Blake Lively is spilling the deets about the end of her lifestyle website, Preserve.
Back in 2015, the Gossip Girl alum shuttered the virtual shop—once touted as a destination for artisans to sell one-of-a-kind items curated by Blake and her team—after just one year of operation. At the time, the actress said the site had "never caught up to its original mission," which was part of the reason for its closure.
Now, in an interview with Entrepreneur, Blake looked back at Preserve's short-lived stint on the Internet. Recalling how there were just "behind-the-scenes stuff that we just couldn't figure out," the 35-year-old described the website's demise as "awful."
"I poured everything I had into that company," she said, adding that walking away from it "felt like a death."
Furthermore, Blake was hurt by the some of the press coverage that seemingly delighted in Preserve's closure. In fact, she said it made her doubt herself abilities: "It was scary."
But one person that had Blake's back throughout it all? Her husband Ryan Reynolds.
"The person whose opinion I trust more than anything in the world is also the person who's saying to me, 'You got this. Go,'" explained Blake, who shares three daughters and is expecting a fourth baby with the actor. "And that's a great feeling."
Eventually, Blake launched Betty Buzz, a line of non-alcoholic, sparkling mixers named after her 3-year-old. The new business was built using "lessons I learned from [Preserve]," she said. "So many mistakes that I made."
Remembering how she launched Preserve "before we were ready," Blake did not want to make the same mistake again and spent years quietly working on Betty Buzz to ensure that every detail was perfect before its debut.
"It's an interesting thing to claim as a woman: being detailed and being precise," she mused. "Because that can be weaponized against you as being difficult. And if someone makes you feel something often enough, you start to believe it's true, and you start to squash those things in yourself, and you start to see them as something that you don't want to bring to the surface."
Blake added, "And it's taken me 35 years to see that, like, that's actually a huge asset: how detailed I am and how precise I am and how much I care about quality. And it's not something that I should apologize for."