Watch: Meghan bakes and poses in ballgown to debut lifestyle business
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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 on Thursday with a holding page inviting supporters to join a waiting list to be kept updated about “products, availability and updates”.
An Instagram profile under the same handle, @americanrivieraorchard, features the same gold logo, featuring decorative A and R initials, and states that the page was “by Meghan, The Duchess of Sussex⁣⁣⁣”.
It features a short video set to Nancy Wilson’s I Wish You Love, which shows the Duchess arranging flowers, baking in a kitchen and posing in a doorway, at what appears to be her Montecito home, in a ballgown.
A trademark application for American Riviera Orchard was filed on Feb 2 and is awaiting approval.
It suggests that the Duchess intends to manufacture a range of domestic items from tableware and cutlery to cookbooks, place name card holders and placemats.
Jellies, jams and marmalades
It also covers a range of preserves, from jellies, jams and marmalades to various vegetable-based spreads, nut butters and fruit butters.
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 Duchess has been working on the initiative for more than a year.
Previously billed as a lifestyle and wellness brand, the commercial venture had been heavily trailed for last autumn, but was delayed as it evolved and “took different shapes”.
There had been much 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”.
The brand is likely to evolve and slowly expand. If successful, it is thought to be 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.
The new website was designed by Canada-based digital agency Article, which Meghan has previously used to help construct The Tig, Archewell and Sussex.com sites.
She said in February: “There is a reason I have worked with Ryan and the talented team at Article for a decade: their attention to detail, their creativity and care, and the thoughtful approach to design as well as to the user experience.”
The Duchess hinted at her plans in a 2022 interview with The Cut magazine 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, Princess Lilibet, for which she had labels made on Etsy.
Davis wrote that as she left the house, she wondered “if somehow I’d missed everything she was trying to say”.
In 2017, the Duchess was forced to shut down The Tig, the successful lifestyle blog that she ran before meeting Prince Harry.
She described the blog as “a hub for the discerning palate - those with a hunger for food, travel, fashion & beauty”.
It was closed shortly before the announcement of 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, the Duchess 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.
Regardless, the Duchess has often made a virtue of her baking capabilities.
Last March, she shared a lemon olive oil cake recipe for a cookbook in aid of the World Central Kitchen.
And during a royal tour to Australia in 2018, she took her own banana bread for a picnic with a farming family in Dubbo, near Sydney.
Last month, the Duchess was photographed cooking traditional Afghan food during a visit to the Southern California Welcome Project for “an evening of cooking and storytelling”.
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 Duchess’s first solo venture after relocating to the US was an investment in Clevr Blends, a small Californian startup that makes “wellness lattes”.
