Before her title, there was The Tig. From 2014 to 2017, Meghan Markle ran the lifestyle blog she created to share her love for food, travel, fashion and beauty. On the now-defunct site, she declared that this was "just the beginning," and she was right.
A new chapter came in 2025, when the Duchess of Sussex launched As ever, her new brand she's described as "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."
As ever's launch came five years after Meghan and Prince Harry stepped down as working members of the royal family and moved to California. It was developed in partnership with Netflix, but that partnership has since ended.
"As ever is grateful for Netflix's partnership through launch and our first year. We have experienced meaningful and rapid growth, and As Ever is now ready to stand on its own," a spokesperson for As ever said.
Following the release of the brand's first collection featuring flower sprinkles and wildflower honey in April 2025, it was revealed that the entire product line had sold out in under an hour. Fast-forward to today, and reports suggest that Netflix is sitting on a surplus of As ever products.
With the brand now continuing independently, questions remain over whether Meghan can find lasting success. It's been reported that her Netflix series With Love, Meghan won't be returning for a third season, while her podcast Confessions of a Female Founder won't be coming back for a second season.
© Jake Rosenberg/NetflixNick Ede, one of the UK's leading brand and culture experts, tells HELLO!: "I think she can succeed if she shows some personality and becomes someone who can become relatable, at the moment she has built a persona that just doesn't really resonate and so it appears she's disingenuous when in fact she's not."
At the same time, Nick points out that the level of scrutiny she faces is a "shame."
He says: "It must be so hard with so many people wanting you to fail. There is and always will be a backlash against them and whether that's warranted or [not] it will have an impact on her ventures, and partners will have to think about whether they are caught in the line of fire by mere association."
Meghan and Harry signed a multi-year deal with both Netflix and Spotify in 2020. While the Sussexes and Netflix extended their creative partnership in 2025 with a multi-year, first look deal for film and television projects, their deal with Spotify ended in 2023, almost a year after Archetypes, the Duchess' Spotify podcast, premiered.
Where Meghan went wrong
As for where Meghan has potentially gone wrong with her ventures? Nick suggests: "I think she has done too many things and not strategized her roll out and thought about what the outcome would be of all the ventures she has worked on. I also think potentially she hasn't listened to the people around her too and their advice may have fallen on deaf ears."
A lack of consistency has also been a problem, according to Nick. "I think that Meghan has tried her hand at many things, it feels like none of them have landed as well as she would have hoped. The problem with them is that they haven't been consistent and they have almost been too preemptive – she launched With Love, Meghan before she had product to sell, she launched Confessions of a Female Founder before she was a bona fide female founder and so none of it felt well thought out and came across disingenuous," Nick says. "Her best venture was with [ShopMy] when her show launched as it actually made sense – you watch the show, you buy her clothes. That's what her fans want to feel, that they can connect and interact."
© Leigh Vogel/Getty Images for Fortune MediaIt came to light last September that Meghan had quietly shuttered her ShopMy page, where followers could purchase a "handpicked and curated collection" of products. Though it felt like she was stepping into influencer territory, a far cry from her life as a working royal, Meghan has previously said she wouldn't categorize herself as an influencer. Instead, she sees herself as an "entrepreneur and a female founder," but she has remarked to People that if her brand ended up being "influential, then that's great".
What Meghan can do next
"I think the best thing for her to do is to throw off all the royal flair and just be herself, a confident, charismatic, compassionate woman who has created a brand, loves clothes and can sell them and is an entrepreneur who empowers others," Nick says.
"I think that she needs to show her personality off much more, and her children, and become what we want her to be and that's someone relatable, funny, with flaws and full of personality. Her current social media is bland, badly curated and boring so she needs to step this up."
It's her royal title, given to her upon her marriage to Prince Harry in 2018, that Nick believes is largely what continues to currently attract audiences. "And it's a shame as her personality and her natural elegance and demeanor is much more than her title," he notes.
Reflecting on Meghan's potential to build a lasting, successful brand like Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop or Chip and Joanna Gaines' Magnolia, Nick points back to The Tig, which was "full of personality and made her accessible".
"If she can go back to that kind of relationship with her audience, then I think she could have a chance to have a lasting brand," he says. "But as it stands, As ever feels like it's lacking heart – and the only heart that should be beating at the centre of it is Meghan's, and it's not."
