As Ever: Is Meghan Markle's Lifestyle Brand Actually Working?
The Jam Sold Out.
The Show Got Cancelled.
Netflix Left.
The Matchbox
Has A Waitlist.
So Is As Ever Actually
Working?
Meghan Markle left a palace, gave up diplomatic immunity, torched her husband's family relationships on global television, and pivoted to selling jam. The jam sold nearly a million jars. Netflix pulled its equity stake anyway. The show quietly died. The candle costs $64. We went through every number available so you don't have to. The answer is: it depends entirely on what you mean by "working."
Let us establish the stakes before we look at the numbers, because the numbers mean different things depending on what you believe Meghan Markle is trying to build. If she is trying to build a vanity project — a lifestyle brand-shaped vehicle for content creation, personal mythology, and the ongoing documentation of her own cottagecore fantasy — then As Ever is working brilliantly. If she is trying to build a real, sustainable, scalable consumer goods company that generates meaningful profit and long-term market presence without relying on the gravity of a royal title she technically no longer holds — then the picture is considerably more complicated.
The jam sold out. We need to start there, because the jam selling out is the only clean win in this entire story, and Meghan's team has polished it to a high shine and dragged it in front of every camera available. The first product drop in April 2025 sold out in under an hour. The brand scaled up inventory tenfold. Then a website glitch in January 2026 exposed the numbers nobody was supposed to see, and the picture got interesting fast.
The Glitch That Exposed Everything
In January 2026, eagle-eyed shoppers discovered that by attempting to add absurdly large quantities of items to their As Ever shopping carts, the website displayed internal stock numbers. Screenshots spread across Reddit and X within hours. The numbers were extraordinary, and depending on which PR camp you believe, they were either proof of massive success or proof of a warehouse with a problem.
Jam (fruit spreads): 220,000+ jars remaining in stock out of an initial order of 1 million. That means approximately 870,000 sold — at $42 per gift box, gross revenue of roughly $36 million on jam alone.
Honey: ~30,000–32,000 jars remaining. Sales trajectory unclear — a fraction of the jam's volume.
Candles: ~90,000 units remaining. Not flying off shelves the way jam did.
Flower sprinkles: ~80,000 tins remaining. Make of that what you will.
Wine: ~79,200 bottles remaining. Slow mover.
Total retail value of visible stock: approximately $21.8 million — and that's what was left sitting in the warehouse.
The jam is the star. Everything else is garnish.
The Sussex camp's response was exactly what you'd expect: "I think it's fair to say business isn't just successful, it's flying off the shelf," a source told The Sun. The source noted that 87% of the jam order had sold, and that Meghan had moved from ordering "a few thousand jars and lids" to discussing "a purchase order of a million." This was presented as triumph. It is, in the narrow context of jam sales, legitimately impressive. One million jars ordered for a brand that had been live for less than a year is not nothing.
But here is the number the sources glossed over: 130,000 jars were still in the warehouse. Which means the brand was sitting on the equivalent of millions of dollars in unsold inventory after its headline product. And the candles, sprinkles, wine, and honey were moving at a fraction of the jam's velocity. The jam was propping up everything else. That is not a diversified lifestyle brand. That is a jam company that also makes things people are not particularly buying.
"The jam sold out. The rest of the warehouse did not. These are related facts."
— Brewtiful Living · Royal DossierWhat Netflix's Exit Actually Means
On March 6, 2026 — eleven months after As Ever launched with Netflix as an equity partner — Netflix quietly withdrew. The Meghan camp said the brand was "ready to stand on its own." Netflix said the split was "always intended." Both statements are the kind of thing you say when the alternative is admitting what actually happened.
What actually happened, per a Netflix insider who spoke to the Daily Mail, was that the brand "just didn't fit" and internal enthusiasm had cooled significantly. A separate source confirmed that Netflix gave away "truckloads" of As Ever product to employees after With Love, Meghan was cancelled. Truckloads. Of product. To employees. As gifts. Because there was surplus. At a brand that is supposedly flying off shelves.
Note that Netflix did not issue a warm statement about the future of the partnership and how excited they are to see what Meghan does next. Their official comment was that they were "glad to have played a role in bringing that vision to life" — past tense, elegantly distanced. That is corporate speak for: we are done here and we wish her well from a considerable distance.
The Netflix relationship timeline, for those who need the full picture, is a study in escalating disengagement. The original Sussex deal, signed in 2020, was reportedly worth over $100 million across five years. By summer 2025 it had been downgraded to a "first look deal." The series was cancelled. The equity partnership in As Ever ended in March 2026. What remains is a first-look arrangement that requires Netflix to consider, but not produce, any projects Archewell Productions pitches. This is the deal equivalent of saying "let's stay friends" while deleting someone's number.
Season 1 launched March 2025 alongside As Ever. 2.6 million hours watched in its first week — respectable but not exceptional for a Netflix flagship launch. Season 2 dropped in August 2025. Netflix did not release viewership data. When Netflix does not release viewership data, it is because the viewership data is not data they want released. The show ranked No. 383 on the platform overall. A holiday special aired December 2025. By January 2026, multiple sources confirmed to Page Six: cancelled. No third season. No renewal. Conversations about holiday specials were "happening" but "nothing in the works." That is the language of kind rejection.
The show was described by critics as being better known for "awkward celebrity interactions" than for any Martha Stewart-style lifestyle content. It ran 16 episodes and one special before Netflix quietly backed out of the kitchen.
The Product Catalogue — A Tour
Let us take a brief, unflinching walk through what As Ever is actually selling in May 2026, because the product list is doing a lot of work in this story and deserves direct attention.
The Merching Everything Problem
The matchbox is not a product strategy. It is a symptom. As Ever has, in the space of thirteen months, launched jam, honey, tea, wine, candles, flower sprinkles, bookmarks, and matches. It has turned a wedding anniversary into a product launch. It has used children's royal titles to sell candles. It has launched a website rebrand featuring Meghan eating a raspberry in an orchard to the soundtrack of aspirational softness. It has accused Netflix of "holding the brand back" while operating a Shopify store with the infrastructure of a moderately successful Etsy account. We catalogued every single product — and what each one says about the brand — here.
The core problem with As Ever is not that it lacks revenue. The jam revenue is real, the sell-out drops generate genuine buzz, and 268,000 website visits in January 2026 — up 36% from October — is not nothing. The core problem is that the brand has no identity beyond Meghan Markle, which means the moment public sentiment about Meghan Markle shifts — or more precisely, the moment the novelty of Meghan Markle selling you things fades — there is nothing underneath the jam to sustain it.
Goop works because Gwyneth Paltrow built an editorial voice, a wellness philosophy, a controversy engine, and a product line over fifteen years. People do not buy Goop candles because they like Gwyneth. They buy Goop candles because Goop has become a shorthand for a specific kind of expensive wellness aspiration that transcends its founder. As Ever, at thirteen months old, is still entirely dependent on the question of whether you want jam that has been touched by a Duchess. That is a precarious foundation for a brand with ambitions to go global. We went through the rebrand in full — and what it should have been — here.
PR expert Renae Smith, speaking to The Express earlier this year: "It's got to stop feeling so reactive. To turn the tide in 2026, she needs to lead with clarity, show consistency in her messaging, and decide whether this next chapter is about commerce, culture, or personal reinvention — because trying to do all three at once simply isn't working."
A separate marketing analyst warned the brand "currently totally lacks any corporate social responsibility element" and that "if a lifestyle brand doesn't clearly express what kind of life it represents, it has very limited potential."
Radar Online reported that industry experts warned As Ever "could stall by 2026 unless she makes one decisive shift." That deadline has now arrived. The shift has not been announced. The matchbox waitlist has.
So Is It Working?
Here is the honest answer: the jam is working. The brand infrastructure is not. The show is gone. The equity partner left. The product diversification is a warehouse problem dressed as a catalogue. The website traffic is up but not at a level that suggests genuine mass-market penetration. The PR strategy oscillates between "we are thriving" and "we are furious at the coverage of our thriving" — and we wrote the plan that would actually fix it, which she will not follow.
The gross jam revenue figure of $27–36 million sounds substantial until you deduct Netflix's former equity share, the costs of manufacturing, packaging, warehousing, fulfilment, the team, the PR machine, the content creation operation, and Archewell's overhead. The actual profit margin on premium artisanal jam is not the same as the gross revenue figure. Nobody is disclosing the net margin. Nobody will be disclosing the net margin. The net margin is doing its best in a warehouse in California next to 90,000 candles.
The UK expansion, which has been reported as a planned next phase, is the real test. Selling jam to Meghan Markle fans in California is not the same as selling jam in the country that watched her dismantle a monarchy, call its members racist on American television, and then announce she was launching a fruit spread. The British consumer relationship with Meghan Markle is complicated in ways that orchard videos will not resolve. But the glitch data suggested she was already preparing UK-facing inventory. We will find out.
"She left a palace to sell jam. The jam is good business. Everything around the jam is a different conversation."
— Brewtiful Living · Royal DossierThe Website Is Also
Having a Moment. Not a Good One.
We pulled the Ahrefs data on asever.com. Because if you are going to claim your brand is thriving, your backend should probably agree. It does not entirely agree.
The headline numbers look passable. Domain Rating of 52. 16,900 organic monthly visits. 10,700 backlinks from 1,500 referring domains. Traffic value of $2.1K. These are the numbers that would appear in a press release. They are not the numbers we are here to discuss.
Crawled pages: 557. Of those 557 pages, here is the HTTP code breakdown that nobody at As Ever HQ is putting in a newsletter:
✓ 200 OK (working pages): 329 — 59.1%
→ 3XX Redirects: 112 — 20.1%
✗ 404 Not Found: 106 — 19.0%
✗ 4XX Other errors: 10 — 1.8%
✗ 5XX Server errors: 0 — fine, one bright spot
To be precise about what this means: nearly 40% of every page Ahrefs crawled on the As Ever website is either broken or redirecting. One in five pages returns a 404. The brand that had a website glitch expose its entire inventory in January 2026 has also, apparently, not cleaned up its dead pages. The technical infrastructure of As Ever is doing approximately what the product strategy is doing: the flagship item works, and everything surrounding it needs attention.
The 106 dead pages are particularly pointed given that As Ever has been live for just thirteen months. A brand this young should not have accumulated 106 broken URLs. That is not a legacy technical debt problem — that is a product-drop-and-forget operation where old pages, discontinued items, and previous versions of things get abandoned in place rather than redirected or removed. It is the website equivalent of 90,000 candles sitting in a warehouse: things that were launched, didn't fully work, and were left where they stood.
The organic keyword picture is also instructive. As Ever ranks for 175 organic keywords total. Of those, 49 are in the top 3 positions — which sounds reasonable until you remember this is a brand with a $100 million Netflix promotional platform behind it, a global press cycle every time Meghan posts an orchard video, and Grok citing it 40 times across 82 pages. 175 keywords is not the SEO footprint of a brand that is dominating the lifestyle space. It is the footprint of a brand that is famous for reasons that do not translate into search intent. People are googling Meghan Markle. They are not yet googling As Ever jam the way they google Goop or Le Creuset or any brand that has built genuine product-level recognition independent of its founder.
Traffic by location: United States 12,800 visits — 75.8% of all traffic, 97 keywords. Canada 1,200 — 7%, 14 keywords. United Kingdom: 855 visits. 5.1% of traffic. 20 keywords.
Twenty keywords. In the country she is planning to expand into. The country that watched her leave the royal family on a Netflix documentary, describe the institution as racist in an Oprah interview, and then launch a jam company. 855 people a month in the UK are finding asever.com organically. The brand is preparing UK-facing inventory. The UK organic search infrastructure currently supporting that expansion is twenty keywords and 855 monthly visitors.
This is either a massive growth opportunity or a significant miscalculation of how the British consumer relationship with Meghan Markle translates into jam purchases. Possibly both.
The AI citations data is the one genuinely interesting bright spot in the Ahrefs picture. As Ever has 9 AI Overview citations and 5 ChatGPT citations — with Grok citing it 40 times across 82 pages, which is a lot. This suggests the brand has decent AI search presence, which will matter more as search behaviour shifts. It is the most forward-looking number on the dashboard. Everything else is the infrastructure of a brand that launched fast, scaled the jam, and has not yet done the unglamorous technical work of building the website that can support what it claims to be.
The brand that cannot keep its inventory numbers secret also cannot keep its pages alive. These things are related. Both are symptoms of an operation that is extremely good at launching a product drop and considerably less good at the sustained, boring, technical maintenance that separates a moment from a business.
"106 dead pages. 19% of the website. The matchbox has a waitlist. The pages do not have a redirect."
— Brewtiful Living · Royal DossierThe final verdict on As Ever cannot be delivered yet — it is too early, and any brand analyst who tells you a thirteen-month-old DTC lifestyle company is definitively succeeding or failing after one viral sell-out and one Netflix divorce is writing a headline, not an analysis. What can be said with confidence is this: Meghan Markle is better at selling jam than she is at keeping media partners, better at generating waitlists than she is at generating viewership, and significantly better at describing her own brand as thriving than she is at demonstrating it in quarterly results she is never going to publish.
The matchbox is a waitlist for matches. This is where we are. The brand is, as ever, exactly what it has always been.
As Ever made approximately $36 million selling jam to people who wanted to consume something a Duchess had touched. The show got cancelled. Netflix pulled its equity stake after 11 months. The candles are sitting in a warehouse. The wine is moving slowly. The flower sprinkles disappointed everyone who tasted them. The newest product is a matchbox with a waitlist. And 19% of the website — 106 pages — returns a 404. The brand that can't keep its inventory numbers secret also can't keep its pages alive. Is it working? The jam is. The rest of it is a lifestyle aesthetic in search of a business model, dressed in a very expensive apron, eating a raspberry in an orchard, with a broken link where the checkout used to be.
SEO: as ever meghan markle · as ever brand working · meghan markle lifestyle brand · as ever sales figures · meghan markle netflix cancelled · as ever jam sales · is as ever successful · meghan markle as ever review 2026. Slug: /royals/as-ever-meghan-markle-brand-working-numbers · May 30, 2026.
