Netflix Walks Away From the Meghan Markle Cinematic Universe
Netflix Walked Away.
As Ever Still Looks Expensive.
A soft, sun-drenched look at what happens when a lifestyle brand has lovely jam, beautiful lighting, a $64 candle, a $27 million inventory glitch, and almost no structural reason to exist without its backer. The shelves are empty. The thesis is also empty. But the linen is gorgeous.
(a candle. just a candle.)
sold out in under an hour
"read between these leaves"
by website glitch
There are only so many times you can relaunch the same woman before the audience starts noticing the scaffolding. We are, at this point, on relaunch number four. Actress. Duchess. Survivor-Advocate-Netflix-Personality. And now: artisanal jam vendor with a candle that costs sixty-four dollars. Each era has been announced with the same energy of someone revealing a plot twist that the reader already figured out in chapter two.
Netflix has stepped away from As Ever, Meghan Markle's lifestyle brand, after serving as its launch partner and backer for approximately eleven months. The official statements from both sides are polished in the specific way that statements are polished when the decision has already been made and nobody wants to say what the decision actually was. Netflix "looks forward to celebrating how she continues to bring joy to households around the world." As Ever is "grateful for Netflix's partnership through launch and our first year." Everyone is absolutely delighted. Nobody is renewing anything.
The Hollywood Reporter summarised the situation with the precision of a surgeon and the energy of someone who has been covering this for too long: "You can probably read between the $14 tea leaves here."
We are going to read them. Loudly. With the receipts out. Because the As Ever story is the entire six-year Sussex post-royal arc compressed into a jar of artisanal raspberry spread that sold out in under an hour and cost fifteen dollars — beautiful on the surface, structurally unclear underneath, and carrying a question the brand has never quite answered. Namely: what is this, actually?
Jam, Honey, Flower Sprinkles, and the $64 Candle That Broke Us
As Ever launched in April 2025 alongside the Netflix debut of With Love, Meghan — a lifestyle cooking show that received a 23% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and was described by one critic as "Martha Stewart by way of Gwyneth Paltrow's Goop, only the worst version of all three." Perfect timing for a product launch. The inaugural collection: teas, jam, honey, baking mixes, a raspberry spread, a shortbread cookie mix, a crepe mix, and flower sprinkle garnishes. Later additions included a Napa Valley rosé and, the pièce de résistance, a scented candle retailing at sixty-four American dollars.
Sixty-four dollars. For a candle. We want to be clear about this. Not a candle and a jar of honey. Not a candle plus a tea tin. Just a candle. In a jar. Smells like intentionality, presumably.
The brand's website describes As Ever as "a love language." Meghan writes in her founder letter: "As ever, for me, is an extension of how I love." We have read this sentence multiple times attempting to locate the business strategy inside it. We have not found one yet. We have, however, concluded that if loving people involves charging them sixty-four dollars for a candle, Meghan loves people very much and at a significant markup.
The visuals, to be fair, are objectively lovely. Sun-drenched kitchen counters. Beige linen. Soft-focus domesticity filtered through the specific aesthetic that suggests a woman who keeps her olive oil in a beautiful decanter and has never once purchased it at a petrol station. The photography is doing the work that a thesis statement was not hired to do.
"As it was always intended, Meghan will continue growing the brand and take it into its next chapter independently."
— Netflix spokesperson, March 6, 2026 · "As it was always intended" working overtime. Calling HR.The Website Accidentally Told the Truth and Everyone Lost Their Mind
In early 2026, a glitch on the As Ever website briefly allowed visitors to view the brand's actual inventory numbers. This was not intentional. It is probably the single most interesting thing that happened to As Ever all year, and it happened entirely because someone in IT had a bad day.
What the glitch revealed suggested As Ever had generated approximately $27 million in sales from its jam and pantry products — a figure that prompted William Sitwell at The Telegraph to argue, with the energy of a man personally offended by fruit preserve, that Meghan's jam sales were evidence of civilisational collapse. It also prompted Meghan to tweet a smiling photo of herself with the caption "Our shelves may be empty, but my heart is full!" which is objectively the most Meghan Markle sentence ever written by a human being.
The sellout strategy deserves its own paragraph because it has been the subject of significant and entirely warranted scrutiny. As Ever products have sold out rapidly at virtually every launch. Critics — including a surgical Substack analysis — have argued these sellouts appear intentional: deliberately under-stocking creates artificial scarcity that makes the brand appear wildly more successful than its actual supply chain suggests. Emma Grede, interviewed alongside Meghan, reportedly noted she had never experienced sellouts like this despite running multiple successful companies and having a net worth of $320 million. She was, by multiple accounts, visibly skeptical. Emma Grede, who has built actual empires, looked at the sellout strategy and raised an eyebrow. That is the review.
The counter-argument — that the sellouts are simply what happens when a global celebrity with millions of followers launches products with limited inventory — is also plausible. Both things can be true simultaneously. What the sellout strategy cannot do, on its own, is answer the question nobody has answered yet: what is As Ever beyond the scarcity and the aesthetic? You cannot build a business on things perpetually being unavailable. At some point, people have to actually be able to buy the candle. Even at sixty-four dollars.
Ingredients
- One duchess-shaped mystique, previously used
- Significant quantities of beige linen (non-negotiable)
- Something preserved artisanally in a glass jar
- Flower sprinkles (edible, photogenic, $21)
- Heavy deployment of words like "intention," "joy," "elevate," and "love language"
- One major streaming platform willing to fund and distribute
- Controlled scarcity to simulate demand at a scale not yet actually tested
- A $64 candle as your statement piece
Method
- Launch simultaneously with a television show about the same aesthetic
- Photograph everything within an inch of its life on a linen-draped surface
- Treat the photography as if it were a business strategy
- Stock approximately 200 units, then celebrate the sellout nationally
- Allow a website glitch to accidentally publish your actual revenue
- Post a smiling photo and "our shelves may be empty but my heart is full"
- Exit streaming backer after eleven months, citing "meaningful growth"
- Begin preparing the next pivot while this one is still warm
"As It Was Always Intended" — A Phrase to Savour
Let us spend some time on this statement, because it is doing an extraordinary amount of work for a five-word phrase. In August 2025, Netflix announced it was extending its partnership with Archewell Productions and specifically named As Ever as a success story. Bela Bajaria said: "fans have been inspired by With Love, Meghan, with products from the new As Ever line consistently selling out in record time. We're excited to continue our partnership."
Seven months later, in March 2026, the statement from Netflix was: "As it was always intended, Meghan will continue growing the brand and take it into its next chapter independently."
"As it was always intended." Chefs kiss. Frame it. Hang it in a museum. The arrangement had been announced seven months earlier as specifically an expansion of the Netflix-Sussex partnership to incorporate As Ever. The reframing of the exit as the original plan requires accepting that the expansion was always a launchpad that would conclude in eleven months. That is possible. It is also the kind of framing that emerges when the actual story is "the second season of With Love, Meghan cratered and nobody wanted to talk about renewing anything." We cannot confirm which is accurate. We have our suspicions.
The broader Netflix-Sussex collapse is documented in extensive, almost bewildering detail elsewhere — the Variety story, the unfollow, the "sans lawyers" letter that became a meme. As Ever is the product chapter of that story: the one with a price list, an inventory glitch, a smiling photo, and a backer who departed while saying they were delighted to do so. Hollywood examined it at length. The tea leaves are still warm.
Attention Is Not a Business Model. Vibes Are Not a Moat.
Here is the structural problem with As Ever, stated plainly so we can all look at it: the brand requires the audience to believe in Meghan as a domestic tastemaker independent of the royal backstory. Not as the woman who left the palace. As the woman whose fifteen-dollar jam is worth fifteen dollars on its own merits. As the woman whose sixty-four-dollar candle — a candle, again, we want to be clear, a regular candle that burns and smells like something — deserves sixty-four dollars of your money regardless of who made it.
The Tig — Meghan's lifestyle blog that ran before Harry, before any of this — is the reference point here. It was a genuine lifestyle blog with a genuine following. People liked it. They read it for the recipes and the travel recommendations and the domestic warmth, not for the royal adjacency. She had the instinct before the palace. The question is whether that instinct, without the Windsor amplifier, can sustain a premium-priced consumer brand at scale without a streaming platform's marketing machine treating every crepe mix as a cultural event.
The answer to that question is what the next twelve months of independently operated As Ever will actually tell us. The brand will either find its footing as a genuine lifestyle company or it will continue coasting on scarcity, aesthetic, and the collective willingness of Meghan's audience to pay sixty-four dollars for a candle because the candle has a specific story attached to it. That is not a criticism. People pay for stories all the time. The question is just whether the story has legs without Netflix writing the opening credits.
The Impressive Part: Twenty-seven million dollars in first-year sales is genuinely impressive for a new lifestyle brand. Most celebrity product launches do not get close to that. This should be stated clearly and without condescension.
The Less Impressive Part: Revenue is not profit. Sellouts engineered by understocking are not evidence of sustainable demand. Twenty-seven million dollars supported by a Netflix show, a Netflix partnership, and a streaming-to-commerce pipeline specifically designed to funnel viewers into the shop is a different number than twenty-seven million dollars generated by a brand standing on its own two artisanal feet. The next year will be the interesting one. No Netflix. No show. Just Meghan, the beige linen, and the sixty-four-dollar candle, competing against brands that have been doing this for actual decades.
"As it was always intended" — really though?
The eleven-month timeline between "we're expanding our partnership to specifically include As Ever" and "as it was always intended, she will now do it independently" is on the aggressive end of "always intended." The phrase is doing the work of a press release that cannot say what the press release actually wants to say, which is that the second season of With Love, Meghan did not perform as hoped and Netflix's enthusiasm for funding artisanal jam production has its limits.
Planned wind-downs exist in every partnership of this kind. They also tend to arrive on the shorter timeline when the metrics don't support continuation. We note that both things can be true. We also note that eleven months is very specifically not "always intended" if the intention had been anything resembling a multi-year brand-building partnership.
What does As Ever look like without Netflix funding the vibes?
Structurally, it loses the thing that was doing the most work: a built-in distribution engine that converted television viewers into product customers in real time. People watched With Love, Meghan, saw the crepe mix on the counter, went to the website, found it sold out, and felt urgency. That mechanism — television show to product discovery to artificial scarcity to press coverage about the sellout — was the pipeline. The pipeline is gone.
As Ever now has to generate awareness through social media alone, which has a different ceiling than a streaming platform with a global subscriber base. The communications challenge is substantial and the team will be doing heavier lifting than before. The candle costs sixty-four dollars and must now justify that independently.
What is the actual missing ingredient?
Clarity. Not aesthetics — the photography is genuinely excellent. Not celebrity — the reach is real. The missing ingredient is a clear answer to this question: what is As Ever for, if Meghan Markle were not a duchess? If there were no royal backstory, no Netflix deal, no Oprah interview, no global recognition — what would the brand be?
The strongest lifestyle brands survive the departure of the founder's fame. Martha Stewart survived prison. Gwyneth Paltrow survived the jade egg discourse. What they had that As Ever hasn't fully demonstrated yet is a point of view that exists independently of who is holding the jar. The rebrand that could have been is the thought experiment worth sitting with. The jam is nice. The honey is expensive. The flower sprinkles are extremely photogenic on beige linen. None of that is a thesis.
The Tig existed before Harry. It was a lifestyle blog Meghan ran as a working actress — recipes, travel, domestic warmth — and it had a genuine, non-royal following. People liked it on its own terms. It was shut down when the royal relationship became public because suddenly the domestic lifestyle blogger was going to be a duchess and the two things did not coexist.
As Ever is The Tig with a budget, a Netflix partnership, a streaming show, and a candle that costs sixty-four dollars. The instinct is the same one she had before the palace. That instinct is real and it is genuinely hers. The question that the Netflix exit now forces into the open is whether the instinct, standing alone without the amplification infrastructure, can carry a premium consumer brand at the scale As Ever is currently implying with its prices.
If yes: the exit is a graduation and the next chapter is genuinely interesting. If no: the exit is the beginning of a harder chapter that "as it was always intended" was never going to fully describe. We have written the roadmap for what should happen next. Whether it gets followed is the annual question. The $14 tea leaves are there to be read. We are reading them. We have never stopped reading them.
The shelves may be empty. The thesis is also empty. But god, the linen is beautiful.
As Ever is now independent. Netflix wished it well in the specific way Netflix wishes things well when it is no longer involved in funding them. The jam is probably good. Six years of the Sussex project have produced one genuine cultural event, a lifestyle brand that sold $27 million of raspberry spread before its backer departed while being extremely polite about it, and a candle that costs sixty-four dollars.
The instinct behind As Ever is real. The aesthetics are genuinely strong. The brand has commercial proof of concept in the $27 million number. What it does not yet have — and what the next twelve months of independence will either deliver or fail to deliver — is a reason to exist that is not primarily "because Meghan Markle is who she is."
Love is not a distribution strategy. Beige linen is not a moat. And "as it was always intended" is the most elegant exit statement we have encountered since the last one. We will be here for all of it. Coffee in hand. Sixty-four-dollar candle unlit. As ever.
Sources: Hollywood Reporter · Variety · Page Six · The Telegraph · Netflix public statements · As Ever official communications · Emma Grede interview footage. SEO targets: as ever meghan markle (2,900/mo KD 7 TP 11,000) · as ever meghan (1,800/mo KD 12) · meghan markle as ever (1,500/mo) · meghan markle brand (400/mo KD 19 TP 20,000).
