Blake Lively has announced she’s shutting down her lifestyle website, Preserve, just about a year after its launch. In an interview with Vogue, Lively opened up about anticipating backlash for doing this and what her next move is.
“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 told Vogue.
“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!’” she continued. “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?”
Lively went on to predict what people will say about it, but she admitted she’s “excited” for what’s to come and has been playing Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” on repeat.
“Failure! Folly! We knew she couldn’t do this, too!” she teased. “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. And I have that plan.”
image courtesy of Zelig Shaul/ACE/INFphoto.com