The penultimate episode of the Duchess of Sussex’s podcast, Confessions of a Female Founder, has dropped, where she spoke about the pressures of motherhood ‘in the spotlight’ with Kitsch founder Cassandra Thurswell
Just a few hours after celebrating her seven-year wedding anniversary, Meghan Markle has dropped the penultimate episode of her new podcast series, Confessions of a Female Founder.
The Duchess of Sussex, who runs her lifestyle business As Ever, sat down with Cassandra Thurswell for the seventh episode of her business-focused series. Thurswell founded Kitsch, a highly successful international company that makes eco-friendly haircare and beauty accessories.
The two businesswomen discussed the struggles of balancing their parenting duties with growing their business, and Cassandra admitted that until her daughter was seven years old, she struggled with managing her role as a mother and as a CEO, struggling with significant “post-partum anxiety” at first.
“I had my daughter, I thought everything was going to be just so easy,” Cassandra explained, “I would continue to just go on as my normal self, breastfeed at the office and do all these things, and I had a real reality check.
“I had some really intense post-partum anxiety, my husband really had to step in, and this was when we were really growing quickly, and it was such a crippling growth period for me…it wasn’t until she was seven years old that I was like ‘I’m okay’.”
Meghan then later shared her own experience of becoming a mother, to Prince Archie in 2019 and Princess Lilibet in 2021, and how it differed from the expectations she had beforehand, seemingly nodding to the pressures that came with life in the royal spotlight. “I will say for myself, especially when they are baby babies,” Meghan said.
“And yes the crying – before I was a mom, and I’ve always wanted to be a mom, but before I was a mom, I was ‘Oh gosh, I’m going to give a speech with a baby on my hip. I had a whole vision…and you fast forward – granted I had a lot of external things happening at the time I had both pregnancies and both babies – but it was not the way I envisioned it.”
The two women also discussed in detail how Cassandra managed to make such a profitable business entirely by ‘bootstrapping’ – using the founder’s money and profits from the business to grow it, instead of taking any capital from investors.
The new episode comes shortly after Meghan shared a sweet memory board collage on her Instagram account, with many never-before-seen snaps of the Sussex family, to mark seven years of her marriage to Prince Harry – including some seriously sweet photos of Prince Archie and Princess Lilibet.
She captioned the post, “Seven years of marriage. A lifetime of stories. Thanks to all of you (whether by our side, or from afar) who have loved and supported us throughout our love story – we appreciate you. Happy anniversary!”
Confessions of a Female Founder is an eight-part series that sees Meghan – who has recently launched two new business ventures, lifestyle brand As Ever, and Netflix series With Love, Meghan – get some insider tips and tricks from successful female businesswomen on how they “scaled small ideas into successful companies”.
Produced by Lemonada Media, the series has featured “fly on the wall” conversations with entrepreneurs like Whitney Wolfe Herd, who founded the dating app Bumble, and Reshma Sajauni, who founded Girls Who Code. Confessions of Female Founder has received a pretty mixed response, with one critic slamming the series as “sycophantic” and another saying it was made up of “45 minutes of platitudes”.
However, the first episode did make the Top 10 overall podcast charts and took the number one spot amongst business podcasts – though it has since dropped off.
The series has seen Meghan make a number of candid confessions of her own, including that she suffered from pre-eclampsia, a “rare and scary” condition after one of her pregnancies. She also opened up in the second episode about going through a miscarriage in 2020, telling her guest, “”I’ll bring this up if you are comfortable talking about it… I have spoken about the miscarriage 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.”
It’s Meghan’s second foray into the podcasting world, with her first series Archetypes cancelled by Spotify after one 12-episode season. Archetypes was first released in 2022, and saw Meghan, along with A-list pals and guests like Serena Williams, Mindy Kaling, and Mariah Carey, break down labels that often have been levied at women, like “diva”, “singleton”, and “bimbo”.
