Blake Lively’s eCommerce Site Closing Up Shop

Actress Blake Lively is scaling back her entrepreneurial endeavors in the eCommerce space, at least for the time being.

In an interview with Vogue published Wednesday (Sept. 30), Lively told the outlet that she is shutting down her website Preserve on Oct. 9.

Launched last summer, Preserve was originally intended to highlight makers of handcrafted items throughout the United States, promoting both the individuals’ stories and their particular goods for sale to consumers. Lively shared with Vogue at the time of Preserve’s launch that two years were spent building the site. Now, in a little over half that time, the venture is closing up shop.

“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,” Lively told Vogue in the most recent interview. “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!’ 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?”

The Preserve founder assured the outlet that the shuttering of the eCommerce site — which, Vogue reports, is undergoing a large sale of its featured offerings in advance of Oct. 9 — does not mark a permanent end to her eCommerce ventures. Rather, Lively seeks to reconsider her approach, rebuild and rebrand, all on an unspecified timeline, and emerge with a new site that shares some of Preserve’s central tenets.

“Our goal has always been to touch millennials through storytelling,” she told Vogue, “and the idea is to create a shoppable lifestyle.”

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