Meghan Markle lifts lid on real reason she dramatically changed name of lifestyle brand

Meghan Markle has released the third episode of her brand new podcast Confessions of a Female Founder and it sees her in conversation with celebrity hair colourist Kadi Lee, the co-founder of the Highbrow Hippie salon and haircare brand

Meghan Markle has spoken out on why she decided to change the name of her lifestyle brand, saying the old name became ‘word salad’. In the latest episode of her new podcast Confessions of a Female Founder, the Duchess of Sussex chats to celebrity hair colourist Kadi Lee, who is also a good friend of Meghan’s.

Kadi has co-founded the salon and haircare brand Highbrow Hippie – and the pair chatted about picking an all important name for a business. Over a year ago, Meghan originally introduced her lifestyle brand with the name American Riviera Orchard, launching both a website and an Instagram account for it. However, earlier this year, she made a dramatic U-turn and announced the brand would now be called As Ever.

Meghan had faced setbacks trying to trademark the American Riviera Orchard name. However, in the latest podcast she tells Kadi that she “didn’t love” the previous name when it became “word salad”.

She explained: “I had secured As Ever as a name in 2022, and then as everything started to evolve last year, and bringing in a partner the size that it was, it was just so interesting. You remember, I said, ‘I like American Riviera as an umbrella,’ and then be able to have verticals beneath it.

“And maybe have the ‘Orchard’ really small. But when that’s not feasible, suddenly it became this word salad. I didn’t love that so much. “I was like, ‘OK, let’s go back to the thing that I’ve always loved. Let’s use the name that I protected for a reason that had sort of been under wraps’.

“And then we were able to focus in the quiet and put our heads down and build on something that no one was sniffing around to even see about. It was really just helpful to have that quiet period.”

Meghan revealed the change to her business name earlier this year in an Instagram video: “Last year, I had thought ‘You know what, American Riviera, that sounds like such a great name, it’s my neighbourhood, it’s a nickname for Santa Barbara’, but it limited me to things that were just manufactured and grown in this area. Then Netflix came on, not just as my partner in the show, but as my partner in my business, which was huge.”

Elsewhere in the episode, Meghan also described how she first met her pal Kadi, who has coloured the hair of the likes of Julia Roberts, five years ago after she suffered a disaster using a shop bought box hair dye. She revealed she had just moved to California during the pandemic and had been attempting to colour her hair at home – but she did not get the result she desired.

She confessed: “I texted Serge [the hairdresser who styled Meghan’s hair on her wedding day] and he said you need to see Kadi – and you came over.”

Meghan has already released two previous episodes of her new eight-part podcast with Lemonada Media, which promises “girl talk” and advice on how to create “billion-dollar businesses”. It follows the duchess’s much-criticised Netflix lifestyle series With Love, Meghan and her new brand As Ever, which sold out of its first batch of raspberry spread, flower sprinkles and herbal tea.

In th first episode, she chatted to Whitney Wolfe Herd, the founder of the dating app Bumble. During the chat, Meghan talked about her experiences of being a mum and revealed she suffered from a ‘huge medical scare’ after giving birth. She explained: “We both had very similar experiences — though we didn’t know each other at the time — with postpartum, and we both had preeclampsia. Postpartum preeclampsia. It’s so rare and so scary.

Meghan added: “And you’re still trying to juggle all of these things, and the world doesn’t know what’s happening quietly. And in the quiet, you’re still trying to show up for people – mostly for your children — but those things are huge medical scares.” Whitney replied: “I mean life or death, truly.” Postpartum preeclampsia is a rare condition that causes high blood pressure after birth.

Meanwhile, last week, Meghan spoke to Reshma Saujani, founder of the not-for-profit Girls Who Code, where she touched on her experience of miscarriage and having to “let something go that you plan to love for a long time”. Meghan had a miscarriage in July 2020, when her eldest child Archie was one, revealing her heartbreak in an article for The New York Times later that year.

The duchess told Ms Saujani, who faced a series of miscarriages due to an autoimmune disease: “The miscarriages that you’ve experienced. I’ve spoken about the miscarriage that we experienced. And I think, in some parallel way, when you have to learn to detach from the thing that you have so much promise and hope for, and to be able to be OK at a certain point to let something go, something go that you plan to love for a long time.”