Why Blake Lively Is Shutting Down Preserve
"People are just going to have a heyday with this," she said.
— -- Blake Lively is shutting down her website Preserve.
The actress, who launched the website last year, announced today that the site will go dark Oct. 9.
"It’s very exciting and it’s also incredibly scary,” the actress told Vogue magazine. “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.'"
Lively, 28, started her own website in July, 2014 in an effort to "touch millennials through storytelling ...[and] create a shoppable lifestyle," she explained. However, now she's admitting that she "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 continued. "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?"
While the former "Gossip Girl" star is expecting a bit of a backlash (“I know what it’ll look like, what I’m facing publicly, that people are just going to have a heyday with this," she said), she's already got a plan in place for a rebranded re-launch at some point in the future. That, she said, is what excites her most.
"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. "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."