Despite making utterly ridiculous claims with no scientific basis and selling equally ridiculous items, like a candle that supposedly smells like female body parts, Gwyneth Paltrow’s ridiculous “wellness” business that she calls Goop continues to be a big thing, so much so that she’s got her own Netflix show plugging her crap.
With so much talk about this whole “wellness” thing lately, I thought it would be a good time to take a trip down memory lane to when Blake Lively launched her own Goop-like website, a site that even Gwyneth Paltrow would’ve frothed over.
Called Preserve, the website was launched in late 2014 to a heap of fanfare and was intended to be Blake Lively’s big foray into the whole “lifestyle” thing.But it didn’t take long for everyone to realise that Preserve was nothing but a Goop wannabe that didn’t even know what it was meant to be.
Described as “part digital monthly magazine, part e-commerce venture, part video blog, part philanthropic endeavour” that intended to connect users with makers of things (like experiences, stories and other hipster buzzwords), the website had a bigger identity crisis than a fourth-year uni student and struggled to figure that out throughout its short lifespan.
If you thought that was confusing, apparently so did Blake Lively because Preserve really struggled to present a coherent message that, you know, made some sense. Hell, Blake even wrote in her editor’s letter: “I’m no editor, no artisan, no expert. And certainly no arbiter of what you should buy, wear, or eat.”
Uh huh, then why launch a “lifestyle” website that does the exact opposite of that?
While no one can quite figure out what exactly is the point of Preserve (I’ve done a heap of reading on it and still have no clue), people did zero in on one thing about the website: the ridiculously overpriced products that made as much sense as the website’s intended mission statement.
It’s one thing to be selling jade eggs and vagina-scented candles like Goop, but it’s another to be flogging, ahem, “artisanal” goods like $1,200 diaper bags, $2000 handmade wooden World Marquees, salt that costs $40, and what ever knick knacks hand-crafted by Blake Lively herself, especially since Preserve was aimed at millennials.
Goop’s big thing is getting people to spend crazy amounts of money on stupid items they don’t need, but Preserve somehow topped Gwynny’s efforts on that front.
Unsurprisingly, Preserve didn’t exactly set the world alight and Blake announced (via Vogue) in September 2015 that she was shutting down the website, barely a year after its launch, and admitting that “It’s not making a difference in people’s lives, whether superficially or in a meaningful way.”
While Blake promised that she’ll relaunch a new, post-Preserve venture, we’ve yet to see that happen, which is probably for the best seeing as how Gwyneth Paltrow and Goop has sort of cornered the market at the moment.
Here’s hoping that’s the last we see or hear of Preserve or whatever lifestyle thing Blake Lively has got going on because the world is already a dumbster fire as it is and we don’t need to add another Goop-like website to the blaze.
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