Earlier in Back Row:

When Meghan Markle decided to re-enter non-royal celebrity life as a lifestyle entrepreneur, it made some sense. Acting doesn’t pay as well as it used to thanks to streaming, and this is just what celebrities do these days. It also made no sense, since so many of these businesses don’t work.

The recent past is littered with attempts. Blake Lively’s lifestyle website Preserve shuttered after little more than a year; Tyra Banks’s multi-level-marketing makeup line Beautytainer closed in 2017, after around two years; the Kardashian-Jenners have tried a bunch of brands, like KKW Beauty, which closed for a “rebrand” in 2021 and Kylie Swim, which seems to have scaled back. Even Jessica Alba’s Honest Company, which went public in 2021 at a $1.4 billion valuation, is struggling — it had a market cap of $337 million when Alba left as Chief Creative Officer in 2024 (it’s bounced back a bit to around $540 million). It’s hard to know what’s going on with others, like Angelina Jolie’s Atelier Jolie, which we seldom hear about. There are some examples of beauty successes — Fenty by Rihanna, Rare Beauty by Selena Gomez, Rhode by Hailey Bieber, and Kylie Cosmetics by Kylie Jenner. Skims, as a clothing success, is an outlier.

Celebrities offer a business valuable built-in publicity — a non-famous person with a skincare line won’t just get booked on a talk show to promote it — but running a business is still… running a business. It’s hard.

Rachel Strugatz, who covers many of these brands as the beauty correspondent for Puck, pointed out, “Everyone thinks they can be the exception. Period, full-stop.” She traces this interest to Jenner, whose Kylie Cosmetics brand has done very well: “When everyone saw how much product she could sell online, every other famous person thought they could do the same thing.”

But Markle isn’t offering her own beauty line. She’s sort of offering clothing, having launched a storefront of her recommendations on affiliate marketing platform ShopMy this week. But her brand, named “As Ever” (after she changed it from “American Riviera Orchard”) is hosted on a website showcasing foodstuffs you can’t yet buy. It’s all very confusing, particularly given that she is winning the attention economy right now thanks to her Netflix show With Love, Meghan.

I asked Ana Andjelic, who writes The Sociology of Business newsletter and who authored The Business of Aspiration, to analyze it with me. Andjelic has served as chief brand officer for Banana Republic, Esprit, and Rebecca Minkoff, and chief marketing office of Mansur Gavriel, and is an expert at connecting brands to culture. Ahead, a condensed version of our conversation.

Here’s my thought-dump on Meghan’s brand. First, so few of these celebrity or influencer brands work, right? That said, everyone's talking about her and looking at what she's doing — so, is simply winning the attention economy enough to get a brand going these days? And three, it seems like a lot of people really don’t like her her. Does that matter?

Influencer brands are hit or miss. Unwell, the drink by Alex Cooper, didn't seem to do so well, even though she's massive and the aesthetic was good. I think it's just about the right moment and the right context and the right audience.

Stick with me on this — but you know how there's been a really big resurrection, no pun intended, of Christian movies and TV shows? Mary, House of David. [From a recent story in The Economist about this trend: “Today ‘House of David’ is the eighth most popular series on streaming services in America. New religious shows and films are in store: seven faith-based titles were given the green light by streamers in 2024, up from just one in 2021.”] So what is happening? It’s familiarity, hope, basic-ness, simple stories, escapism.

Meghan is offering that completely accidentally. As Tina Brown said, her timing is always off — she's ten years behind. Like girl boss [Markle’s forthcoming podcast is Confessions of a Female Founder], her aesthetic — everything is old, but it's familiar. I think that we really overestimate the importance of a cool factor. The majority of this country is not cool. They want comfort and aspiration and hope and sunniness — it’s basic, familiar.

You overestimate the hate for her. She is divisive figure, but most people are neutral. I want to say she's not going to succeed, but I think she will, actually. I think she's less Martha Stewart and more QVC. What she wears sells.

But the rub about her seems to be that people find her to be phony and inauthentic. Does that hurt one’s brand?