Blake Lively Shuts Down Her Website Preserve, Admits To Failure

Published on September 30, 2015.

(Photo by Evan Agostini/Invision/AP)

Actress Blake Lively, branched out from being known as just an actress when she took her business knowledge to launch her own lifestyle Preserve, but on Wesdnesday, Sept. 30, she announced that she is shutting it down, after launching it only one year ago.

In her announcement to Vogue, Lively stated, “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 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?”

She also went on to add that admitting to the failure was “scary,” but also what she thinks best as it hasn’t lived up to its mission statement: “It’s very exciting and it’s 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 three that we, as a team, are not proud of.'”

“I know what it’ll look like, what I’m facing publicly, that people are just going to have a heyday with this. 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,” she added.

Lively is clearly taking it all in stride, which is admirable in itself and even more so when she also announced she is working on her next project in which she will take all the lessons and tools she learned from the launch and shutdown of Preserve to create something better.