The Gossip Girl star, foodie and homemaker Blake Lively is shutting down her artisan website, Preserve.
The actress-turned-lifestyle guru will shut its virtual doors of Preserve, eight days from now. As she explains to Vogue - her site never lived up to its mission statement, and that in spite of what will happen, she's proud of the decision to know when to let it go.
"It's very exciting and it's also incredibly scary," Lively told Vogue. "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 also admitted that she prematurely launched her website called Preserve, an online community that seeks to connect users with artisan makers and story tellers. She told Vogue that she wished she had waited six more months before launching the site. "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.
As part of the sites closure on October 9, all of Preserve items is currently on sale. At the moment, she is keeping mum about the new plans after Preserve. Though she is currently researching founding stories of big brands such as Jessica Alba's Honest Company, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram.
"Our goal has always been to touch millennials through storytelling, and the idea is to create a shoppable lifestyle. And that's not to say to turn everything into commerce, but to make things easier: This is a thing that I created with my own two hands and this is how you can do it, or this is something that I found on my adventures and travels and this is how you can have it. It's about creating a level of ease for the people who identify with us. We've focused in so much that it's actually very simple, it's very clean, it's very direct."
