A little over a year since its launch, Blake Lively‘s lifestyle website Preserve is going dark.
The “Age of Adaline” actress will shut down her first entrepreneurial venture on Oct. 9, and told Vogue the reason is that the website was launched prematurely.
“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,” she said. “It’s not making a difference in people’s lives, whether superficially or in a meaningful way.”
For the last week and a half of Preserve’s short but shiny life, everything is on sale, and then the site will go dark, allowing Lively to, according to Vogue, “rebuild, rebrand, and eventually reveal — on her own timeline — what her project was always meant to be.”
The “Gossip Girl” actress is an old hand at this and knows to expect backlash.
“‘Failure! Folly! We knew she couldn’t do this, too!’” she mimicked expected haters. “I know what it’ll look like, what I’m facing publicly, that people are just going to have a heyday with this … 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.”
Lively might also change the name if and when she brings her brand of lifestyle merchandising back online, and cites Jessica Alba‘s The Honest Company as a source of inspiration.
“I mean, champagne problems,” she said. “Thank God these are the things I get to complain about.”