Preserve, we barely knew ye. Blake Lively has announced that she's shuttering her much-maligned lifestyle site, which emulated fellow lifestyle guru Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop model and sold artisanal crafts at eye-watering prices (Anyone fancy $40 salt? Yeah, no).
The reason behind the move is that Blake wants to "rebuild, rebrand, and eventually reveal...what her project was always meant to be". So from October 9, the website will be no more. And on the plus side - you can pick up some of the pricey salt on sale.
But before you snigger at the site with its slightly bizarre content (one essay on the site: Flower Beards: Summer's Hottest Trend? Or a Death Sentence? A Story By Sir Willups Brightslymoore), Blake's explanation for shutting the site down kind of holds its hand up and says "Y'know what, I made something a bit nuts and it didn't work."
“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 said.
She added: “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?”
Good for Blake for admitting defeat - and she's ready for the haters.
“I know what it’ll look like, what I’m facing publicly, that people are just going to have a heyday with this. But it’s so much worse to continue to put something out there—to ask my team to put something out there—that isn’t the best we can do. 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."
Good on you Blake.