Don't Be Fooled by the Hype, Why Every Metric Indicates that Meghan Markle's Brand 'As ever' is a Disaster

The constant sellouts for As ever and #10 spot on Netflix might seem flashy and an indicator of great success, but trouble is brewing behind the scenes for the Duchess of Sussex

Meghan Markle is certainly dancing for joy in another shapeless and wrinkled beige ensemble as she walks barefoot throughout her Montecito garden, grabbing the produce so conveniently grown, cultivated and picked … by her gardeners.

The so-called Duchess of Sussex should have seeming lots to celebrate. Her three product launches this year all sold out within hours, her Netflix show hit #10 on the U.S. charts with season two coming in the fall, her podcast hit #1 on Apple Podcasts, and her Instagram following is approaching 4 million, with a ShopMy attached. Life should be quite good for the cosplay royal.

Credit: ‘With love, Meghan’ / Netflix

But these metrics are only part of the picture. Scratch slightly beneath the surface and the veneer of success almost instantly crumbles.

Her Netflix series only received a “renewal” after its debut as the second season was already filmed. Given the dismal audience and critical reaction, the show should have probably been canned after one go. Though it did land as #10 on the U.S. charts that week, climbing as high as spot #4 or #5 on the list days after its launch, the show dropped out entirely the next week. The true metric of success will be seen once Netflix releases its “What We Watched” for the first half of 2025 later this year, and it’s likely that the real metrics are tepid at best.

The podcast may have hit number one, but it soon cratered into oblivion within the the first weeks of its initial eight week planned release. Not even an appearance by Tina Knowles at the end could save the flop of a podcast. It currently sits at #160 on the business podcast list on Apple Podcasts, and will soon fall off the radar entirely. Even Meghan admitted she’s moving on after the failure, though framing it as she just wants to focus on her business, despite starting the podcast to allegedly talk about her business.

There’s also her middling return to Instagram, filled with some of the most banal and uninspiring content circa 2014. Her following only seriously spiked when she shared a video of herself twerking in the hospital room to “Baby Mama.” The images of her tacky and vulgar grinding before the birth of her daughter will forever tarnish her image. Though she likely got a brief high off the nearly one million followers she gained, it’s questionable whether it was worth her dignity.

The ShopMy is perhaps one of the more interesting and less discussed aspects of Meghan’s slew of failures so far in 2025. Despite launching it to much fanfare, and with attempts to capitalize off her wedding makeup and favorite Easter items, she seemingly has already abandoned it. Her ShopMy was last updated in mid-May. Perhaps Meghan is too busy to update, or she found out that her audience is less interested in buying her obscenely expensive clothes than she thought? I’ll let you decide the answer there. And like so many things, when the times get tough the self-proclaimed hard worker has Markled another company and project without a second thought.

Of course, the perhaps biggest news of the year so far for Meghan is the launch of her beleaguered brand, As ever.

Starting off with a raspberry spread, honey, crepe and shortbread cookie mixes, teas and recently wine, the brand has been a chaotic mess from the start.

It was originally announced with the name “American Riviera Orchard” in March 2024, but Meghan later discovered that she couldn’t trademark the name or the logo. That wouldn’t have been an issue, it happens in the process of business creation, except that Meghan had already sent promotional packages of the strawberry “jam” to her celebrity friends to promote American Riviera Orchard with the logo, branding and a signature product.

Oops.

By the fall of 2024, it had become clear internally to Meghan and the team (whoever those poor souls are) that the name wouldn’t work, and her logo was rejected by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office for being unreadable and unusable. So a last minute shift was made to “As ever”, while Meghan still lazily kept seemingly most of the previous marketing material she developed for American Riviera Orchard. The name As ever leaked as someone discovered a website underdevelopment, giving a taste of the As ever offerings.

The products finally went on sale on April 2, and promptly sold out within 45 minutes, as Meghan has boasted numerous times. The second batch of products, which included everything but exchanged raspberry spread for apricot, sold out within a couple of hours. Meghan later went on Instagram and told her fans “you did it again” and repeated the claim that they had researched to make sure they had enough products for everyone, when that obviously was not true as she sold out, again. Her rosé wine went up for sale on July 1 and also sold out within an hour.

For most, that would be a dream. But it’s Meghan Markle, and there are too many questions and too many “successes” for anyone with a healthy bit of business acumen and cynicism to believe. Here are just some of the problems of As ever, and likely indicate a slide into collapse for this latest Markle venture in the near or nearish future.

“Selling out” isn’t necessarily a good thing, especially when it happens numerous times.

Meghan Markle’s inability to keep stock is rather mind-blowing. In this age of automation, mass production and endless research opportunities, the vast majority of brands, with a few exceptions, are always be able to keep up with demand. The whole point of a company is to sell products, and a company that can’t keep product in stock is not indicative of health but of failure and incompetence.

A sellout can happen once maybe twice, especially if a company is new and gauging the market, but that it seems to happen every time with Meghan can only mean one thing: it’s intentional. There’s no excuse for Meghan not to have her raspberry spread or crepe mix available to purchase 24/7. I mean, Meghan shared a story on Instagram about how one family is going to make crepes a new Saturday morning tradition (cue the eye roll). But honestly, if the family wants to do that they’ll have to order Meghan’s crepe mix in bulk at every launch or find another supplier otherwise that “traditional” is already DOA.

For customers it’s rather frustrating, as they can never get products and sets a bad precedence for the future.

So why is Meghan doing this? In my humble opinion, in order to make her business seem more successful than it is, Meghan is deliberately under stocking or setting limits on the quantities of products sold so that she can try to use the scarcity tactic to drum up interest. It’s a cheap ploy and one that’s only set to annoy, as she herself admits in her interview with Emma Grede. Interestingly enough, Emma admits to never having items sellout like Meghan’s, despite running multiple successful companies and having a net worth of $320 million, and you could almost feel her BS antennae going up in response to Meghan’s situation. Any competent business person knows that if there’s no product, then there’s no customers and no money. It’s a simple idea, but one that apparently escapes Meghan as the flashiness of “selling out” is seemingly more important to her than keeping customers happy, which gets us to our second point.

“Selling out” might be good for headlines, but those can quickly turn sour when you over sell and have to eat profits.

Not only did Meghan “sell out” of this latest As ever product round with apricot spread, but she also over sold, again.

As ever, it seems, customers are baring the brunt of Meghan’s blunders. Though customers have received an email apology, refund and the promise of the free product in the future, it’s questionable when or if this will happen. Now some have claimed the As ever response to the problem was good, and how a company handles mistakes can be a good indicator of future success, this has happened twice now.

In her initial round, Meghan oversold her honey and had to issue refunds and, if I remember correctly, give those customers first crack at her next round of honey. I gave her the benefit of the doubt then, but twice in a row? Come on now.

The same has now happened with her apricot spread. In an email to customers, the company wrote: "Due to high demand, we are unable to fulfill your order of the apricot spread at this time. We are refunding the purchase of this item by the end of this week. In addition to the refund, we want you to know that when the apricot spread is back in stock, you will be the first to receive it, free of charge."

So not only did Meghan tick off customers, including some of her biggest supports, but now her profit has been cut as she has to send out free product.

It’ll be interesting to see if that happens, as the apricot spread has been officially removed from the website entirely. Only the raspberry spread remains publicly posted and it was never restocked in the first place. In fact, the raspberry spread without the keepsake packaging has NEVER been for sale at all, and yet has remained on the website since April. Not even sure what to make of that, except that being secretive has been a ploy Meghan’s used for years at this point, to diminishing returns and the undermining of her credibility.

Despite claims of success, Meghan and her team remain cagey about any sort of hard metrics about the products sold.

If there’s one thing that the public can rely on when it comes to Meghan Markle, it’s her abysmal track recored with the truth. Since entering the massive royal spotlight, it seems, at least in my opinion, that Meghan is more than willing to lie or embellish the truth when it suits her. From she only cared if Prince Harry was nice before meeting him (no one believes that) and the claim that she and Harry were married by the Archbishop of Canterbury three days before her wedding (the Archbishop had to deny that story) to seemingly calling his family racists and lying about when she initially went into labor, Meghan is not known for her ability to tell the truth. And that’s part of the problem with this brand.

Perhaps it has been as successful as Meghan has claimed, but since we know she tends to be less than honest in order to protect herself and her image, it’s difficult to believe all the hype.

According to bastion of royal journalism that’s … In Style, because a dying former fashion magazine is where one goes to share great business news, someone on Meghan’s team claimed that they increased “inventory nearly 10 times that of the first collection.” A spokesperson also said that “the demand has consistently outpaced our projections.”

How? Seriously, how is that possible?

Meghan and her team would tell you it’s just because her brand is just that good and everyone wants a piece of the Duchess of Sussex’s brilliant and life-changing products. But having tried most everything myself, I can attest that nearly everything is basic at best to awful at worst. It’s not something I would ever willingly seek out again, except for the fact that I run a company discussing royals.

This week, Meghan has given us the greatest indicator of questionable business shenanigans behind the scenes when it comes to this mess.

A spokesperson told Newsweek that “significant volumes were shifted” when it came to the wine. Well, that could be true but the company did force everyone to buy at least THREE bottles of the rosé. There was no option to buy one, so yeah, “significant volumes” could be shifted as buyers were forced to invest in three bottles of something they might like, or hate. A risky business move with an untested product. Meghan and her team could seriously risk alienating more diehard customers if they spent upwards of $120 on wine that they tried and didn’t like and had two extra bottles. If it was closer to Christmas, I would say that As ever wine could become a good white elephant gift.

Meghan’s products might be selling, but the brand still lacks any sort of public identity.

There’s seemingly nothing more annoying than someone who’s created a brand and proclaims it reflects themselves and their ideas, and yet can’t crack the most critical piece to a brand: identity.

In the months since As ever publicly debuted, the brand has yet to establish an identity, purpose, direction, business plan or even a soul, if that can be a thing as a business. The brand, Meghan claims, “… is an extension of what has always been my love language, beautifully weaving together everything I cherish — food, gardening, entertaining, thoughtful living, and finding joy in the everyday.” But that’s not what Meghan promotes.

Since flipping her American Riviera Orchard Instagram to As ever, Meghan’s “promotion” of her brand identity includes a series of bland, boring and soulless Instagram pictures of … well … nothing related to anything, least of all her actual brand and products. It’s unclear, months later, why Meghan posted a stylized picture of herself washing blueberries writing “simple pleasures”. What does this have to do with her brand or products? No idea.

More recently Meghan has really gotten into the food puns with “steep dreams” instead of sleep dreams, being one example. Not sure what we’re supposed to get from this, as this is NOT the tea Meghan is selling nor have we ever seen her touch the tea she’s selling. In this picture, you could argue that the great Meghan is too sophisticated for the tea she’s shilling at $12 a pop and still making her own blends. As ever is for the peasants, apparently, as the Duchess in her $16 million mansion still lives off more premium, bespoke products.

But this all comes down to one gigantic failure, which makes As ever as a company impossible for Meghan to sell in the future and reflects her series of failures as a business woman.

Meghan is As ever and As ever is Meghan, which makes it useless to anyone else, especially investors.

At this point, there is no differentiation between As ever and Meghan. This is perfectly reflected even in the Instagram posts. If you watch Meghan’s Instagram for any period of time, she posts almost the same content on both pages, upwards of three to four times you might see the same picture and caption included in the respective posts and stories. It gets excessive and highlights something so critical that Meghan seemingly missed in her relentless pursuit of millions.

As Ever & Meghan Instagram Pictures

For her brand and company to be successful, it has to exist with or without her.

No investor would buy a brand that exists and sells ONLY because of Meghan Markle. Now, that may inflate Meghan’s ego, and that of her fans, but from a business perspective it’s actually incredibly concerning.

A strong business shouldn’t live or die with one single person. A strong and influential founder can help, but for the money to truly roll in the customers have to like it for—novel idea here but stay with me—the PRODUCTS not the personality.

A personality can easily help sell a business, but that interest will die if the products themselves aren’t good, and that’s Meghan’s problem. So far, her products are mediocre and pedestrian. She’s literally competing with grocery stores where similar products to hers are available literally 24/7. Instant gratification. If she can’t figure out her stocking issues, her customers will move on, especially if they find something better while waiting for the next restock.

The mark of a good brand isn’t their founder, as Meghan likes to constantly proclaim herself to be, but that the business can exist without it. Meghan has tied this business so close to herself that she is the brand and the brand is her. If an investor bought the business, it would collapse overnight if Meghan walked away. There’s literally nothing holding it together at this point except her fervent fandom, who would follow her to the next venture doomed to failure, some mildly curious and critics. That’s it.

Though that might be a good thing. If Meghan’s brand fails it’s all because of Meghan. She owns the success and the failure, as the business is nothing without her and is everything with her (whatever that might be). But if she want’s true success and to make at least millions or even billions and not merely thousands, she has to figure out this problem and quick.

Otherwise, As ever will be another Markled brand in Meghan’s wake.