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\u2019s nascent lifestyle brand As Ever.<\/p>\n
In one of the more enduring elements of what came to be known as \u201cMegxit,\u201d<\/a> As Ever will continue to court consumers with its gauzy branding and curated jams, candles and teas, according to people close to the brand.<\/p>\n 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 \u2014 \u201cA new chapter to celebrate\u201d \u2014 and a link to order an $89 Napa Valley sparkling wine with \u201csubtle minerality, graceful notes of fruit and a bright finish.\u201d<\/p>\n Last year, Meghan released two seasons of her Netflix show \u201cWith Love, Meghan\u201d<\/a> 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 \u201csourced from Spain\u201d and California wines.<\/p>\n The show, in which Meghan showed audiences how to hand-dye neck scarves and make vegan soap while throwing out lines like, \u201cLove is in the details, gang,\u201d 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 \u201cflower sprinkles,\u201d for example, were dusted on French toast in an episode with Tan France, a \u201cQueer Eye\u201d host, and sold for $15 dollars a canister.<\/p>\n Her new television persona fell flat for some critics \u2014 in her Substack newsletter<\/a>, Tina Brown, the former editor in chief of The New Yorker, described the whole experiment as Meghan \u201cmasquerading as an influencer\u201d \u2014 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<\/a>, she couldn\u2019t wrap her head around. Maybe, she mused, they \u201cjust create a little bit of magic that we\u2019re all craving in our everyday.\u201d<\/p>\n