Meghan Markle Lifestyle Brand Soft-Launches Luxe ‘Montecito’ Strawberry Jam To 50 Friends

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 earlier 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.

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 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. A month later, its strawberry jam dropped to fifty people roughly a month later.

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 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?

Predictably, Fleet Street, whose editors have formed whole squadrons of reporters to dog every microscopic jot and tittle of every implication of every move the wayward Prince Harry and his wife make, 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 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. But it would help the Markle enterprise if there were something more on offer besides the wait-list.