The reviews are coming in for Meghan's podcast 'Confessions of a Female Founder'ions of a

[LaBarruci]

Not listened to the first in Meghan's podcast series, a conversation with the founder of Bumble, Whitney Wolfe Heard, but the Mail has collated all the press reviews so far, with links. The Guardian, Telegraph and i-Paper are unanimous: the podcast is cloyingly dreadful.

The reviews for Meghan Markle's latest podcast are in! Two stars for Confessions of a Female Founder https://mol.im/a/14584193 via https://dailym.ai/android

They met in 2020 I believe.

If Kadi Lee thinks she knows more than a dermatologist, she needs to give her head a wobble.

Hair follicles grow out of the skin and a dermatologist will have the medical knowledge to assess overall health which impacts hair growth. For example, if you have very low iron and are anemic, all the hair serums from all the salons in the world won't help you grow your hair, and a hairdresser can neither send you for lab tests nor write you a prescription.

Very disappointing to poo poo doctors indeed.

My friend saw an endocrinologist for hair loss as it can be hormonal .

Does Meghan have any friends from her pre- Harry days ?

The interest in her podcast has fallen off a cliff, it’s not charting anymore, no where in the rankings.

To be fair, the range is a supplement and a serum so iron and zinc are likely included in the supplement. I thought it was disrespectful to the medical field.

I have reflected on this overnight and I have realised something. The aim of the Highbrow Hippie range is for it to go viral and it get bought up by a bigger company such as L'Oréal. This is what happened with Tatcha (Vicky's Tsai's brand - it sounds like she is the next guest). That's where the money is. MM is an investor in HH so this is a full on plug. Kadi is doing the same thing with the small volume releases to keep it exclusive. It sounds sensible from a business point of view. She has multiple famous clients such as Julia Roberts so I genuinely think she has a shot.

It made me think that Meghan is hoping that someone will buy up As Ever. Oh dear.

No surprise

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14634815/Meghan-tried-land-Beyonce-Taylor-Swift-podcast-no-ones-phone.html

But has As ever been on the go long enough ? She sold what must have been a very limited number of items and weeks later still hasn’t restocked 🤷‍♀️

If I was her I’d be after Oprah (payback for appearing on Oprah with their exclusive), Rihanna (as a modern woman of colour), Martha Stewart (same business venture as her own for top tips), Kim Kardashian’s (tie it into her Archetypes of Bimbo/B-Word that a lot of people associate with The Kardashians), Gwyneth Paltrow (especially since they seem friendly judging by their little skit).

Whether they want to work with her on a podcast is the issue.

It’s nice she’s including her friends but (forgive my ignorance) I haven’t heard of any of them individually and only heard of one of the brands). I think she needs star power to draw in audience. We need more people like Serena, Mariah and Paris to entice us in. She’s relying to much on her own star power and that star seems to be waning.

You would think she would ensure that a speedy restock was in place to keep up momentum after the initial publicity around the launch, which she won't get again. But no. It is all very weird.

Quite!

Her problem is that her business is better suited to a gift shop rather than an e-commerce shop.

You visit Highgrove or Buckingham Palace and buy a jar of jam as a memento or gift for granny.

She would have been better opening a working orchard or vineyard when you can tour and wine taste, then sell her wares in the gift shop along with local Montecito wines etc. Or play the long game and open up their house in Frogmore after their country house upgrade.

Brings up the questions of did she ask them? Did they say no?
Or didn’t ask as they are so famous it would detract from her?

or wanted to concentrate on lesser known people and brands. Possibly this I think.

I think it’s just all for publicity. I think she knows the line won’t sell , it’s just a big fanfare to get her in the media. I think she is addicted to attention and needs to have a constant supply from somewhere, good or bad.

As ever, is all pretty basic mass produced items.

She is not short of funds (or is she?) and can access advice from, amongst others, successful businesswomen and yet this is the best she can come up with? It’s odd.

If she was serious about making a go of this I would have thought she would have a contract with her suppliers and that a basic requirement would be to ensure a timely delivery on stock. Weeks later there is still nothing!

Has she not paid the suppliers?

It’s all very amateur hour and very far from looking like a billion dollar business, more like just a PR or data harvesting exercise.

I’m certainly glad I didn’t make a purchase and hand over my bank details.

You might want to watch the latest The Royal News Network video @IAmATorturedPoet . Britney, did an unboxing and tasting on her last video. It was interesting. She said the tracking was a bit of a nightmare, so her parcel was left out at the mercy of "porch pirates." (that'll be the crappy distribution company MM has chosen). And ended up getting soaked in the rain. She said all the packaging was really cheap and light-weight, and she showed the labels being stuck on badly and being wonky and bubbling, and the type face being off in places (so much for MM poring over the proofs and that freakish attention to detail). The teabags have plain labels on the string, rather than the branded ones pretty much all teabag companies use, which makes me think these are generic ones. The jam was shit, the pancakes were shit, the teabags bang average; the "shortbread" (that you have to add a load of butter to and sound like a faff to make compared to just making your own, it's a very easy recipe) were the best thing - whaddya know, flour, sugar and butter tastes good! But not that good for $14 a packet. And you need a food mixer. I'm guessing most people in possession of a food mixer have one because they make their own bakes, they don't buy packet mixes. I really don't see MM making a profit, let alone a fortune from this at all. However, I do concur with pp that her goal is probably to get a large distributor to buy the brand off her and license her image, and sell it on the mass market a la Betty Crocker.

@PrettyFlyforaMaiTai none of these well known names need to be featuring on a podcast like this. Their brands and images are stronger than this. Can you imagine Oprah sitting indulging in " girl talk" - that phrase is the antithesis of what they have achieved. Who wants to sit and talk about Meghan's inability to stop looking at photos of her children 😬. She is a third rate Giovanna Fletcher who has limited appeal to the " Mummies". Again Meghan has blurred the business v Mummy theme.

If she doesn't restock soon, will she just let it all fizzle out? She'll make even more of a fool of herself!

Thanks for the recommendation @RandyRedHumpback I’ll look that one up.

‘Jam is my Jam’ looks like it’s been consigned to the history books already and the honey seems to have buzzed off into the sunset.

Did anyone receive their ‘item of choice’ replacement for the honey no show?

’licence her image’ did cause me to have a bit of a 🤭. If that is what she is going for then she is going to need to take advice, take her time and give this whole venture more than her usual 5 minute attention span because no one is going to pay big money to licence a ‘f**g grifter’😬

I agree with this - we're all looking at this as a commercial venture to make them money, but I think it's really just a PR vehicle to generate congratulatory praise, celeb reviews, and bolster Meghan's image as a successful business woman. Otherwise it doesn't make sense.

Agree - she's not a premium brand . She won't sustain a waiting list like Hermes. You can buy these things anywhere.

I don't think she will re-stock. Her greatest achievement so far is having disappointed customers who still want this stuff. Once they receive the substandard shite, they won't be re-ordering. She will just wait until the second half of the series drops in the Autumn, and sell another bunch of Halloween/pumpkin spiced crap that will have this whole rigmarole starting again. I am convinced her goal is to sell off the brand for a tidy sum to a mass market distributor.

I am convinced her goal is to sell off the brand for a tidy sum to a mass market distributor
But wouldn't she have prove over a fair amount of time that her products sell? We don't even know how many she had sold this time round, could only have been a few hundred?

The woman has managed to convince pretty much everyone that comes into contact with her that she is capable of X,Y,Z achievements, and has been given lucrative contracts as a result. There's no reason to think she's not deluded herself that this is another one of those instances. The fact of the matter is that, regardless of how many pots of raspberry slurry she's shifted, her publicity is saying it's sold out, just as her publicity told the world she's an excellent speaker, writer, producer, podcaster etc and she's received millions as a result, and even despite the evidence to the contrary. Like the Kardashians, she's notorious, and notoriety seems to sell, or at least get the all important clicks.

Now obviously it's a bit more nuts and bolts with a product line, and any distributor will want to know how many units she's actually shifted. But that's not to say some corporate won't see a greater value in the name "As Ever" and her image on a box than in actual units shifted. And for a relatively small amount to pay her off (small to a mass market producer) they can take that share of the market that might be interested in buying something she endorses, and produce and sell it at a lower cost but with a much higher volume of sales. It's win win for MM. She still gets her name and face out there. She can talk about her "collab", how the demand for her produce led her to find partners who could deal for the huge demand for all things Meghan. The headache of having to actually be responsible for the day to day is taken out of her hands. She's just the public face, which is all she's ever wanted to be. The fame and the money without the hard work or substance.

I think that ship has sailed now though. They got the Netflix. Spotify and Spare gigs on the basis of dishing the dirt on the RF. That turned out to be a damp squib and now all these years later there’s no more. Netflix probably hoped that the merch might revive a bit of interest, together with the lifestyle scmuck that was With Love, Meghan. Hasn’t really worked out like that though and I think she now has no commercial appeal at all

She didn't plan on the tariffs. Also, US tourism is taking a hit, and that affects tax dollars, which in turn affects jobs. Everyone is being very cautious with money.