Blake Lively Wishes That Preserve Hadn't Launched When It Did

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Blake Lively's initial launch into e-commerce with Preserve was rough to say the least, and she knows it. She was interviewed by Time for a report on celebrities with second lives as entrepreneurs, and it's an incredibly honest look into everything that happened in Preserve's troubled first year online.

"There is constructive criticism we've taken to heart," Lively said of the site's initial launch. "And then there's people being mean for the sake of being mean, or when you're trying to be light and people take you literally. It's a nasty world."

"You don't see male entrepreneurs pitted against each other, destroyed, picked apart, and every word they say served up to judge," she continued. "That's disappointing, but we've got so much going on that we can't pay attention. The things that keep me up are things I look at on the site and I know could be better."

Lively explained that Preserve wasn't actually supposed to launch when it did, but the team had to push it forward to coincide with Lively's Vogue cover. "I couldn't call Anna Wintour and say 'I need six more months'—people hacked into our site a week and a half before it was meant to launch, so the site leaked," she said. "The site's not close to what I want it to be. I hope by the time it's what I want it to be, my standards will be raised infinitely more."

When pressed on what, exactly, is wrong with Preserve, Lively brought up the less-than-stellar user experience. "It's an e-commerce site that's a confusing experience—the UX and UI feels like a Matryoshka doll," she admitted.

"Every layer of the company can and will be improved," Lively told Time. "It's hard to have it under a microscope. If I had my dream, I'd put it on hold for six months or a year and then relaunch it. But I'd want to do that every three months."