When Meghan Markle boards that plane to Britain this summer with her Hubby HArry, with Archie and Lilibet in tow, trust me when I say: every single element of this trip will have been gamed out in advance — the timing, the children, the camera angles, the narrative hooks, and, if her track record in Australia is anything to go by, almost certainly the outfits.
This trip is a strategic operation dressed up as a plea for family unity and the reasons it is happening right now are worth examining one by one.
The lifestyle brand that was supposed to transform Meghan into the next great American tastemaker — the answer to Gwyneth Paltrow, the rival to Martha Stewart — is not performing the way her team projected, and the numbers coming out this week make that impossible to spin away.
Website traffic to As Ever fell by 33 percent between January and April 2026, which is a catastrophic decline for a brand that has only been selling products for just over a year. A website glitch late last year accidentally let the world see exactly how much stock was sitting in warehouses: roughly 650,000 individual units of jam, tea, flower sprinkles, and candles, all of them going nowhere, with expiration dates that are no longer comfortably far away.
Netflix, which had taken an equity stake in the brand and cross-promoted it through Meghan’s cooking show, walked away from that investment in March after the show failed to crack the top 1,000 watched programs in the back half of 2025… and reports surfaced that Netflix staff were being handed the jams for free because the alternative was throwing them away.
The word being used by insiders right now is “bankruptcy.”
One source told Women’s Day: “Meghan just can’t move enough product and she can’t expect to sell things at full price with shortened expiration dates — unless she and Harry have some miracle up their sleeve, there might be no saving this business.” The miracle she needs is a photograph of Meghan Markle, relevant and radiant, standing near actual working members of the British Royal Family. That would be an image, circulated globally, that does for her brand what no marketing budget on earth can replicate: she’s back and fully accepted into the fold.