Certainly, Meghan’s diary of late has ticked all the boxes one would expect of an international philanthropist – and fashion and lifestyle guru.
There’s been a tour of Australia with husband Prince Harry, visiting hospitals and shaking hands, as well as a talk with an ‘intimate’ group at a luxury women’s retreat – ticket price around $3,000 – all while advertising the outfits she wore online to allow fans to buy them themselves.
Then, last month, she flitted to Geneva, giving a speech at an event outside the World Health Organisation about online harms to teens.
Meanwhile, her latest Instagram pictures have again showcased her ‘aspirational’ brand of motherhood, with yet more artfully shot pictures of her children, Archie and Lili, playing with their father shared this week.
Yet behind the PR-approved images, a looming crisis brews – one which rather belies her image as a global power player. And it relates to something dazzlingly ordinary: the best-before dates on her much-vaunted range of jam.
Because the Duchess is facing a serious problem for anyone in food retail: how to shift your stock before it goes off.
For I can reveal that all of Meghan’s jams, teas and tins of flower sprinkles are set to go pretty much simultaneously out of date at the end of next summer. To put it bluntly, our analysis of her recent sales figures indicates that there’s more chance of King Charles taking a swim in a pool of her homemade conserve than her selling all her stock in time.
It may seem prosaic but, astonishingly, this jam jar-mageddon could see Meghan’s lifestyle brand, As Ever, face losses of more than $5million (£3.7million) – on her jams alone. Those rapidly expiring tins of flower sprinkles could also cost a cool million.
Meghan made a fateful decision to bet the house on a rapid expansion of her range, steeply hiking production – only for sales to then seemingly plummet
What makes matters worse is last year, Meghan made a fateful decision to bet the house on a rapid expansion of her range, steeply hiking production – only for sales to then seemingly plummet.
To say all this is galling for the Duchess is an understatement, because she has pinned so much to it being a success.
Indeed, she is heavily personally associated with the jam range, right down to her handwritten calligraphy labels that adorned the first pots.
And it all started so well, too. After launching in April 2025, Meghan sold out of every item – jam, honey, crepe and cookie mixes, tea and flower sprinkles – in a matter of minutes.
Two months later, she was back with more stock, having, she said, ordered ‘10x’ the amount, and again sold out of everything almost instantly. A week later she added a rose wine to the range, which sold out in 44 minutes.
Plainly delighted, the Duchess gave an interview on camera to the business news site Bloomberg which was released on the same day as a mega-drop of new As Ever goodies on August 26.
In the interview she explained she had personally decided to give the go-ahead to a new, huge restock because it seemed that people couldn’t get enough of her.
She said: ‘Suddenly the conversation goes from, at the start of this year, talking about a few thousand jars and lids, to we need to do a purchase order of a million. That’s a huge jump in just a few months of starting a business.’
How long ago those million-jar ordering days now seem.
The number of customers to the As Ever website has reportedly dropped to such an extent that some are now openly speculating that the brand is on its way out.
This week the respected magazine Newsweek tracked a fall in visitors to the website by 33 per cent between January and April, which it says corresponds to a drop in Meghan’s personal popularity over the same period.
All of Meghan’s jams, teas and tins of flower sprinkles are set to go pretty much simultaneously out of date at the end of next summer
Another research company says traffic to the site has dropped by 24 per cent in a single month. With less online traffic, come less sales – which seems to be borne out by the fact that Meghan is no longer using the fulfilment giant Snow Commerce to handle her orders and shipping. Instead, in what looks like a drive to save money, she has downgraded to the online platform Shopify, which is mostly associated with micro-businesses and hobby traders. It has a competitive rate of just $29 (£22) a month for handling transactions. In contrast, Snow Commerce takes around 30 per cent for their services and are also thought to require a minimum level of trading.
It’s perhaps now clear why Meghan has never restocked her cake and crepe mixes (which have a shelf-life of only six months), and why she has launched new iterations of candles, which last forever. Commercial jams, though, have a shelf life of not more than two years, ditto herbal teas.
It adds up to the picture of a brutal reckoning of expired goodies. All of which makes Netflix’s decision to sever ties with Meghan’s brand in March this year look even more like good business sense.
While Meghan said it had always been the intention for the streamer to go its own way once it had supported her successful launch, a source told me at the time: ‘The issue was sales in the end. The product was not taken up in the way that people had hoped. The jam thing became totemic. There was just all this jam. We had thought there would be more to it. The failure was more to do with the product and the business model, which didn’t work, than a people thing about Meghan being difficult. Although I hear there was an element of both.’
The granular detail of Meghan’s sales figures backs this up.
A ‘glitch’ in the As Ever website on January 3 revealed just how much was still unsold after that mega-restock in August last year. The answer, as was reported at the time, was a lot.
However, what is less widely known is that the glitch wasn’t fixed until January 5 – and for those 48 hours her sales figures were available to anyone who cared to look.
It’s not a large enough sample to be necessarily representative, but it does for the first time give an idea of what is selling and how fast. For example, Meghan’s boxed trio of ‘Fruit Spreads’ which are on sale for $42 (£31) had 137,465 available on January 3.
Two days later, there were 137,429 available, giving a sale of around 25 trio boxes a day.
This means that come June next year, when the products will be at or near expiry, there could still be 123,544 trio boxes remaining, with a retail value of $5.18 million. Repeating the calculation for the tins of flower sprinkles – the only product really used by Meghan on her associated With Love, Meghan TV show – they went from 80,391 to 80,368 in two days, selling around 11 tins a day.
That would leave 74,340 unsold tins next June, with a retail value of $1.2 million.
Happily for Meghan, much of the retail value of her inventory lies in her expensive wines.
The figures indicate that she had 6,871 bottles of Napa Valley Brut, 46,428 of Sauvignon Blanc and 23,972 bottles of rose. That represents a retail value of more than $3million (£2.24million) which will still be good to sell next summer and beyond.
Variety magazine reported in March that she had $10million in unsold As Ever stock and these figures would certainly fall into line with that.
So can the brand continue under such pressure?
I can reveal that Netflix – originally her partner in the business and her only investor – amputated its ties with her so thoroughly that all inventory (meaning any unsold stock) was handed back to her in January, some three months before they announced that they were done working with her. It means that Meghan’s business will have to absorb and deal with the coming losses entirely on its own. Sources confirm that Netflix has no remaining financial interest in flogging her stuff.
Meghan included a jar of jam in a recent dump of personal photos on her own Instagram, and used an influencer to produce sponsored content for the brand
Significantly, Meghan’s representatives do not demur at the idea that much of her inventory will be unsellable from the end of next summer because it will have expired. Meanwhile, a visit to the Godmother’s book store in Montecito, which is still the only physical retail store stocking her products, confirms that the teas and sprinkles are indeed all going out of date at a point between June and September 2027.
An order of jams to an address in the US this week appears to tell the same story.
Meanwhile, it can be revealed that Meghan’s relationship with Gwyneth Paltrow’s brand guru Devin Pedzwater is also over.
He was hired on a small consultancy fee last summer.
At that stage, Meghan had ambitious plans for her brand, an expansion into physical stores, as she told Bloomberg, while behind the scenes, plans were also afoot for a diversification into homewares, table linen, glassware and a cookbook.
It had seemed wise for her to pick the brains of Pedzwater, with his Goop connections, to see what might be needed to make a lifestyle brand fly.
She’s talked about wanting to emulate the ‘elevation’ of Gwyneth’s Goop but at a price point which she could have afforded herself as a teenager with a Saturday job at a frozen yoghurt store. However, she no longer has his support or advice for her next moves.
For now, Meghan, is determinedly grafting away.
She included a jar of jam in a recent dump of personal photos on her own Instagram, and used an influencer to produce sponsored content for the brand in a story on the As Ever Instagram page this week.
Her Australian tour also marked her trying to make money from her style, via the One-off website, which sells her looks and gives her a slice of any sales. Looks from two of her most recent Instagram posts (on June 9) were included by her on the site this week, among them jeans and a denim shirt from the clothing line run by her friend Tracy James, married to former Paramount boss Brian Robbins.
Of almost 90 items posted by her so far, fewer than half a dozen are sold out.
It’s not clear, though, how many items she has sold or what money she has made and those figures will not be made public.
Her friends warn against writing her off just yet.
One said: ‘The Newsweek story [about her website traffic falling] has a lot of inaccuracy and I think we can all agree that polls have forever been a source of misleading information.’
The market intelligence about As Ever, which is provided by companies such as Crunchbase, is also discounted. Says the source: ‘As Ever does not disclose any (financial) information so NONE of this can be based in fact.’
The pivot to Shopify is not, they say, proof of failure.
‘Regarding Shopify, would you consider companies like [Kim Kardashian’s] Skims, Kraft Heinz, and Sephora hobby sellers as well? They all use Shopify,’ says the source.
The friend adds of the change in fulfilment: ‘As Ever is now independent and runs its own operations. That is how this works.’
Some commentators believe that the use of influencer Olivia McDowell in a collaboration points to a new direction, with Meghan stepping away from directly selling the brand herself, perhaps because she is such a divisive figure. Again, though, friends deny this is correct.
One said: ‘Regarding the collaboration – Meghan has always been engaged with others who share her love of hosting and entertaining. As the company evolves so will the ways they engage with social followers and finding unique ways to showcase the products. Meghan is always going to be a big part of the brand so this is not a shift away from anything but more so building on the creative elements.’
Meghan has, though, started dropping hints about a new brand, called ‘The one and only’.
An envelope with these words on it was shared on her Instagram this week.
There is no trademark application for this phrase by any entity associated with Meghan – yet.
But as talk swirls again of a financial crisis for the Sussexes, with their expensive Montecito lifestyle including a mansion and security, it looks as if the imperative to sell, sell, sell has never been stronger – especially when it comes to jams and teas.
You almost start to wonder if the couple’s Californian adventure has a shelf-life, too.
