Meghan turns to jam for some extra bread
Duchess of Sussex launches online commercial lifestyle venture promoting homeware and preserves
THE Duchess of Sussex has launched a new lifestyle venture, American Riviera Orchard, that is set to sell jams, cutlery and nut butters.
The website for the business was launched yesterday with a holding page inviting supporters to join a waiting list to be kept updated about “products, and availability”.
An Instagram profile features the same gold logo and states that the page brand is “by Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex. Established 2024.”
The Instagram page features a short video set to Nancy Wilson’s I Wish You
Love, showing the Duchess arranging flowers, baking in a kitchen and posing in a ballgown at what appears to be her Montecito home.
A trademark application for American Riviera Orchard was filed on Feb 2 and is awaiting approval.
It suggests the Duchess intends to manufacture a range of domestic items from tableware and cutlery to cookery books and placemats.
It also covers a range of preserves, from jellies, jams and marmalades to various vegetable-based spreads.
The business name appears to be based on the Sussexes’ location. Their Montecito home boasts an orchard featuring orange, lemon and almond trees, while Santa Barbara is known as the “American Riviera” due to its climate, food and wine culture.
The launch follows claims that the Duchess is planning to “take on America’s most famous lifestyle queens” such as Ina Garten, Martha Stewart and Joanna Gaines and even plans to launch a “lifestyle-food show” on Netflix. The venture had been heavily trailed for last autumn, but was delayed as it evolved and “took different shapes”.
There had been speculation that it would be a version of Goop, Gwyneth Paltrow’s multi-million dollar lifestyle business, but aides said otherwise.
The initiative is considered “highly personal and “genuine to who she is”.
If the brand is successful, it is thought likely to become the Duchess’s primary focus in the longer term.
It is owned by a company called Mama Knows Best LLC, which is registered at the same Beverly Hills address as Archewell Productions.
Meghan hinted at her plans in a 2022 interview with The Cut in which she said: “Do you want to know a secret? I’m getting back … on Instagram.”
She also gave writer Allison P Davis “a harvest basket” filled with fruit and vegetables from her garden and a jar of jam from the “Lili Bunny Garden + Larder” named after her daughter, Lilibet.
Davis wrote that as she left the house, she wondered “if somehow I’d missed everything she was trying to say”.
In 2017, Meghan was forced to shut down The Tig, the lifestyle blog that she ran before meeting Prince Harry.
It was closed shortly before her engagement to Prince Harry, but the Duchess has long been keen to create something in a similar realm.
“It wasn’t just a hobby, it became a really successful business,” she said in the Netflix series Harry & Meghan.
In one post on the now defunct website, Meghan admitted that as much as she loved the ritual of cooking, she was not such a fan of baking. “There’s something about the technicality of it that stifles my inner rebel; no dash of this or extra spoonful of that,” she wrote.
The Sussexes made clear when they stepped back from their public duties to move abroad, that they wanted to become financially independent.
Since then, they have signed various lucrative commercial deals, many of which have not been as successful as they might have hoped.
The couple’s five-year Netflix deal is due to expire at the end of 2025, with a contract renewal looking increasingly unlikely, while a deal with Spotify came to a premature end last summer amid reports of disappointing audiences.
♦ The King of the Netherlands waded into the royal Photoshop row by making a joke at the Princess of Wales’s expense.
King Willem-alexander was greeting members of the public in Zutphen, when a girl wearing a handmade orange paper crown made a reference to “a photograph with your whole family”. The King replied: “Really? At least I didn’t Photoshop it.”