so Meghan is going to do her own version of Flamingo estate. Because it’s so easy
This article really is astounding in its revelations about how M operates. Nothing is original. She wanted to be part of the business…was refused her demand and so flounces off to be an imitation. Sound familiar?
Some quotes from that DM article:
There is a very particular kind of perfection in an elegantly stamped brick of soap, especially ones made with hand-picked black pepper from Madagascar, or sustainable Big Sur sea salt, or jasmine from a third-generation Egyptian farm, plucked every morning at dawn.
In fact, the offerings from Californian lifestyle brand Flamingo Estate are so elevated — a range of candles endorsed by the Dalai Lama; a £200 jar of honey from actress Julianne Moore's bees — that, at times, it reads like a parody of a shopping list for the world's top 0.001 per cent.
Put it this way: once you have inspected a drinking chocolate gift set which costs £73, and heirloom tomato scented dish soap costing £23 — a favourite of Oprah Winfrey — you will no longer be impressed by Gwyneth Paltrow's 'luxe' vision at Goop.
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What makes this olive-oil-for-the-Cali-elite enterprise news is that in 2022 the owner was visited numerous times by Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex.
She, of course, has just announced her own lifestyle brand, American Riviera Orchard, which will operate from her own Tuscan-style cream palazzo in Montecito in California. And as we shall see, the indications are that it has numerous areas of coincidence with the Flamingo Estate in terms of style, aspiration, inspiration and even target market.
That she was inspired by this wildly fancy venture seems beyond question. The issue now becomes: is she planning on copying it wholesale?
One observer says that Meghan's newly launched lifestyle brand 'looks like what happens when you go to a dinner at Flamingo Estate and aren't invited back' and adds that Meghan's offering is 'suspiciously derivative'. It's no surprise to be told that she was utterly enamoured by this vision of uncompromising high-end perfection, presented with unbending elegance.
Or, as the website puts it: 'Flamingo Estate is a reminder that beauty is not so much the penchant of certain people for exceptional things, as it is their refusal to stand for anything less.' Words which one can imagine dropping from Meghan's lips.
Reports reveal that she was so bowled over by the vision that she actually wanted to partner Christiansen and his boyfriend Aaron Harvey in business, as she did for instance with the drinks company Clevr Blends, in which she invested back in December 2020.
Writer Rachel Strugatz, of U.S. entertainment website Puck, said last week: 'There were multiple in-person meetings with the Flamingo Estate team in 2022, I'm told, and Markle expressed a desire to come on as an 'active partner' in the business.'
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Chocolate gift set costing £73
She added: 'Apparently, Markle and Prince Harry became such big fans that they displayed Flamingo Estate products in their home .'
This seems to be true beyond dispute. A stack of Flamingo Estate books about gardening and the environment, costing an astonishing £290 for six books, is visible in the background of a 2022 clip of Prince Harry promoting a New Zealand eco-travel project from his study.
Strugatz said that no deal was ever done between Flamingo Estate and Meghan, noting: 'Ultimately, the estate realised they didn't want to take the business in that direction.'
She added that a source said: 'It was a business she was trying to be a part of,' and said that Meghan had the chance to look through all the relevant financial information which an investor might, giving her 'intimate knowledge of the business'.
With Flamingo Estate sales doubling each year and the venture now in profit, you might imagine that this would present a very tempting prospect for Meghan, a former actress with an excess of public attention and a well-developed aspirational personal style but a lack of long-term commercial deals.
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But mostly there is a unnerving feeling of synchronicity. Even the suggestion that there might be an American Riviera Orchard shop is very Flamingo Estate — it had a successful pop-up in the Hamptons over the summer.
Perhaps the biggest clue is the word 'Orchard'. Meghan — a city girl who grew up in LA and worked in Toronto — has not up to now been much noted for her love of the natural world.
But her new website is, by name at least, explicitly selling itself on the natural wonders of the place where she lives — the American Riviera as some call Montecito — and its orchard. In this, once again, it is very much following in the Flamingo Estate footsteps.
