What’s up with Newsweek’s “royal correspondent” Jack Royston? At times, it definitely feels like he’s deranger-adjacent, but he also publishes quotes in defense of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. I think he’s probably on the Sussex-communications office’s email list. Well, for months now, Royston has been trying to track the numbers around Duchess Meghan’s As Ever, her startup which is about one year old. As Ever has been a huge success by any metric, and it appears as if Meghan has quickly figured out her inventory issues and supply chains. Which is great, because in As Ever’s first months, Meghan was selling out of everything within minutes. Her limited-edition products still sell out quickly, like those chocolate bars. Well, Royston’s latest “analysis” for As Ever is that the company is doing badly because… Meghan has inventory. And As Ever’s website still gets hundreds of thousands of visitors every month. Scandal!
Meghan Markle has had just under 400,000 U.S. visitors to her As Ever website since January, when a website flaw appeared to reveal inventory levels of more than 650,000 units.
The Duchess of Sussex launched the business in 2025, cross promoting with her Netflix series With Love, Meghan, which has not been renewed for a new season. No sales data has been published, while supporters say her products are selling strongly and critics arguing they remaining unsold.
A person with knowledge of As Ever, told Newsweek they anticipated it would “double in size this year. By any measure, for any startup, you can’t deny that is anything but a success. People are obsessed with wanting her to fail.
“The commentariat are clouded by their own prejudice and a need to perpetuate a narrative that her business is a failure, because they pegged her that way from the start and they can’t take being wrong.”
Newsweek has used data from digital intelligence platform Similarweb to estimate Meghan’s potential customer base, comparing it with known inventory figures to assess the relationship between supply and demand. The issue is particularly significant because Meghan and Harry have been under pressure since the start of 2023 to demonstrate their relevance to U.S. audiences since two major projects, their Netflix biopic Harry & Meghan and the prince’s book Spare, led to a crash in their popularity among Americans.
I’m not being facetious: this guy wrote a story about how 400,000 is a smaller number than 650,000. He’s literally arguing that As Ever is in trouble because Meghan has more products in stock than she has monthly visitors to As Ever’s site. Throughout this whole decade-long Sussex situation, I’ve come to understand that reporters on the royal beat really have no concept of money, they don’t know the first thing about business, and they prefer to keep royal gossip a logic-free zone. These are the same people who downright insist that Meghan and Harry are broke because their $100 million Netflix contract was completed in five years. This is another entry into the Deranger Math book – how can As Ever be successful if Meghan maintains As Ever’s product inventory???
Photos courtesy of As Ever’s Instagram.
