Meghan Markle Merch: artisanal lavender dog soap, anyone?

Kate Middleton news derails Meghan Markle’s big plan

The global outpouring of goodwill for the Princess of Wales as she fights cancer may leave Meghan Markle in a very difficult position.

Daniela Elser

March 26, 2024 - 4:01PM

Are you in need of a new dog lead or meditation cushion or wine carrier or drawer organisers or marmalade or a bird feeder? How are you doing for pet shampoo, lanterns and tisanes?

If you are then, boy, do I have some good news for you. Meghan the Duchess of Sussex has heard your cries and soon you could be able to buy all this and much, much more from her new American Riviera Orchard (ARO) lifestyle brand.

Those industrious sorts over at the Daily Mail have somehow gotten their hands on ARO’s trademark application which for the first time reveals the scope and ambition of the duchess’ first major solo commercial project and golly gosh it’s a big ‘un.

To which I say, amen. Build it and they will hopefully come and spend money. Dream big and then embroider it on a pillow you can sell at a massive mark-up. I am all in on the return of Business Meghan seven years after she shuttered her blog The Tig, even if that was blandly derivative.

Meghan Markle’s new lifestyle brand American Riviera Orchard will have quite the array of goods. 

However, in the ten days since ARO’s Instagram debut, the world tilted on its axis with Kate the Princess of Wales’ announcement that she has cancer.

How could the incredible global deluge of support and sudden lovey-dovey messages of goodwill for the princess affect the public reception of ARO?

Basically, will discerning shoppers fork over large wodges of hard-earned cash for artisanal lavender dog soap to a woman who is not on speaking with Kate? And who has spent the last few years chipping away at Kate’s image?

No launch date has yet been revealed for ARO but it mustn’t be far off.

For the better part of the last year reports have circulated that Meghan was beavering away at some entrepreneurial online turn with the only oblique hints being that it would be authentic and whatnot.

Then on March 14 came the big reveal of ARO on Instagram, including a 15-second video of the 42-year-old looking like someone auditioning for the part of a sister-wife, showing her arranging flowers and mixing something in an artfully rustic kitchen.

Meghan Markle's new lifestyle brand, seen in a promotional video posted to Instagram. Picture: American Riviera Orchard/Instagram

No matter what best laid plans might have been drawn up, just over a week later, on March 22, Kate released her video – the internet reeled and the Church of England sat down to write a special prayer (truly) to wish the princess a speedy recovery.

The worldwide reaction to the video has been truly incredible to witness.

It has been viewed 197.5 million times on the Waleses’ official Twitter and Instagram accounts alone. In the US, CBS broke away from their live coverage of March Madness basketball to broadcast the video, Prime Ministers and Presidents by the dozen nearly fell over themselves to show their support and the White House press secretary, Dr Jill Biden and President Joe Biden all separately shared their effusive best wishes within a matter of hours.

Then came the hand-wringing and the self-flagellating with millions worrying about the consequence of their gleeful reposting of bonkers Kate theories and speculation.

The end result of all this sympathy and suddenly caring bleating is that Kate has basically been deified in only a few days.

The Princess of Wales revealing she is undergoing treatment for cancer. Picture: Kensington Palace

So where does this leave Meghan and ARO? Could this dramatic volte face of feeling towards Kate have an impact on her business’ debut?

Join me as we really get into the weeds here.

One argument here is, the two women’s lives have precisely zero bearing on each other. Meghan and husband Prince Harry the Duke of Sussex put out their own one-sentence statement wishing Kate “health and healing” and according to People, the California-based couple have also reached out privately.

The Sussexes are entirely free agents meaning they can do whatever they fancy with their spare hours in between manifesting abundance and writing cheques for the small army of top London silks toiling around the clock on Harry’s hacking lawsuits. Meghan could join a Mars mission or convert their lesser sauna (they reportedly have two) into a rescue shelter for Pomeranians or run for Santa Barbara comptroller and it would be fine and dandy.

Whatever is happening back in Blighty has nothing to do with whatever the duke and duchess are doing.

Kate, William, Harry and Meghan reunited briefly after the Queen died in September 2022 but relations have remained strained since. Picture: Chris Jackson/Getty Images

However, the other argument goes, get real. That’s a wilfully naive interpretation.

For years, the Sussexes have largely built their US brand in opposition to the royal family. The couple put their hearts on their sleeves and shared, shared, shared, even sometimes when they were not being paid.

While Crown Inc. and Harry’s relatives were unconsciously biased, frigidly cold in the face of personal suffering and emotionally constipated, the Sussexes were the open, evolved version of royalty, them valiantly speaking truth to an antiquated institution and casting royal life as a protracted emotional and psychological trial. (Though seriously, how can anyone doubt them on that last point?)

Harry and Meghan with their Oprah interview, Netflix series and the duke’s memoir Spare, offered a deeply unflattering portrayal of William and Kate claiming that they had encouraged Harry to dress up as a Nazi, William had attacked Harry, Kate had made Meghan cry and in one shocking incident currently under investigation by the European Commission, Kate was reluctant to share her lip gloss with Meghan. (The Hague has also been notified.)

In November last year, the Dutch version of highly sympathetic Sussex biographer Omid Scobie’s Endgame named King Charles and Kate as having commented about the Sussexes’ son Prince Archie’s skin colour. The duke and duchess did not comment on the claim push back in any way.

The Waleses and the Sussexes have not been on good terms to say the least. 

Given this history, this story, the image that Meghan has cultivated post-Megxit is the yin to Kate’s yang, what could this mean for ARO’s launch?

In this climate, will Meghan pitching herself as a cosy domestic goddess with perfect taste land with shoppers and see the orders stream in? Or could there be some sort of shopping protest vote, so to speak, with people staying away from ARO out of sympathy for the Princess of Wales?

Will support for Kate see the credit-card toting masses boycott or avoid ARO? Or is Meghan’s US support base so big (and her taste so exquisite) that her sister-in-law’s health battle will have no impact?

(I have said it before and I will say it again for anyone who needs to hear it – the Duchess of Sussex has sublime style.)

It’s interesting to note that to date, ARO has attracted 570,000 Instagram followers, despite no content aside from that first video. That’s a truly impressive figure until you realise that in 2019 when Harry and Meghan launched @SussexRoyal, they set a Guinness world record for reaching one million followers in five hours and 45 minutes, then the shortest time ever. (Jennifer Aniston later broke that record.)

And William and Kate? They have gained just shy of one million new followers this year alone.

Daniela Elser is a writer, editor and a royal commentator with more than 15 years’ experience working with a number of Australia’s leading media titles.

 

Beware the Helping Hand (or: How to Make a Crazy Quilt)

 

I just had one of those godawful internet experiences of losing a few thousand words I labored over for the entire evening – because I forgot to hit “update”. I was adding it to a previously-published post, so it wouldn’t automatically save as a draft. So it didn’t. But I will make an attempt at piecing it back together. The gifs are random and just a way to break up the block of text.

Have you ever had a relative you tolerated, even tried to be nice to, strictly because they were kin and you didn’t feel you had a choice? I had one of those, but no more. I had to unload this person for the sake of my – excuse me – “mental health”.

And the whole thing is so ironic, in light of what went down, and why.

My sister-in-law, my husband’s brother’s wife, whom I will call Janie, is what used to be called a “ busybody” – happily probing into everyone else’s business, then passing along the most sensitive bleeding chunks of information with relish, especially if it would serve her in some way. And this did.

She would phone me. For the past 30+ years, at least three or four times a year, she’d phone me, and talk, and talk, and talk, in her rattling-on, self-involved way – which was irritating enough – but it was worse than that. I don’t know how some people do this, but she was adept at extracting information from people – me in particular. When I’d finally get off the phone with her, which always took a lot of effort, I’d always have the feeling that I never should have told her any of that stuff. But somehow it came out. Like a robin pulling a worm out of the ground, she somehow got things out of me, largely from asking questions so none-of-her-business that you somehow answered her because you couldn’t quite believe what she just said. 

Never once, ever, in my life, have I phoned Janie, because I didn’t want to phone Janie. I don’t like Janie, and I never did. I don’t want to talk to her. Ever. And yet, for reasons I have never understood, she phones and phones, tagging along after me like a particularly obnoxious dog you can’t shake off.

This has taken a turn just lately because she started to follow my Facebook posts, and leave likes and comments on the majority of them. Some of them were nice, but mostly they gave me that cloying feeling. She was fastening on. Coat-tailing, they used to call it. Even reading her comments made me feel drained. After she read my Facebook post on “Why I Hate Mental Health” (because it has become a shallow, meaningless buzzword), she phoned me (of course! She always phones me!), and began to talk. Oh yes, I was so right! Oh yes, the mental health care system is terrible! And as it turned out, she has taken it upon herself to become a Mental Health Crusader, and has joined some sort of board of directors and gets up at board meetings and tells Tales of Terror from the Crypt of Mental Illness. 

I should have been clued in when she said she told them all about her close friend, a woman with schizophrenia whose doctor changed her meds, leading her to attempt suicide so she had to be hospitalized. She told this in colorful detail, which I am sure must have really impressed her pals at the board meeting, but while she was rattling on, my guts began to squirm. 

Did Janie, um, like, ask permission to say these things? Did her close friend want those painful episode brought up and trotted out as an example of How the System Fails the Mentally Ill? I had no idea, but my stomach-squirm turned out to be prescient. 

To further prove what a selfless crusader she is for the lame, the halt and the blind, she then launched into the story of how I had to spend three nights in a hospital corridor because they had no room for me in the psych ward, and how I had then climbed out of bed, crawled down the hall on my hands and knees to a pay phone, and phoned the crisis line so I’d have someone to talk to.

That’s the thing, Janie remembers stuff. God, does she remember. This was the kind of thing I would tell her, oh, maybe 30 years ago, but she filed it all away.  But there it was again, dredged up, fresh as paint, raw and red and glistening. She then said she told this psychiatric horror story at her board meeting, in an attempt to raise funds for one of her pet projects, Feed the Criminally Insane or something. No kidding, she told my story to impress the board. 

But there was just one problem. More than one, really, but the main one is this: it never happened. She took several different stories I wish I had never told her and conflated them, stitched them together, “curated” them into the ultimate horror story, when in reality the hospital corridor thing (which was only one night) happened in 1982, and the crisis line thing happened in an entirely different setting (NOT a hospital) in 2004. And never did I ever crawl on my hands and knees. I walked, until some nurse shouted at me “GET BACK INTO BED!” (which was bad enough, but still not crawling). So the most RECENT story, told in very garbled form, happened 20 years ago. Out of these rags and tatters,  she stitched together a crazy quilt of horror that was much more colorful and impressive than anything that actually happened. 

She did mention that she "didn't use my whole name", which she seemed to think made it perfectly OK to profit from my "story". (Though she DID say it was her sister-in-law.) She also assumed that because I had told HER about it, I was completely fine with sharing it with anyone at all, up to and including a Society for the Prevention of Straitjackets (or whatever the hell).

But this time it was different. I had had it with Janie. Forever. I just couldn’t pretend to be nice to her any more and just told her to STOP dragging up stuff from the past that I’m trying to forget about! And I tell you, she was very upset. I was raining on her social worker/self-righteous-charity-lady parade, thwarting her shining quest to Speak for Those who Cannot Speak for Themselves, the  powerless, the stigmatized, the crawling dregs of society! 

I don’t remember yelling at her any time before in all those dozens or hundreds of annoying one-sided phone calls, but I did it this time, and she was not only astonished but actually quite offended. What?? I’m not grateful for her selfless service to The Cause? I didn’t want to help her save every  mental patient who ever crawled along the floor in a psych ward?  Well, no, Janie. I don't. She finally said, “QUIT SHOUTING AT ME! I heard you the first time, so you can just stop ranting at me!” 

At that point, I hung up. I immediately blocked her on Facebook, then deleted her furious email response unread, though the first line gave the impression of a tiny little person jumping up and down and screaming. The exclamation points were practically flying off the page. So that’s the end of Janie, and I now realize I never DID have to have any sort of relationship with her. I just felt like a captive audience. I never wanted to talk to her on the phone, yet for years and years I let it happen, and she went right on studying and extracting and collating her crystalline memories of fuckups that happened to me forty years ago. (Or maybe they didn't, but it sure sounded good that way.) I’m fascinating, you see. I’m a live one. Right there in the jar, on the end of the assembly line. So her scientific little busybody mind could poke, prod, and finally present the results of her laboratory experiment to the Board of Directors, with the final goal of getting a cash grant for all her psychiatric charity work. 

I guess this has gone on long enough, and if THIS one gets deleted I give up. I guess what I’ve learned is to pay a lot more attention to my discomfort and to trace it down to the source – and then, wherever possible, GET RID OF the source so I can live my life without emotional vampirism, from my own family or from anyone else.

I've left out a few bits and pieces, but because it's my blog and I'll rant if I want to, I'll add this. On the phone, Janie recounted how she was gathering funds for her Mental Health Event (bake sale, rodeo, nude swim), and someone dared to joke at her, saying "so are you crazy too?" or something equally devastating. Janie told him to FUCK OFF, turned on her heel and walked away. (This was in public.) She recounted this proudly, as if to elicit oohs and ahhs  from me, exclamations of how brave, how gutsy, oh my, you go girl, etc. Ohhhh, thank you so much for standing up for me, speaking for those incapable of speaking for themselves! (At the same time, do you notice anything here? ANY implication AT ALL that she herself has a mental health condition is outrageous and abusive and causes her to fly into a public fury.)

Janie has never been popular in my family. No one says it out loud, because we’re not that sort of family, but everyone has had a “story” at some point. Bill’s sister Judy once told me in a sort of muttering voice that she saw Janie in her kitchen, opening each kitchen cupboard and each kitchen drawer and snooping around in the contents. She said it was like an inspection. Mostly the muttered complaints were about the fact that they never saw her husband (was he being held hostage somewhere?), and her busy-body-ness and general obliviousness to other people’s feelings. Then I heard the incredible story from Bill’s brother that Janie had once been in a cult, complete with shaved head, mantras, sexually-abusive gurus, and whatever else they have in cults. It struck me as strange, as she doesn’t strike me as someone who would take orders from anyone – or was it a sort of School for Cult Leaders, and she was studying for a degree?