Pack up the succulents and patchwork denim, because Blake Lively’s ecommerce site Preserve is no more. The actress is moving onto more fruitful pastures after the site, which launched last July, failed to gain traction.
The exclusive news of the site’s shutdown went to Vogue.com, which celebrated the Preserve launch last year in a cover story about Lively. Vogue shared the news on Wednesday in a post that is oddly defensive regarding the criticism directed at Lively and her site over the past year.
Preserve
Vogue’s post blames Lively’s detractors for Preserve’s downfall, rather than the fact that it might not have been a very good (or tasteful) site.
“What we are dealing with is the increasingly boundaryless space between social media, Internet forums, online tabloids, and other forms of quick-fire hot takes,” reads Vogue‘s fairly hot take.
But Lively herself is able to admit failure—which is to say, a lack of Goop-level success.
“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 says, on the phone from New York. “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?”
How, indeed.
Preserve, which was not all that different from Gwyneth Paltrow‘s luxury site, never truly became a trusted source for cashmere, cacti, and all that glitters. Lively said that she had “a plan that will rock people” in the works—potentially something in the same vein as Jessica Alba‘s hugely successful Honest Company.
In the Vogue interview, Lively took pains to remind us that she’s just a mixed-up late-twentysomething at the end of the day.
“I’ve asked my husband to just play ‘Shake It Off’ on a loop,” she said. “It feels really good to listen to it on a loop!”
H/T Cosmopolitan | Screengrab via Vogue