Meghan Markle today revealed she received business advice from her ‘mentor and friend’ Oprah Winfrey ahead of launching her lifestyle brand As Ever.

The Duchess of Sussex said she had been in ‘so much fear of failure or opinion’ but Winfrey gave her advice to ‘encapsulate your essence’ in her business.

Meghan spoke about her friendship with Winfrey in the fourth episode of her new Lemonada Media series Confessions Of A Female Founder which came out today.

She was interviewing IT Cosmetics co-founder Jamie Kern Lima – just one day after Meghan gave her first ever podcast interview yesterday to the entrepreneur.

During the new podcast, she also spoke about how she could not audition for beauty adverts when she was an actress, because of her freckles. And Meghan claimed she was rejected for more acting auditions than other people because she is mixed race.

Talking about the early days of her As Ever business idea, Meghan said: ‘At the beginning, I just liked making jam. All I liked to do was just make jam and preserves. 

‘And it went from, ‘Okay, I’m gonna share this jam with lots of friends and family,’ to ‘People really like it and it brings me joy. So maybe I can share it more broadly’.

‘But even then, I was in so much fear of failure or opinion, that I wasn’t thinking big enough at first – at the onset I thought, ‘Okay, I know what I can do, I’m going to go online, I can get what’s called a ‘Cottage Licence”, which you can get in the State of California, which means if you cook something in your home you can sell it up to a certain amount at a farmers’ market or somewhere small. 

‘And I thought ‘Okay, well that’s great, I’ll get my Cottage Licence and I applied for one. And I just though ‘I’ll just do small batch jam from home.’ And I had to step back and look at what I was doing and saying, ‘Am I playing small because I want to play small? Or am I setting in motion playing small because I’m scared?”

Meghan has known Winfrey for years, with her having been a guest at her wedding to Prince Harry in May 2018 and famously interviewing the couple in March 2021.

And the Duchess said: ‘Oprah, who I know is a mentor and friend to you [Kern Lima], same for me, she was the one that said, ‘There are tonnes of things you could put your name on. But for you and how you like to show up for people, once you figure out how to encapsulate your essence, then you’ll know’.’

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Meghan also spoke about how Kern Lima offered her advice as she was developing As Ever – previously known as American Riviera Orchard.

The Duchess said: ‘For me, starting a company, it’s newer, [I am] surrounded by very savvy business women friends. You and I had just become friends, and I was talking to you about business.

‘I remember you said to me, ‘Okay, so what’s the timeline?’ I said, ‘Oh, a couple months from now.’ You said, ‘That’s too soon.’ And I didn’t want to hear that, but you’re right.’

‘You planted a seed that became a knowing for me, and it gave me the grace to have the space to take my time until it was right.

‘To really not be concerned about someone else’s urgency, or the media’s urgency, or speculation’s urgency, somehow becoming my urgency – to wait until you’re ready. Even if I didn’t want to hear it, it was the thing that I needed to hear.’

Kern Lima then said: ‘If all of a sudden our timelines are being pushed out or something, we think we did something wrong. We think, ‘Oh, everyone else sure looks like they have it together on social media or whatever, it must just be me.’

‘Because a lot of times when you look at companies or you look at businesses or anything online, you know, you see the outcome or the external.’

And Meghan continued: ‘Yes, they create the illusion of – here’s the finished product and look at how great it is. It’s just tied up with a bow and the bow is perfect as opposed to, the process is not perfect.

‘The process can be painful and it can be riddled with things that don’t just make you question your business, they make you question yourself.’

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During the podcast, the Duchess also spoke about how she could not audition for beauty adverts due to her freckles.

She said: ‘That would have been when I was an actor, auditioning for commercials. And I remember my commercial agent could not submit me for beauty or skincare ads because I had freckles.’

Meghan said her freckles were not considered as ‘a sign of beauty’, adding of the beauty industry of old: ‘You couldn’t see yourself reflected there.’

However, she spoke about how Kern Lima was using women of all ages, sizes and skin tones for models.

The Duchess said: ‘That was such new thinking then. When you were bringing that to market that was so [unheard of]. Now it may seem more normalised.

‘People listening now will be like ‘Well yeah of course,’ It was not an of course. It was a revolutionary way to think about makeup and beauty at the time.’ 

Kern Lima founded her firm in 2008 after having trouble finding products to help her struggles with rosacea and hyperpigmentation – and said she was rejected for ‘three years straight’ while trying to get her new product in stores.

She told Meghan: ‘I sent samples everywhere and none of them believed, at the time, in this idea of a product that works for people with skin issues and we show it on all ages and real people and sizes and skin tones.

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‘They would always say this to me, these words exactly, ‘Women will only buy makeup from images of unattainable aspiration.’ It was always those two words, ‘unattainable,’ which means you can’t even look like that ’cause it’s not real.’

Meghan then spoke about how the rejections she suffered in acting auditions.

The Duchess said: ‘As you’re talking about all these ‘nos’, for me, what was I doing before, I was acting. Oh my gosh, oh please. I heard ‘no’ all the time, especially because I wasn’t cookie cutter for a specific type. 

‘At the start of my auditioning career you were either the black girl or the while girl or the Latina girl. Everything was typecast, so being mixed I could get into a lot of rooms, that meant as a numbers game I heard ‘no’ even more’. 

Since the start of last month, the Duchess has launched her Netflix show With Love, Meghan and lifestyle brand As Ever, appeared at a Time100 summit in New York and posted a series of Instagram videos including one featuring Princess Lilibet’s accent.

She has also released a new episode of Confessions Of A Female Founder each Tuesday this month – including interviews with Bumble founder Whitney Wolfe Herd; Girls Who Code founder Reshma Saujani and Highbrow Hippie co-founder Kadi Lee.

Meghan and her husband Prince Harry also last week unveiled a memorial to young people who lost their lives due to online harms, and gave an interview to the BBC .

Yesterday, Meghan told Kern Lima in an interview for Kern Lima’s podcast that she is enjoying a new ‘honeymoon’ feeling with Harry since they got ‘a little bit of breathing space’ after quitting their royal duties.

Meghan said she and Harry, 40, struggled to fully enjoy one another’s company early in their relationship as they were quickly put into ‘the trenches’.

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The pair started dating in 2016 and married in 2018, initially taking on royal duties before deciding to step back from their roles in 2020, leading to strained relations between Harry and the King and the Prince of Wales.

She said: ‘You have to imagine at the beginning, everyone has, like, butterflies. Then we immediately went into the trenches together. Yeah, right out of the gate, like six months into dating.

‘So now, seven years later, when you have a little bit of breathing space, you can just enjoy each other in a new way, and that’s why I feel like it’s more of a honeymoon period for us now.’

Meghan also said Harry was ‘just going to do whatever he can to make sure that our family is safe and protected and we’re uplifted and still make time for date nights’.

She added: ‘He’s also a fox. If you haven’t noticed, my husband’s very, very handsome. But his heart is even more beautiful.’

Meghan became emotional when talking about her children, Archie and Lilibet, and revealed that she sends emails to secret addresses she has created for them to read when they are older.

‘Before I go to bed, almost every night, I email them, like, here’s your report card from today, or, oh my gosh, wasn’t it the funniest thing this morning? Or here’s a picture of you two having breakfast, or here’s you playing.

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‘The things that you’re not going to frame, the things that you’re not going to put pen to paper in a journal, but which they will end up seeing at one point in their life, maybe when they’re 16 or when they’re 18.

‘I’ll say, here’s an email that I’ve been keeping for you. Here’s everything and every moment that I wanted to tell you how much I love you and, like, how proud I am of you.’

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Meanwhile Meghan’s representatives have denied she uses the title Her Royal Highness after relinquishing royal duties.

The Duke and Duchess gave up royal titles when they stepped down as senior royals in March 2020, but yesterday’s interview with Meghan showed a gift card bearing the title HRH.

Shown during the podcast on a gift basket sent by Meghan to Kern Lima, the card reads ‘With Compliments of HRH The Duchess of Sussex’.

Kern Lima said the basket containing homemade strawberry sauce and ice cream was sent to her home ‘about a year ago… to see if that helps lighten my load’.

A spokesman for the Sussexes said they do not use HRH titles.

Although no laws were passed or documents signed to prevent their use, Harry and Meghan’s agreement with the late Queen and senior officials was that they would stop using the word ‘Royal’ after what was christened Megxit Day.

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Earlier this week, Lilibet’s accent was heard for first time in a new video posted on Instagram by the Duchess.

The three-year-old daughter of Meghan and Harry was asked what she thought of jam as it was being prepared, and Lilibet replied: ‘I think it’s beautiful.’

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Harry and Meghan live in Montecito in California, with their children Lilibet and Archie, five.

Meghan’s first batch of As Ever products, including raspberry spread, flower sprinkles and herbal tea, sold out, but her Netflix lifestyle series was met with a barrage of critical reviews.

Last week at the Time 100 summit in New York, Meghan said it had been an ‘incredibly busy’ time recently as she launched her TV show, new podcast and lifestyle brand As Ever but being a mother gave her ‘perspective’.

In the third episode of Confessions Of A Female Founder on April 22, Meghan spoke to Lee and branded American Riviera Orchard, the former name of her lifestyle business, a ‘word salad’, adding: ‘I didn’t love that so much.’

The second episode with Saujani on April 15 saw Meghan speak about ‘juggling it all’ and nursing a poorly Archie and Lilibet at home.

And in the first episode with Wolfe Herd on April 8, the Duchess said she suffered medical complications after childbirth, and had to cope with the ‘world’ not knowing.

Meghan’s eight-part series with Lemonada Media launched with the promise of ‘girl talk’ and advice on how to create ‘billion-dollar businesses’.

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