A jar of rich strawberry jam is a welcome gift, especially at the tag end of strawberry season, though that tried and true harbinger of spring is, apparently, endless in California. Nevertheless, the fifty — strategically professionally placed and presumably well-curated — friends of Meghan Markle’s who received the stately little hand-numbered jars of Ms. Markle’s “American Riviera Orchard” jam early this week responded very nicely, or at least, if not strictly per Emily Post in epistolary form, they can be said in this day and age to have responded with a certain digital alacrity, according to the unwritten laws of what now passes for the historical record, namely, on their Instagram accounts.
KINGSTON, JAMAICA – JANUARY 23: (L-R) Brian Robbins, Tracy Robbins, Meghan, Duchess of Sussex and … [+]
Tracy Robbins, the wife of Paramount prexy and CEO Brian Robbins, pictured above with Meghan Markle and Prince Harry at the Bob Marley: One Love premiere in January in Kingston, Jamaica, noted her gift of Jar No. 17 (of 50) nestled in a sumptuous basket of California lemons. Delfina Blaquier, the lissome Argentine model and wife of Prince Harry’s longtime polo teammate and friend Nacho Figueras, pictured at top with her husband, Markle, and Prince Harry at a charity polo event in Florida on April 12, posted her jar No. 10 (of 50) with an ecstatic-foodie salutation to the maker and a slightly fuzzy down-shot of the jam smeared on a piece of bread. Aspirational, cute, and just-us-folks homey, but also exceedingly luxe with its seemingly-handmade paper labels and italicized calligraphic lettering, the jam landed like that.
Of course, the Instagram shots went beyond the simple thank you shout-outs. And that was the commercial point: Markle definitely wants her jam to get to those followers (of recipients such as mesdames Blaquier and Robbins), whenever it actually hits the market.
But as of this writing, there’s no product of the Markle company’s out there yet. In fact, the only and most bare hint of things to come on the American Riviera website is a field in which to leave an email address to gain access to — with zero explanation of what the site or the company is about — a “wait list.” A Martha Stewart — or more to the generational demographic point — a Gwyneth Paltrow/Goop launch this was not. When Martha Stewart launches her new copper cookware 3.5 qt. pan ($195) on Amazon, or Gwyneth Paltrow beefs up her site’s “wellness” tab with a revolutionary new “pelvic floor and sexual health”-promoting vibrator ($395.00), there is the commercial possibility for the prospective customer to lay down money for those things, should they be so inclined.
In short, as part of Meghan Markle’s long bruited and anxiously awaited drop of her new lifestyle brand, American Riviera Orchard, it can be diplomatically described as a super-soft jam “release,” with an unfortunate layer of exclusivity, a you-have-to-know-the-doorman-to-get-in red velvet rope hanging in front of the disco. It will remain an irony that the jam is publicly unavailable, but it’s assumed that that detail will be taken care of shortly. By the wait list, or via some other announcement for which those on the wait list can only hope.
To review, then: American Riviera Orchard, the company, had a March 12 birth announcement on its newly-created website, which evaporated as the wait-list was launched. Roughly a month later, its strawberry jam dropped to fifty people.
Here we have an unfortunate echo of the 18-month stutter-stop wait for product between the well-trumpeted announcement of the (rumored) $20 million 2020 Spotify podcast deal with Meghan Markle and the actual 12 episodes of the “Archetypes” podcast that underwhelmed both its listeners and producers before being spiked by the company in mid-2023. The question of the hour is: why, as a “launch” tactic, announce a company, or a thing, then put nothing on offer? Why not actually produce something, then launch it?
The primary question for American Riviera Orchard and its products is whether the brand can sell things to Americans. And the Windsors of Montecito have cultivated many American connections, notably to Netflix and its CEO Ted Sarandos, to the Simmons, and certainly not least, to Oprah Winfrey, among others. Another way to put this is, whatever they try to sell, they’ll have some powerful Americans to turn to for help. The question is whether, in this country, still, they can drum up the interest in the larger public. In the case of American Riviera Orchard, that would be the larger public to whom a lifestyle product release by Martha Steward and/or Gwyneth Paltrow would really matter.
Across the pond, in Harry’s former home country, there is an entirely different math at work as relates to the public “acceptance” at almost any level, of any product that Meghan Markle or Harry would bring to market. Predictably, Fleet Street’s editors have formed whole squadrons of reporters to dog every microscopic jot and tittle of every implication of every move that the (in the British view) wayward Prince Harry and his wife make. In this instance, that means that the London tabs went long on the jam drop.
The premier British tab, the Daily Mail, long a courtroom enemy of the Windsors of Montecito and one of the several British publications with whom the tetchy couple “cut” ties, roped in a marketing expert as well as its Harry-and-Meghan-beat reporters and began dissecting the launch. Uncharacteristically for the Mail, the PR expert, Nick Ede, did not predict the brand’s abject failure.
Rather, the tabloid published a few reasoned paragraphs by Ede stating that the homey, soft launch was an attempt by Meghan Markle not to have the focus on herself but rather on the product and the company — a theory that stands up to examination in the sense that she is shooting a Netflix cooking show and that the brand will have time to take on shape. That noted, significantly, Ede was more than perplexed at the mysterious lack of website content.
In a word, even the Daily Mail is, in its fashion, partly, seeming to withhold judgement of American Riviera Orchard and its jam for the moment. Which is not to imply that the Mail writers or any other of Fleet Street’s coursing dogs on the Windsors of Montecito’s trail will be eager to give Meghan Markle a fair shake once she has the cooking show up online and some product on the brand’s website. Inarguable is this fact: It would help the Markle enterprise immensely if there were something more on offer besides the wait-list.
Blowback update: A soft launch can be as soft as the managers of the product or the site would like, but in a rather sharper trading velocity, and with a decidedly clever hacker’s awareness of what can be accomplished in (legally) “surfing” on a launch by someone with a modicum of notoriety, by April 17, 48 hours after the gauzy Instagram posts of the Montecito jam, a presumed “good Samaritan” in the UK had snapped up a very similar UK domain on GoDaddy, which then leads to a “Just Giving” page encouraging donations to the Trussell Trust, a British food bank charity.
In the “story” section of that second page lies the disclaimer that neither the UK domain nor the Just Giving page are Meghan Markle’s, and, while championing food donations, the writer (or writers) go the extra step to express sympathies for Kate and the King in their recovery from cancer diagnoses. Overall, the action has elements of a spoof, but the tone of this writing does not back that up. Reportedly, they’re actually collecting money for the Trussell Trust under a domain that is not Meghan’s carefully-crafted battle flag, but seems at a glance as if it might be.
Put bluntly, this is the kind of swift, imaginative Robin Hood philanthropy-for-the-people that does not seem to spring from a group of cardigan-wearing pensioners at afternoon tea at the parish church’s senior center. It’s far too sleek and weaponly a construct, for one thing, and thus skews far younger. It is a play, but one with a seriously political, charitable point.
Which should come as a demographic lesson and more than a little worry for the politically active, charity-minded proprietors back at American Riviera Orchard headquarters: Specifically, it means that certain significant, smart, politically active younger elements of British society don’t give a whit how Meghan Markle or Prince Harry are trying to make money. It means that those people, whom the Windsors of Montecito should by rights have on their side, would rather just bounce off and shunt a bit of Montecito’s market notoriety toward a greater need.
