If you stacked 123,544 jars of jam on top of each other they would reach nearly 1.5 times the height of Everest or the equivalent of 37 Eiffel Towers. Handy if you want to reach cruising altitude on a ladder of raspberry preserves; not so much if you are the owner of this teetering jam tower, namely Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex.
The duchess is facing being left with jam valued at more than $7 million, enough for more than 1.8 million cream teas, that is set to expire next year, according to the Daily Mail.
It could be, the Mail’s Alison Boshoff writes, “jamaggedon”.
The twisty turny story of the duchess’ As Ever (AE) lifestyle brand goes like this: First Meghan announced that Netflix would be partnering with her on her new business, then came With Love, Meghan, her attempt at winning Martha Stewart’s crown, and then came the first drop of her AE products – jams, honey, and flower sprinkles amongst others – which went on sale in April. Bang! It all sold out in under an hour. When a second drop came a month later, again, zap! It was all gone.
Though it feels like it was approximately 45 months ago, it was only last April that Meghan finally unveiled her long gestated lifestyle brand As ever with, as its star product, jam. But the jam was so much more than jam – it was her signature gloop, her origin story, her hero product, the narrative linchpin of her tilt at Martha-dom – a woman who had undergone extreme tumult and change finding her centre and solace and future standing over a bubbling pot of fruity goodness.
US shoppers loved it. If HRH-ing had not proved a natural fit for the duchess, the celebrity jam caper certainly did. It seemed that Meghan, a woman who has taste the way that King Charles has stray rubies and yew trees, was onto a winner with AE and as 2025 progressed, wine, candles, hot toddy mixes, and a bookmark were added to the stable.
With sales going gangbusters, as Meghan told Bloomberg, she went from “talking about a few thousand jars and lids, to we need to do a purchase order of a million.”
Unfortunately for all you macroeconomic theory fans, there is no easy alliance between supply and demand.
Jams have a shelf-life of about two years which means that, based on the Mail’s calculations, the current available crop of AE spreads are set to expire between June and September 2027.
According to that paper’s estimations, as of June next year this could see the Duchess of Sussex left with 123,544 boxes of her jam trio still on the shelf, worth more than $7 million alone. Add to that the estimated 74,340 surplus tins of flower sprinkles, with a retail value of nearly $1.7 million.
Handily, wine, candles and bookmarks won’t go off until the End Times, and in fact are probably everything you need in an apocalypse, wow, bunker.
However, the Mail’s calculations are only part of a much bigger, sweeter picture.
In January, a Sherlockian Redditor worked out they could add tens if not hundreds of thousands of AE items to their AE cart, which showed there were 137,465 lots of “Signature Fruit Spread Gift Box”, 24,238 lots of the “Honey Duo Gift Box”, 44,612 lots of orange marmalade, 80,391 containers of flower sprinkles, and 89,826 candles available.
If you work backwards, from that million-strong order Meghan mentioned to Bloomberg, it equates to AE having sold more than $50 million worth of jam.
A source with knowledge of the business told People after this news broke that, the duchess’ enterprise “isn’t just successful — it’s flying, literally off the shelf”.
Other numbers suggest it’s not quite so cut and dried. When that Redditor worked out they could monitor stock levels, they checked back in two days later, showing that AE was selling about 25 jam trio boxes per day. (It must be noted this was January when, post Christmas, sales are probably at their lowest.)
At that rate of sales, that would see Meghan left with nearly 120,000 jars of jam by the time they pass their best-before date, the Mail has reported.
In February, a source told Page Six that Netflix was “literally just giving [As ever products] away” to staff.
“Apparently, there are two storage rooms packed with As ever product,” the source said. “One (staffer) walked out with 10 products for free.”
Said a second source: “There’s so much overstock”.
Then in March, Netflix announced they were shelving With Love (after a second one last year and a Christmas special) and that they were getting out of the jam business and were cutting ties with AE.
At the time a source told the Mail: “The issue was sales in the end. The product was not taken up in the way that people had hoped. The jam thing became totemic. There was just all this jam.”
At least, when Netflix backed out, they reportedly gave Meghan all the AE stock “gratis”, according to former Sussex ally Dan Wakeford’s Celebrity Intelligence newsletter. (Added to which, she reportedly earned a “nice payday” for the two seasons of With Love.)
Translation: Even if all that jam has to be junked next year, it won’t have actually cost Meghan anything.
But more broadly speaking, has the Duchess of Sussex’s pivot to lifestyle maven working?
In under a year, according to YouGov polling, Meghan’s net approval rating in the US has fallen from +15 (that is, liked by 37 percent of Americans and disliked by 22 percent) to +2 (29 percent liked, 27 percent disliked) as of the first quarter this year.
That drop, Newsweek’s Jack Royston has reported, correlates with a fall in website traffic to as ever, which logged a total of 178,000 visits in April, of which 61,500 were from the US, the only country that AE ships to.
(A friend of Meghan’s told the Mail that the this story had “a lot of inaccuracy”.)
International expansion would be the obvious next move, with the 44-year-old having trademarked AE in Australia.
The question that the supposed “jamaggedon” begs is, can or will AE grow into a business that can help pay the Sussexes’ bills? According to former People editor Wakeford, the couple’s $20 million Montecito mansion has multiple mortgages, their security bill costs more than $4.2 million–a-year and they have cut their staff from 16 full-time employees to five.
At least, while Meghan’s husband Prince Harry, The Duke of Sussex does something unspecified all day, she is trying her hand at other ventures, such as joining AI powered shopping discovery app OneOff as both a user and an investor. (Though the Mail has reported that fewer than half a dozen of the items of clothing posted by the duchess, out of almost 90, have sold out.)
Don’t lose sight of one crucial fact in all of this: Meghan is the queen of the pivot. Calligrapher, actress, blogger, working royal, TV maker, podcaster, children’s book author, the world’s most famous purveyor of flower sprinkles: The duchess is clearly not afraid to launch herself into waters new. And if that might mean swimming in excess jam for a bit, and Harry having to radically up his daily toast quota, then so be it.
Daniela Elser is an editor and commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.
