Meghan Markle and Prince Harry took a little jaunt down to Australia this week and, based on the photos, it would be easy to mistake the trip for a royal tour, the type of goodwill visit meant to make the citizens of countries still under the British crown feel OK about that archaic fact. Visually, it’s very similar to a trip the Duke and Duchess of Sussex took in 2018 as newlyweds, riding the high of having just announced that Meghan was pregnant with the then-seventh-in-line to the throne: They’re posing in front of famous landmarks, they’re crouching down to meet children, they’re gamely receiving gifts and tokens. It could make a casual observer wonder if maybe they’d missed news of Harry and King Charles burying the royal hatchet, and the Sussexes being put back on the royal tour rotation.
Presumably, that’s exactly what Meghan and Harry want you to think—because no, they are still living their decidedly not royal life in Montecito, California. Since the couple reemerged into the world in 2021 via an extremely juicy interview with Oprah, they’ve been in an extended professional-identity crisis that only seems to have gotten worse in the past year, as the multi-million-dollar deals they made with major content platforms five years ago have fizzled out. One of the fruits of those deals, the utterly banal but somehow still watchable Netflix lifestyle show With Love, Meghan, which came out in March 2025, was a vehicle for her next career aspiration: influencer.
This trip appeared to be a trial balloon to determine whether they can still command the respect that comes with the imprimatur of British royalty, while also raking in the cash like a proper American influencer. And they seem to be pretty close to having their cake and eating it too—at least on the friendly Australian shores.
Meghan has really committed to the influencer bit. When she’s not participating in viral trends that allow her to show off cute pics from 10 years ago, her Instagram account is a well-curated background for her consumer products brand, As Ever, which sells jam, tea, candles, sets of mulling spices, an inexplicably sold-out leather bookmark—you get it. These are the types of things that women who earnestly call it a “guilty pleasure” when they eat two squares of dark chocolate after dinner would love to receive as a hostess gift.
Whether or not there is sustainable demand for what Meghan-as-influencer is selling remains to be seen, however. She launched a ShopMy collection last year, which initially featured 32 “neutral staples in muted colours…and natural fabrics like linen and cashmere,” according to the BBC. I admit that I have not been totally on top of checking the page over the past 12 months, but at least for now, her ShopMy is empty. And if she can’t (or won’t) maintain a shop-my-closet link—the most basic element of a successful Instagram influencer career—it does suggest that her heart isn’t really in it.
Meanwhile, there are competing narratives about the success of As Ever: In early March, Netflix “divested” from the brand, which suggests that it wasn’t paying off for them. Variety reported on March 17 that, last year, “Netflix was sitting on a surplus of As Ever products, including tea and baking mixes, totaling more than $10 million in value (so much so that the company started giving inventory to employees for free, putting the goods on card tables in various office buildings. [A Sussex] spokesperson says giveaways from sample closets are standard practice at studios).” Ten days later, a Vanity Fair piece told a very different story about the brand, noting that it is still a “going concern,” rolling out new partnerships every few months—most recently “a limited-edition gift set featuring As Ever tea and fresh gardenias from High Camp Supply.”
In January, an As Ever website glitch revealed that hundreds of thousands of products were in stock. Some took this to mean that nothing was selling, but other Meghan-watchers noted that she’d said on a Bloomberg podcast that As Ever had had to order “a million” units of some products—meaning that the vast majority had already sold out. (Back of the envelope math by the British newspaper the Times indicates that, if the “a million” story is true, As Ever has sold $36 million of just its “signature fruit spread.”) So far, the brand has demurred on confirming or correcting the record.
This week’s Australia tour seems to be at least in part a trial balloon for Meghan (and Harry) to bring influencing into the real world. Harry was a keynote speaker at a professional development conference; you could pay $500 to watch him online, or up to $2,370 for a “platinum” event experience. What exactly a man who has never had a real job could add to conversations about the workplace I cannot say—though to be fair, influencing is the ultimate fake it til you make it gig.
Meghan is also co-hosting a “girls retreat” this weekend called Her Best Life in Sydney, where guests paid up to $3,200 for the chance to mingle with her at a “gala dinner.” The Daily Mail—no friend of Meghan’s—reported on Friday morning U.S. time (Friday evening Australia time) that Meghan left after two hours, but also added the couple was “mobbed by crowds” on Friday. So whatever the Sussexes are trying to do down under, it appears it’s being fairly well received.
Earlier on Friday, they sailed around Sydney Harbor, which People helpfully noted was “recreating” their 2018 royal tour. To risk repeating myself, you wouldn’t be able to tell which was the Queen Elizabeth-sponsored trip and which was the influencer-lifestyle excursion just by looking at the photos. (Meghan hasn’t aged a day!) They also really turned up the royalty dial by visiting a children’s hospital previously visited by Charles and Diana in 1985.
I suspect that part of the magic of this trip is the location; they can ride on the legacy of that successful 2018 tour, which is bolstered by the fact that Australia is part of the Commonwealth and the British monarch is still its sovereign. But that mind trick doesn’t work on Americans; when they’re back in Montecito, Harry is just another wealthy British nepo baby trying to find his niche—Brooklyn Beckham with much more baggage. Sure, they’re surrounded by other extreme wealth, but nothing sets them apart in California; a tech billionaire has no reason to defer to a prince or a duchess by marriage.
In November, after Kris Jenner included photos of Meghan and Harry having fun in an Instagram roundup of her 70th birthday bash, the Sussex camp asked Jenner and Kim Kardashian to delete them. Kardashian later said that it was because the royals realized after the fact that the party took place on Remembrance Day (which is basically Veterans Day for the Brits, only they get real freaky with it) and they thought it might be a bad look to be spotted partying with some of the world’s worst people that night (my words, not hers).
That elbowing their way into the social circle of ur-influencers clashed with their perceived obligations as members of the royal family might have prompted some to hit pause on trying to do both, but not these two. Meghan made headlines earlier this week after calling herself “the most trolled person in the world,” and yet she appears to be constitutionally drawn to the spotlight, where a lot of the worst trolling happens. And look, you can be a pain about discretion and publicity when you’re an actual working royal, but the cost of cashing an influencer check in America is regular people peeping into your life—and, almost certainly, commenting rudely on it.
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