When Blake Lively’s lifestyle website Preserve launched in 2014, the derision was instantaneous. The project was a minor miracle — somehow more ridiculous and tone deaf than Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop.
Preserve blended absurd so-it-yourself (DIY) projects such as tinselled apples, purple prose and shoppable navel-gazing, Lively announced her pregnancy on the site, and gossip-mongers could “shop the story.”
But it turns out Lively didn’t really like Preserve, either. That’s why she’s shutting it down on October 9. The reason?
“It’s not making a difference in people’s lives, whether superficially or in a meaningful way,” she told Vogue.
You can’t argue with that. But that doesn’t mean the Age of Adaline star is giving up. Like Whac-A-Mole, another lifestyle website will pop up to take Preserve’s place, and Lively promises that it will be closer to what she initially envisioned. She just didn’t think she could transform the site in real time.
“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,’” she said.
She’s not releasing many details about the new project or if the name will change, but she says she envisions a plan. According to her Vogue interview, it looks something like this:
“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.”
That somewhat abstract plan doesn’t sound so different from Preserve. And how many people were bookmarking the site? Could it have been enough people to warrant an announcement over its demise and rebirth? Well, Lively doesn’t care what haters think. In fact, she’s been warding them off with a special talisman.
“I’ve asked my assistant to just play Shake It Off on a loop,” she said. “It feels really good to listen to it on a loop!”
