When the Duke and Duchess of Sussex lived in the UK, they used “Sussex Royal” branding for their social media. Even when they were exiting the institution, they used sussexroyal.com to explain to the public what they wanted and why they were leaving. As part of the Sandringham Summit in early 2020, Prince Harry agreed (or was forced) to stop using any and all use of “royal” in their branding. No more Sussex Royal Instagram, no more updates to sussexroyal.com, no more HRH stylings. This was a huge reason why Harry and Meghan came up with the “Archewell” branding – it evoked their son’s name, it wasn’t royal or royal-adjacent, yet it had a kind of vibe they liked. They used the Archewell branding for their production company, audio/podcast company and their foundation. But guess what they just did? They launched something new: sussex.com.
From the look of it, sussex.com is just a more organized way of creating some kind of delineation between all of their projects. The new site has links to Archewell Productions, the Archewell Foundation and the old sussexroyal.com site. The new site also has more thorough and updated biographies for both Harry and Meghan, which is nice because every other week, the webmasters at royal.uk are pulling some new bullsh-t with their “updates” on Harry and Meghan’s pages and bios, playing fast and loose with their titles and HRH styles and trying to minimize the Sussexes’ work.
My favorite part of Meghan’s new bio is that her hellish time in the UK is reduced to “In 2018, Meghan married Prince Harry, becoming The Duchess of Sussex.” While Meghan’s patronages and projects as a working royal are mentioned (the cookbook, SmartWorks), she’s basically doing the most to distance herself from That Family.
Hello Magazine reports that Harry and Meghan might use sussex.com as a platform for “personal and official updates,” and they likely wanted to launch it before their three-day trip to Canada. Sure. But they were giving us updates on Archewell.com too, so why this new site? While I know they have their reasons – good reasons – for being wary of being too online, I am f–king begging them to have more of an online presence. Meghan doesn’t even need a personal Instagram, but they should absolutely have an Archewell IG. I’m praying that they use sussex.com to, like, blog about what they’re doing and give us updates on their work in a more direct way. It’s been four years of their antiquated media/comms strategy and they need to shake things up.
Photos courtesy of Cover Images, screencap of sussex.com.