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.

 

Hey, hey, hey. . . KATE's OKAY!

 

I wasn't going to deal with this at all, except. . . it's been a slow week, I've been sick with the double-whammy of a nasty headcold and fierce spring allergies, and what the hell. I needed a distraction from "it", which is what I now call the so-called-Sussexes, those supremely boring ex-royals in which I've completely lost interest. But then this popped up!

After not being seen in public since Christmas, amid the usual swirling rumors about what the hell has happened to her, THIS photo of Kate Middleton with the kids was released, and right away everyone thought it was fishy.

Which it is.

A few teeny-tiny mistakes were made in the photoshopping - and yes, indeed, the image was photoshopped TWICE according to the "metadata", the digital information every public photo now yields.  With Adobe, which is the one I use, for God's sake - the equivalent of manipulating a photo using your thumbs.

Worse than that, the news agencies looked at it and immediately became alarmed, then "killed" it (pulled it from all the papers, wire services, etc.) - something that generally only happens with suspicious images from North Korea or the Oval Office.  So what was actually going on? All too soon, a very lame-sounding "apology" was issued implying Kate herself had botched it up. Which is, to quote the Brits, "not bloody likely".

This has led to some alarming theories, not to mention some highly-entertaining memes on social media, along with newly-fired-up speculation about where and how Kate actually is (IF she is - some say the worst has happened already). Now rumors are surging to the forefront about Prince William's affair with his old flame, Rose Whateverhername is, and the fact she is now pregnant with their SECOND love child.

I told you it was weird.

I must say that Kate makes a rather handsome man, which is more than I can say about most "trans" men who still look like women. That beard is rather striking. But not "manipulated", surely?

But this is my personal favorite. No doubt naughty Kate cut-and-pasted this one, late at night, with her thumbs, just in time for Mother's Day, which in Britain is on March 10 for some reason (and the brilliant green leaves and grass in the background added yet another element of unreality to the thing).

But never fear, I've found a number of charming photos which prove that there's nothing to see here at all. I've titled my gif presentation:  Hey, Hey, Hey. . . KATE'S OKAY!

And if she really DID photoshop these, she has obviously learned from her mistakes.

Kate, the pregnancy, the prank. . . the disaster

I'm just like anybody.  I have no interest in the Royals at all and at best find Harry's exploits - dressing like a Nazi, getting drunk and flailing around like a veritable Prince Phillip - juvenile and boring. (At least we know now that he wasn't sired by Diana's "riding instructor": his eyes are too close together, like all the rest of them). And the things they wear on their heads, the women I mean, look like those weapons the Klingons throw on Star Trek.

So I'm not really a Royal watcher, but I honestly did like the Royal wedding, the excitement and magic of it, such a departure from the suffocating,  elephantine bumph of Charles and Diana and the train that went all the way to Bristol. I like Kate, like her self-assurance and her dimples and her way of wearing clothes: stylish, but with none of the narcissistic preening and fluttering of Diana at her worst. Kate seems like the real deal to me.

And then she's pregnant - more excitement - but things aren't going the way they are supposed to, she's throwing up all the time (and do I know what that is like). So the rather overly-slender Kate has to be hospitalized before she dehydrates completely.

Then it happens: the "punk" that "punk'd" the world.

These idiot Australian radio people, whoever they are, I can't even be bothered to look up their glutinous little names, decide to try to get through to the nursing staff at the hospital. And what they do is so patently ludicrous that I can barely describe it.

Putting on the worst phony accent since - since - I don't know! I can't remember ANYONE else with an accent that bad! - the she-part of this poisonous duo called the hospital assuming the identity of some drunken drag queen who likes to impersonate Her Majesty at gay biker orgies. In other words, she was trying to sound like the Queen.

She used the word "please" twice in one sentence, for one thing. She sounded more "Strayne" than anyone I've ever heard. And the poor nurse, the naive nurse, put her through! If she says she's the Queen, she must BE the Queen. The nurse who actually reported on Kate's bouts of retching must have been equally taken in - perhaps more so, to give out so many details we really needn't have heard about.

But no one could predict what happened next. I was in the car with my husband driving home from Staples or something, he had been away for a while, and I started recounting the stupid "punk'd" story in case he hadn't heard it.

He had.  "She died, you know."

"KATE??"

"No, the nurse. She was found dead."

"What - the Royals hired a hit man? That's insane!"

""No, they think it was suicide."

It was one of those odd the-world-slips-sideways moments. It just didn't add up. This woman didn't even give out those medical details that should have been kept confidential. She just handed the phone over. What happened?

Nobody is sure what happened. But someone died. So with its usual crystalline logic, the entire human race decided to MURDER those two Australian DJs for plotting to deliberately assassinate a poor innocent nurse. Looking at it backwards, the insane logic is: they punk'd her, she died, they killed her!

I have a few points to make. Maybe I've already made them, but I'm so sick of Twit, Tweet and Twat and the Gospel of Facebook screaming "those murderers should be hanged!" and stuff like that,  I'll make them again.

One. Those punksters NEVER thought they would get through. It was one of those sleepover gigglefest type-things where little girls call someone at random and say, "Is your refrigerator running?" The worst that could happen, they probably thought, was, "Get off the phone, you wretched impostor!", or perhaps (even better!) the threat of arrest.

Two. If there had been ANY level of security at all in that hospital, the "punk" never would have happened. It would've been shot down before any information could have been given out at all.

Three. It's only one small step from freely giving out confidential medical information on the phone to carelessly letting some drag queen dressed as Liz in the door for a nice little visit. The hospital administration made a grave, even horrific mistake, far worse than mere carelessness, in maintaining such a lax system.

What the fuck were they thinking? Did they have their heads shoved up their blowholes? But though there obviously was no special policy in place to protect Kate, meaning that anyone in the world could just phone and ask  for information and get it,  the whole shameful episode got shunted on to this poor nurse. Even though nothing really bad came of her actions, she must have had such agonizing pangs of conscience that she decided she should not exist any more.

The nurse no longer exists, but someone still has to be blamed. Someone's head has to be paraded around town impaled on a stick. The villagers with flaming torches are about to close in. So it has to be those two heartless, murderous, bloodthirsty, demonic Aussie DJs!

To be honest, I feel sorry for them. I think they're just idiotic assholes who were seeing how far they could push it. Pretty far, as it turns out. Whole Facebook pages are being set up even as we speak to bring them to justice, i. e. life imprisonment, if not the gallows.

This whole thing was completely bizarre, one of the strangest stories I've ever heard, but where does the blame ultimately lie? Isn't it obvious? If the Royals trusted this place enough to put one of the most admired and influential women in the world in it, shouldn't they have known a little something about their security system, if indeed they had one? (As it turned out, they didn't.)

This isn't B-list royalty: Prince Edward's dumpy wife Whatsername, or Sarah Ferguson and her horrific fanged daughters. THIS IS KATE MIDDLETON. She is far too valuable to be trusted to a place where they might allow an IRA member dressed as Prince Phillip in for a nice little visit.

(A very sad postscript: I just had the thought that a lot of good might have come from this asinine prank. Policies might have been changed, security tightened, awareness of danger increased.  Maybe Kate might have been a lot safer next time, i. e. when she gives birth. But instead, the whole thing tumbled down into disaster.)

Nancy and Kate. . . are they really the same person???

(Also known as Sort Out the Cloned Brunettes). Half of these photos are of Kate Middleton, and the other half of Paul McCartney's new 51-year-old-but-looks-30 heiress bride, Nancy Shevell.

Can you tell whom is whom, which is which, and (most importantly) why is why? I think I've lost track, myself.

(Confused? Me too. Does Kate have a twin?)

Oh. NOW I know. . .

"Kiss me, Kate!"