Yet another conspiracy about the Duchess of Sussex is brewing, and Tom Sykes’ Royalist Substack is here to throw gasoline on the fire. The conspiracy? Per Sykes, “Meghan Markle’s UK Visit Coincides with Baffling ‘As Ever’ Summer Marketing Push.” In other words, “why is Meghan promoting As Ever in the same way she has since she started the brand last year?” They find it “baffling” that a successful brand… sends out bi-weekly emails and posts cute Instagram reels. Shock, horror, capitalism!! If I’m being honest, I thought As Ever’s “Summer Hostess” email blast last week was a magnificent troll, but the pearl-clutching royalists are appalled at the very idea that Meghan’s jam might taint the homewrecker queen consort, the tampon king and the incandescent heir.
As headlines swirl around Meghan Markle’s proposed return to the UK for the first time in four years, the Duchess has taken the opportunity to promote her lifestyle brand, As Ever, with a distinctly strange new Instagram video.
In the clip, Meghan is seen strolling through a garden carrying a wicker basket overflowing with carefully arranged fruit and vegetables, before posing with a cup of tea, presumably one from her As Ever collection, where tea bags retail for $14.
It’s all very odd: Hand in her pocket and glancing back with a smile as she sips her tea, the one thing for sure is that Meghan is very much the star of her own carefully curated scene. But hey, while everyone else is debating why/whether she has chosen to return to Britain next month, after years spent putting as much distance as possible between herself and the Royal Family, the Duchess is using the moment to keep the spotlight firmly on her products and her brand.
The Instagram clip, posted on Tuesday and captioned “A basket full of summer,” appears to be a careful piece of marketing. While Harry and Meghan have struggled with their popularity in Britain since stepping back from royal duties in 2020, even criticism can translate into clicks, and clicks are something the Duchess of Sussex needs.
According to estimates cited by Newsweek, As Ever had attracted just under 400,000 U.S. visitors since January, as of the beginning of this month, making the renewed attention surrounding her return to Britain a potentially valuable opportunity to drive interest in her brand.
Meghan’s dip in popularity with Americans appears to have coincided with a slowdown in traffic to her As Ever online store, suggesting that a warm royal homecoming could help reverse that trend. But while renewed royal associations may boost interest in her brand, many remain uncomfortable with what they see as the commercialization of royal status.
The Windsors and their defenders lack imagination. Anyone with a business/PR background would have advised the palace to lean into Meghan’s “commercialization” and go tit-for-tat. The Buckingham Palace gift shop should have updated their site with a “Summer Hostess” special highlighting similar products. They could have even made a cheeky comment about jam or wine or flower sprinkles. Anything to show that the Windsors aren’t actually this priggish, dull and bum-clenching. Anyway, as I said, Meghan and the As Ever team are just adhering to their promotional strategy which was already in place before all of the news about the UK trip. But but but Netflix cameras! OneOff! Jam! She’s broke! She’s profiting from her royal association! Expiration dates! Commercialization! It’s always going to be something.
Photos courtesy of As Ever’s Instagram, As Ever’s promo emails and Meghan’s Instagram.
Sorry, I’m laughing. Woman promotes her business, oh my! News at 11.
She has the audacity to live her life ahead of an unconfirmed trip to the UK! Stop the presses
Is it just me or has Sykes seem to have gotten even more unhinged/desperate than usual recently?
Right?!?
Dear Tom Yikes:
The answer to your question: she’s promoting it because it’s her business.
It’s her day job.
And her day job is a lot more palatable to the public than wearing wiglets in Victorian carriages or hiding out in Clarence House under a pile of gin bottles, clinging to an ashtray.
She’s not your runaway slave, Sykes.
If this douche and all of the other royal pundits or so called “journalists” kept H & M’s names out of their mouths, they would all be out of a job or at the very most scrounging for pathetic snippets of work.
So let me get this straight, she’s going to go bankrupt if she doesn’t sell 5 million jars of jam by the end of the year, but they’re also wondering why she’s promoting the brand?
And this dip in website traffic thing is just as stupid as the Netflix rankings thing. They try to extrapolate how these numbers without context are somehow bad for Meghan. You have no idea what the amount of people who went to the website bought, nor how many people of those who visited bought anything. However, for some reason 400,000 people visiting your website is evidence that your business isn’t doing well. Like I said before if even half of those visitors spent $50 that would been $10 million. And I’ve never spent just $50 when visiting her website.
Also, what would coming to the UK have to do with the success of As Ever when it’s not sold in the UK? Or are they STILL laboring under the delusion that the Royal family has so much influence in the United States that their approval will translate into purchases? I said it before and I’ll say it again if As Ever was doing as poorly as they are reporting, they would not literally be tracking website clicks to see how many people are going to the website and trying to see how many unsold jars of jam she has.
With July 4th around the corner, people ARE going to be hosting parties; it’s the beginning of summer! Why *wouldn’t* she be promoting at this time??? My God, the endless stupidity and jealousy will never end. I swear, by now, it’s literally the oxygen that feeds the BM and its sycophants.
I still really don’t like them going. If they do, I hope they go, see the Spencer’s, the grave, and the king, and Meghan and the kids head back before anyone’s the wiser. No pictures. No announcements.
Oh, I do hope for pics! Would love to see a very special foto on Insta. A foto of Archie and Lily (from behind, of course) and the Earl of Spencer on the shore of Diana’s lake! You would hear the bomb going off at Forest Lodge all around the world!
The white dress looks like the Stella Macartney she wore to her wedding reception. Pretty smart, expert-level trolling!
Similar but different and excellent trolling. This might be her Oscar de la Renta?
For those of us without Meghan’s budget, there are two cute white silk halter dresses on Quince.
@Kaiser if you want to provide shopping links, they are
100% Washable Silk Halter Maxi Dress
100% Washable Silk Twist Halter Midi Dress
If Charles and his people have even a smidgen of humor, they already have plans to gift the Sussex family with a hamper stuffed with Duchy and Buckingham branded preserves, biscuits and teas. They could have a fun, family taste-off — with toast and crumpets and waffles in honor of Queen Elizabeth’s gift to Archie. I’m not holding my breath, but, as an icebreaker, it could be a sweet way to celebrate a stressful meeting of family members with multiple lifestyle brands.
I’m not entirely joking here.
And if the Sussexes have a smidgen of sense (and they’ve got loads), they would NOT taste any of it without some serious chemical analyses, and even then, give the hamper away (my mother, bless her, would absolutely bin the lot). The Windsors and the people around them CANNOT BE TRUSTED. There have been too many near misses, coupled with the things that Harry has found out about just how much his family has been orchestrating various dangers for them, for me to look at any interaction with them with wide-eyed innocence and whimsical wishing.
You know that saying “Beware of Greeks bearing gifts…”? Same.
In the same way we “joke” about Charles making sure that he watches his back and employs a food taster due to his over-eager, incandescent heir, so too must the Sussexes watch out for any sudden “gestures of kindness” from either KP or BP. I would not let my children eat anything gifted to them by people who have been going out of their way to cause them harm. And I’m fairly certain that their security team has looked into such possibilities.
They are so desperate to prove that earning your own money is bad but living off the taxpayers is good. So much stupidity.
The fact that they think any of this is going to land well in Austerity Britain is absolutely wild to me.
So, they were absolutely fine with Andrew’s ex-wife living rent free for years with him on royal grounds and doing shady deals – but Meghan selling jam tsk tsk. The horror!
Right on, @Sharon. And if T. Sykes thinks that seasonal promotions from a commercial enterprise is “odd” or “strange” then he would be shocked and appalled at the email I received from Macy’s. I mean, there were swimsuits and short pants involved, the horror, the gall. “It’s all very odd.” /s
Just ate a big spoonful of As Ever marmalade and ordered the jam and chocolate bundle. I’ve been craving the raspberry and strawberry jams and this article was the reminder I needed to go ahead and order lol!!
Bum-clenching LOL
Why is a multimillionaire business owner and investor daring to promote her business, period. That’s what all these RRs bang on about. They think the Sussexes should be required to hide under a rock and beg for a living? Meghan runs a thriving business because she knows how-and-when to promote her high quality products.
At this point it’s clear these so called “royal correspondents” have an AI agent writing these BS articles.
Basically, the agent scrapes together whatever nonsensical stories the other “royal correspondents” have been peddling for the past couple of months and cobbles them together into a rehashed BS storyline. All they need to do is ask the AI to cough up some sort of link between the various lies being told about As Ever inventory levels, Meghan’s bankruptcy, being shunned by Netflix, dropping popularity in the polls, deserving to lose their titles, being Hollywood losers, Harry no-mates, etc etc, and presto, out comes this week’s article!
The joke’s on the idiots taking this ridiculous nonsense seriously.
I think the palace showcasing similar items to coincide with Meghan’s Instagram posts would make them seem even more desperate and transparent. It would make it more obvious that they are followers and not the epitome of what everyone should inspire to be. It would make it more obvious that it is always them who have to copy Meghan because no matter how many years and times they tell us that Meghan was awful at the role of being a royal, it is Meghan and only Meghan that everyone of them has copied by style of dress, brands, speeches, hugging, mannerisms, kneeling to eye level to kids, increased work efforts, causes and where they choose to travel. Meghan if we didn’t know any better based on the obsession and coverage she gets from all of them, would seem to be the monarch of that family. This article is only showing how obsessed they are. She left them six years ago. Harry has said more things about them, some of which was actually damaging to their character, yet the blame still remains clearly on the biracial woman who if they would have left her alone and stopped harassing her, could have made this family more loved around the world. Only they couldn’t cope with the biracial woman being more popular and better at being royal than they are.
So is Meghan supposed to pause her business because she’s visiting the UK for 5 days? The way the Rota writes it, Charles has his annual trip to Holyrood the same week so he doesn’t have much time for the Sussexes anyway. So maybe an hour then he’s off. Despite what the press says, Charles is not the focus of the visit, its Invictus and the Sussexes seeing other family and friends. People like Tom Sucks are so dramatic, they might as well write pot boiler novels rather than “news”.
What I’m taking from this is that I need to start some shoulder/arm training, Meghan looks amazing!
A woman who married into that Windsor clan is working in the summer .
What is she thinking? Doesn’t she know that the Windsors don’t do summer work or winter work spring work. Meghan, this is why you didn’t fit in . You believe people should work for their money . When are you going to get it that the Windsors are all about take take take and never earn. Of course Ton would struggle to understand this to because he writes shit and lies for a living and calls it journalism
Does Sykes get payments from certain royal quarters? He is so persistent at trying to find a flaw in two people who have been quite successful since leaving their jobs as working royals.
It’s almost as if they’re not familiar with, you know, work.
Sykes is an utter fool who hasn’t a clue about much of anything. Of course a brand advertises, especially before July 4th when people are hosting, buying hostess gifts, etc. The idiocy of these people knows no bounds.
Also – her jams are so insanely good. I bought the matcha/strawberry set for my son who loves a strawberry matcha and I had a little nibble of the jam. OMG – like the ripest strawberries exploding in my mouth!
I love the email with the ‘try this combo’ suggestions as well. I just purchased the jam trio so I can try the marmalade (sunshine in a bottle) with cheddar per the suggestion.
I’m getting ready to order the trio plus an extra marmalade. Yes its pricey but damn its good, lol. My daughter is hooked on the marmalade, she is keeping a jar with the tiniest little bit you can scrape out until she gets some more.
I know, it’s my favorite marmalade. I put a tablespoon in oatmeal. I wish I hadn’t found that my favorite use for the strawberry spread was on ice cream, because I need to eat a lot less of that!