Meghan Markle's First Moneymaking Venture Is Not What You'd Expect

Meghan Markle is deeply leaning into her entrepreneurial spirit—but that spirit is nothing new for the Duchess of Sussex.

In a new interview with Fortune published on April 8, Meghan reminisced on her first business venture: making scrunchies and selling them. “I’d buy the remnants of fabric from the fabric store and elastics, and use my little home sewing machine to make scrunchies and sell them,” she told the outlet.

“I remember when I was really young, I must have been 8 or 9, I started making scrunchies to sell,” Meghan said, per Us Weekly. “I had my mom take me downtown to get scraps of fabric from the fabric stores and sell them for five bucks.”

She felt a sense of achievement at a young age, and in 2021 said at The New York Times DealBook Online Summit that “I remember the feeling of knowing that I had done something. I had invested in myself and done this labor and been compensated for it. There’s a sense of pride that comes from that.”

She’s no longer selling scrunchies for $5, but her As Ever products—eight in total so far—are intentionally affordable, she said. The products range in price from $12 to $28, and Meghan told Fortune she did that because, “From our standpoint, certainly for me, even in the expansion of the brand, things should still feel accessible.”

“But as we look at the larger context of how this is going to affect the consumer day to day, I’m very grateful that in part of the conception of this brand, I wanted to create products that look more prestige, but are more accessible and affordable,” she added. “I think during any time of recession, people still want to find creature comforts, items that can bring them joy.”

“At its conception, I had thought about the interest that people seem to have in my fashion, for example, what I would wear,” Meghan continued. “I think there’s a parallel here, always the ‘high-low.’ I always loved things that present beautifully but didn’t break the bank.”

Meghan also addressed her new podcast, Confessions of a Female Founder, which dropped its first of eight episodes on April 8: “I’m talking about what I’m going through as I’m going through it, not with reflection after some time, not with that different vision you can have when you think about hindsight 20/20,” she said. While she said the schedule for the show was “very, very tight” it was “the right move to do the storytelling justice.”

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