As the Duke and Duchess of Sussex prepare to leave behind Montecito, and their sun-dappled California mansion, there is one element of their fading Hollywood empire that will remain intact: Meghan’s nascent lifestyle brand As Ever.
In one of the more enduring elements of what came to be known as “Megxit,” As Ever will continue to court consumers with its gauzy branding and curated jams, candles and teas, according to people close to the brand.
On Friday, days after news broke that Prince Harry and Meghan would return to Britain, As Ever emailed its customers with a winking first line — “A new chapter to celebrate” — and a link to order an $89 Napa Valley sparkling wine with “subtle minerality, graceful notes of fruit and a bright finish.”
Last year, Meghan released two seasons of her Netflix show “With Love, Meghan” in a move to refashion herself from ex-royal to a Goop-adjacent domestic goddess, in the same vein as Martha Stewart, Chrissy Teigen or Gwyneth Paltrow. Alongside the show, Meghan founded As Ever, selling an assortment of items including a trio of raspberry, orange marmalade and strawberry spreads for $36, lavender honey “sourced from Spain” and California wines.
The show, in which Meghan showed audiences how to hand-dye neck scarves and make vegan soap while throwing out lines like, “Love is in the details, gang,” was something of an exercise in streaming product placement. Netflix manufactured some of the products shown onscreen through its consumer product group in a revenue-sharing deal, and items were sold on the As Ever website. Dried flower petals that Meghan called “flower sprinkles,” for example, were dusted on French toast in an episode with Tan France, a “Queer Eye” host, and sold for $15 dollars a canister.
Her new television persona fell flat for some critics — in her Substack newsletter, Tina Brown, the former editor in chief of The New Yorker, described the whole experiment as Meghan “masquerading as an influencer” — but As Ever products sold out within an hour of the initial release. The flower sprinkles, specifically, became an obsession, something Meghan said, in an interview with Time magazine, she couldn’t wrap her head around. Maybe, she mused, they “just create a little bit of magic that we’re all craving in our everyday.”
Although Meghan is pivoting again — she is said to be eyeing an acting comeback with a rumored role in Guy Ritchie’s Netflix crime series, “The Gentlemen,” that films in Britain — As Ever will remain a California-based brand sold only in the United States. But there are ambitions to ship its products globally, people close to the brand said.
To expand the brand into a global one, she may have to consider how much of it continues to be married to her, personally, said James Denman, a brand consultant for lifestyle and fashion companies like Gap, Tom Ford and Mulberry.
“If you tie a brand explicitly to the person and the person is the only articulation of what the brand stands for and its values, effectively, you are at the whims of popularity of that person,” he said, which is relevant given that Meghan has a complicated relationship with the citizens of the country she’s heading back to.
But keeping As Ever infused with a certain kind of effortless, elevated and coastal California sensibility, he added, could appeal to consumers globally. It might even translate as alluring.
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