Meghan Markle has been lying awake at night fretting over boxes. Specifically the packaging for the rollout of her new brand, As Ever. For months, she’s been mentally rehearsing the unboxing videos that are now all over social media, anxiously thinking about tissue paper and sticker placement and biodegradable packing peanuts. She’s a female founder now, and sweating the small stuff is a right of passage.
With her new podcast venture, Confessions of a Female Founder with Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex is revealing these insights such as this in an eight-episode series. In each one, she interviews another wealthy business woman about their journey to making it big. I am not a female founder, nor do I aspire to be one. But I do have nightmares about boxes sometimes. I once interned for some female founders who started a wellness box subscription service (remember when those were all the rage?). It was my job to make up thousands of cardboard boxes, stuff them with eco-friendly paper strands and chia seed packets, label them up and ship them out.
But that was over a decade ago, at the height of the girlboss epidemic. I thought the whole pseudo-feminist guff — starting a business like one of the boys!! — had died out with all the scandals of the late 2010s. Nasty Girl, Away, Thinx, The Wing. All those women-led businesses that foundered in the wake of toxic workplace allegations and lawsuits against their, uh, female founders.
Women “proved” they could do business, sure, but those businesses were just as exploitative even if they were run by supposed feminists. Sheryl Sandberg’s cri de coeur for women in the workplace, Lean In, was published in 2013; compare that to 2025, where we have Sarah Wynn-Williams memoir Careless People, which includes some fairly serious allegations about Sandberg’s behaviour towards the women she employed. Surely the era of the girlboss is over.
But capitalism loves a rebrand. Girlboss is now the more mature-sounding female founder. Your personal brand is now what Meghan describes as your “essence”. A fragrant distillation of a notable woman’s self that can be marketed, sure, but in a classy way. When Megs is worried about launching As Ever (FKA American Riviera Orchard) she tells us that “I try and compartmentalise it and all I can control is this extension of my essence and my aesthetic and what I want to share with it.”
This isn’t entirely Meghan’s fault. She’s been effectively frozen in time for years. She had been running her own lifestyle blog, The Tig, where she shared all that essence and aesthetic online from 2014. The peak girlboss years. Then she got engaged to Harry, and royal commitments meant shuttering her blog in 2017 and suffering the slings and arrows of the British media in silence. Like a princess in a fairytale (the Grimm kind) her entrepreneurial aspirations slumbered until her prince got them the hell out of dodge. She clearly has unfinished business with being a busy business woman.
Plus, there’s the California of it all. Her home in Montecito may be several hours down the coastline from the Bay Area, but start-up lingo litters Meghan’s speech. Something is either “high value” or not. One submits to the “grind of a business”. There is framing and scaling and touch points and boundaries. All that pop science terminology pressganged into service for capital. She claims this is how she speaks with her first guest, friend and Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Heard, all the time, just over lunch with several glasses of rosé. It sounds boring, but then you can’t catch a drink with your friends and moan about your boss when you are the boss.
If it sounds like I’m joining the Meghan hate train, I’m not. She’s a generous and competent interviewer, playing up her anxieties and being the right amount of complementary and deferential to keep her guest relaxed and talking. She’s also funny. When Wolfe Herd discloses that she wrote a gratitude letter to herself when she became the world’s youngest self-made billionaire, Meghan quips that she was “taking stock of [her] stock”. Wolfe Herd’s decision to break up (temporarily) with Bumble was a “conscious uncoupling” Meghan suggests, shouting out her friend Gwyneth Paltrow.
It was a smart choice to get Wolfe Herd on first, to drop the postpartum pre-eclampsia reveal and draw parallels between their treatment at the hands of the press. The Bumble founder is also pivoting to essence-ness, teasing her new dating app-adjacent venture that will have users working on themselves before they find love. Wolfe Herd is clearly a pro, dropping interesting tidbits and one strategically deployed swearword. At one point she gentle parents Meghan through the anxiety over those boxes as she would her own child — did you do your best? she prompts.
Is this the best format for Meghan? It’s clearly the one she wants, the one she feels fits her brand best. It’s also for her American audience — the most popular US podcasts are follow this format, with a well-known host interviewing the guest of the week. In the UK, we tend to prefer duos having more of a chat. I’d love her to crack out the rosé and have a proper gossip with Gwenny or get Harry involved. But then that behaviour may not be befitting of a female founder.
Streaming now on Lemonada Media
