I’ll buy whatever Meghan Markle is selling

At a time when life can feel like a relentless trudge, she is selling a Californian fantasy – and Sophie Gallagher is on the waiting list.

How best to launch a modern lifestyle brand? You’ll need an Instagram account, a tasteful (yet utterly ambiguous) teaser video, and a customer base hanging on your every move. Tick, tick, tick. In a week that has been feeding us dramatic royal updates by the second, Meghan Markle has thrown her hat into the ring as if to say: how about enjoying some expensive linen and homemade nut butter while you watch my in-laws fall apart?

The Princess of Wales is missing in action, King Charles is being treated for cancer, and the Kensington Palace Photoshop account is working overtime. Just as we thought we might get a second of work done, on Thursday afternoon, the Duchess of Sussex relaunched her former career as a lifestyle-blogger-turned-influencer with a new brand, American Riviera Orchard.

This is The Tig 2.0 – the blog she gave up when she married Prince Harry. The information is sparse. The website is bare apart from a waitlist sign-up – who knows what we’re waiting for?! Of course I handed over my email anyway. But the 15-second promotional film gives us an idea.
We watch well-moisturized hands organizing white roses and hydrangeas; Meghan cooking at a huge kitchen island; and a woman (presumably Meghan but the video is so low res it makes zooming nigh-on impossible) standing at the end of a long hallway in a black ball gown.

The aesthetic is Little House on the Prairie meets Succession. A snapshot of the type of life where you have enough time – and enough wealth – to wear dry-clean-only oatmeal cashmere to bake in the middle of the day. Where you could have a 365-days-a-year Californian tan. Where you could have enough disposable income to learn how to do calligraphy. Or learn how to arrange a vase of flowers rather than buying whatever is on offer at the petrol station.

A trademark application filed in the US suggests what she’ll actually be selling is tableware, home goods, decanters, a range of spreads, preserves and jellies, table place card holders, stationary and textiles, pet accessories, and cookbooks (some reports have suggested this is leading to a Netflix cooking show…). And frankly – I’m buying it all.

Whatever you think of Meghan, this curated lifestyle is utterly enviable (although I’d pass on the tortured period shacked up with the in-laws). She looks bloody great and wouldn’t we all like to mill about barefoot in a Montecito villa with some rescue dogs and Oprah on speed dial? At a time when life can feel like a relentless trudge, she is selling a Californian fantasy. She’s doing a Martha Stewart x Goop – hopefully at a more reasonable price point. Yes, it is easy to criticize.

The name is as silly as The Tig that preceded it (is it a Riviera? Is it an Orchard?) and we are rotating through careers at an astonishing pace here – children’s author/podcaster/Spotify-deal maker/philanthropist – but Meghan is a millennial so what else is to be expected? And the couple needs to make money somehow. Not least if they’ll now be paying for their security every time they visit the UK. You cannot begrudge them that. They’re not just sitting at home hoping a magic money tree pops up in the back garden.

And trading on the royal connection (she does very specifically have “By Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex” on her profile) is a bit too much to resist when the Windsors and Wales keep on serving up such high-level publicity. The best advertising agency in the world couldn’t have generated the front-page coverage the family achieved this week. As has been pointed out, a launch to coincide with the fourth anniversary of the couple’s so-called “Freedom Flight” presumably did not happen totally by accident, either. She’s savvy! She’s not missing a trick!

In the background of the video, Nancy Wilson’s jazz classic “I Wish You Love” is playing. The lyrics: “I wish you health and more than wealth, I wish you love,” feel almost ludicrously on the nose for this new chapter for Brand Sussex, the couple who’ve relentlessly sold themselves as young lovers winning against the odds, escaping a gilded cage to prioritize their happiness. Now let’s only hope they ship to the UK.