere on the cover of the editor-in-chief’s magazine. Lively even admitted to Time in June that the pressure to meet a deadline played a part in not making the product she really wanted to put out. She even said her dream would be to “put it on hold for six months or a year and then relaunch it,” foretelling this future foreclosure.

“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,” she explained. “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!’ 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?”

So in just a few days, the site selling clothing, accessories, and home decor that is all now deeply discounted, will shut down, which the mother to baby James admitted is exciting but also incredibly scary. “I never thought I would have the bravery to actually do that, to take the site dark and to say, ‘You know what? I haven’t created something that is as true and impactful as I know it can and will be. And I’m not going to continue to chase my tail and continue to put a product out there that we, as a team, are not proud of.’”

But this isn’t the end of Preserve — well, maybe the name. While pretty dresses co-designed by Lively or expensive baby bags with her stamp of approval won’t be readily available, they will be back. “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 during the reconstruction period, she’s asked her assistant to play “Shake It Off” on repeat (see Taylor Swift, no “Bad Blood” here!).

Throughout her career, and particularly during this enterprise, she’s faced a lot of criticism in the press, but she’s prepared to face it. “I’ve finally summoned the strength to take on whatever anybody says because I know I’m going to come back with something stronger. I’m proud of it and I can take it, because I am a much harder critic on me than any nasty gossip rag,” she said. “And that’s a good thing and a bad thing, but I just want to make myself and my family proud. And this time around, I really think I’ve done that.”

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