When Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, announced in March that she would be launching a lifestyle brand called American Riviera Orchard, it took the internet by storm.
The company, which will reportedly sell everything from table linens to pet food, has so far soft launched one product:
a strawberry jam that the duchess sent to 50 of her closest famous friends (it is still not available for public purchase), including Kris Jenner and Chrissy Teigen.
American Riviera Orchard is far from the first company started by Meghan and Prince Harry.
Since they exited The Firm in 2020, the couple have embarked on a number of business ventures.
Royal entrepreneurship is a relatively new phenomenon, which has produced decidedly mixed results.
Usually these businesses are started by royals further down the line of succession, or those who have left life as working royals by choice, divorce, or forced exile.
There have been major success stories, like Marie-Chantal, Crown Princess of Greece, who has helmed her eponymous luxury children’s brand, Marie-Chantal, since 2000. Just last year, the dashing Prince Carl Philip of Sweden, son of King Carl Gustaf and Queen Silvia, announced the launch of his brand, Bernadotte & Kylberg, selling upscale textiles like silk scarves and cashmere blankets.
For Princess Märtha Louise of Norway, a spiritual exercise and a visit from a guardian angel inspired her to trade her royal duties for work. “That led me to all the entrepreneurship. It led me to being a princess in a different way and not just the traditional way,” she said on a podcast episode with former princess of Luxembourg Tessy Anthony de Nassau.
She has since started a variety of businesses, many in partnership with her fiancé Durek Verrett, a spiritual shaman.
Of course, accusations of nepotism have plagued working royals for decades. Prince Edward’s run at the helm of Ardent Productions in the early ’90s ended in embarrassment and claims that he milked his family connections. (Ardent Productions denied the allegations). In Monaco, Prince Albert is currently embroiled in a financial scandal, which includes accusations that Monaco’s government unfairly awarded state contracts to businesses owned by his nephews Andrea and Pierre Casiraghi. Bloomberg Businessweek reported that both the prince and the Casiraghi brothers denied any wrongdoing, and the brothers stated that they conduct their business activities “with integrity and strict adherence to all governmental rules and regulations.”
But not all enterprising royals have been so coddled. Some of the earliest titled entrepreneurs started businesses simply to survive. After World War I and the Russian Revolution, thousands of nobles fled their home countries penniless, with few work skills and even fewer options. According to The Flight of the Romanovs by Constantine V. Pleshakov and John Curtis Perry, when Russian Grand Duke Alexander “Sandro” Mikhailovich began looking for a job, he was met with derision. “The very idea of hiring a grand duke struck them as a ridiculous notion,” Sandro noted sadly. Sandro finally managed to make a living, trading on his name. Other royals decided to start businesses on their own.
For aristocratic women, one of the main avenues of entrepreneurship was dressmaking and embroidery, a practical skill in which many of them excelled. In Paris, the stylish and enterprising Grand Duchess Maria Pavlovna started her own embroidery house, Kitmir, in the 1920s, employing dozens of other exiled Russian women who made intricate beaded shawls, handbags, and embroidered dresses by hand. She worked closely with Coco Chanel for some time before expanding to supply to over 200 other businesses.
Maria loved the work, finding fulfillment that she had lacked in her formerly cushy life. “It is not necessary to feel sorry for me. I do not believe that idle women are happier than those who work,” she stated, per Helen Rappaport’s After the Romanovs. “You have to build something new and fruitful.”
She was not the only Russian royal to join the fashion industry. The notorious and stylish Prince Felix Yusupov, one of the nobles who conspired to kill Rasputin, founded the Parisian fashion house Irfe. His famously beautiful wife, Princess Irina, served as the face of the brand. High society flocked to their first fashion show, eager to be part of such an exotic occasion.
“In the winter of 1924, there was a fashion show by the big Parisian houses at the Hotel Ritz on the Place Vendome, which ended with a ball,” Alexandre Vassiliev writes in Beauty in Exile. “The Irfe atelier was furiously working late into the night: The last designs were still being sewn as the Irfe models arrived at the Ritz well after midnight, with the ravishing Irina in the lead. It created an indelible impression even on the jaded Parisian public, who had seen it all. A French reporter wrote: ‘Originality, refined taste, meticulous work and an artistic sense of color immediately placed this modest atelier in the ranks of the big houses of fashion.’”
Fashion, beauty, and lifestyle brands would continue to be the most natural fit for royals, since their very names conjured images of luxury and glamour. In the 1950s, Princess Macella Borghese began making makeup from natural ingredients found on her family’s famed Roman estate. Eager to start a comprehensive line of lipsticks, she partnered with Charles Revson, founder of Revlon, after she received the blessing of Pope Pius XII.
But only one princess would truly make revolutionary waves in the fashion industry, building an empire now in its 50th year. After her wedding to the German prince Egon von Fürstenberg in the summer of 1969, Belgium-born Princess Diane von Fürstenberg arrived in New York with a dream. “The people I met were amused and intrigued by the unorthodox presentation of little jersey dresses pulled out of a Vuitton suitcase by a young, pregnant European princess,” she writes in her autobiography, The Woman I Wanted to Be.
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Source: CNN
