14 DAY TRIAL // It takes guts to admit failure, and actress Blake Lively is hoping you’re paying attention and duly appreciating the fact that she did just that. Lively launched her lifestyle website Preserve 15 months ago, after almost a year of teasing it.
Today, she admits defeat, telling Vogue that she has decided to shut it down because it failed to have the impact she was hoping for. Worry not, though, she plans to come back with something bigger and better.
Preserve is shutting down with a massive sale
Blake made the announcement of Preserve going online in an interview with Vogue magazine, and she chooses the same publication to let the world know that the experiment didn’t work. She still blames Anna Wintour, the magazine’s Editor-in-Chief, for rushing her to take the website online, so that the release would coincide with the interview, saying that this meant they went public when they weren’t ready yet.
In reality though, Preserve probably failed because it never clicked with its audience. In between selling overpriced stuff like wooden crates for bicycles, each “imbued with its own unique character,” and offering editorials praising the Antebellum era, when slavery still existed and women had no rights, the website got Lively into a lot of trouble.
The biggest issue with it was that it was using content lifted from other websites without proper credit, which was widely publicized at the time and came to deliver another blow to a brand that Lively tried to build but was having visible trouble doing it.
In a way, the announcement that it’s shutting down isn’t exactly surprising. Lively tells Vogue that Preserve will be going offline on October 9 with a massive sale that’s already started.
Something bigger and better
You can see Lively’s full announcement on the failed Preserve experiment below. She insists that the project wasn’t ready for launch when it was launched, so they never got the chance to catch up.
She also plays down the negative feedback by stressing that Preserve never became the thing the entire team was thinking they were working on, so it was a disappointment to them, first and foremost.
At the same time, she promises Preserve will come back, just not in the same form. “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. And I’m so excited about it, and that’s what gave me the courage to do this, to say, ‘You know what, I’m going to give myself one more shot at this, and I really have to do it as well as I can do it this time.’ And that is the only thing that will impact people,” she says.