When Meghan Markle finally launches her new lifestyle series on Netflix next week, one man in particular may be scrutinizing it with special interest: Richard Christiansen, the Los Angeles guru-to-the-stars who some say has inspired the duchess.
After moving to California in 2020, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex appeared to become fans of Christiansen’s Flamingo Estate farm shop brand, prominently displaying its glossy coffee-table books in their Montecito home.
It’s not difficult to see why.
Christiansen, who recently spoke to the Daily Mail on the publication of his new book, has been enormously successful selling high-priced ‘lifestyle’ accouterments – food, flowers, toiletries, ideas – to the California in-crowd. In short, he has cornered a market that Meghan seems to covet.
And so, when the duchess last year launched her own lifestyle brand – at the time called American Riviera Orchard – by sending cutesy, limited edition numbered jars of strawberry jam nestled among a bowl of lemons to her celebrity pals, some suggested that it had come straight out of the Christiansen playbook.
A sprawling trademark application suggests Meghan will offer all manner of home and kitchen supplies, ranging from soaps and lotions to napkin rings, place mats, jellies, jams, fruit preserves and nut-based spreads.
For his part, Christiansen became famous for selling organic celery to the likes of Kim Kardashian alongside other extravagant offerings – including $250 jars of honey (from hives kept by actors Will Ferrell and Julianne Moore, and basketball star LeBron James), $42 bars of soap, $80 dried strawberries and even $75 bags of manure to spread on all those caringly curated Hollywood backyards.
Flamingo Estate customers can subscribe to receive a ‘curation’ (that’s a bouquet to you) of seasonal flowers for $125 a week. And even the Dalai Lama has been involved, personally blessing the brand’s Sea Buckthorn body oil, which costs $60 for a small bottle but is ‘hand-harvested high in the Himalayan valleys by a community of women who can sustain their family for a year from just one harvest’, the brand’s website boasts.
When Meghan Markle finally launches her new lifestyle series on Netflix next week, one man in particular may be scrutinizing it with special interest: Richard Christiansen (pictured), the Los Angeles guru-to-the-stars who some say has inspired the duchess.
After moving to California in 2020, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex appeared to become fans of Christiansen’s Flamingo Estate farm shop brand, prominently displaying its glossy coffee-table books in their Montecito home.Â
Flamingo Estate customers can subscribe to receive a ‘curation’ (that’s a bouquet to you) of seasonal flowers for $125 a week. (Pictured: The Flamingo Estate).Â
Perhaps unsurprisingly, some critics have dismissed Flamingo Estate as outrageously pretentious and decadent nonsense for people with much more money than sense.
Early last year it was reported that – before Meghan announced her brand – she had been in protracted talks about a business partnership with Christiansen and his boyfriend Aaron Harvey, only for Christiansen to politely walk away from the idea.
Entertainment news website Puck said that there were ‘multiple in-person meetings with the Flamingo Estate team in 2022’ and ‘Markle expressed a desire to come on as an “active partner” in the business.’
Negotiations reportedly went as far as the duchess being given access to all the enterprise’s relevant financial information, providing her with what one insider described as an ‘intimate knowledge of the business’.
However, no deal was ever done between Flamingo Estate and Meghan. ‘Ultimately, the estate realized they didn’t want to take the business in that direction,’ Puck reported.
It may have been a wise decision.
Almost a full year since she unveiled American Riviera Orchard, Meghan has yet to publicly release a single product, though insiders reportedly say items may go on sale in brick-and-mortar stores owned by Netflix next month.
And, in fact, they will now be sold under the new name ‘As Ever’, following an 11th hour rebrand by the duchess after reported trademark issues over the original American Riviera Orchard tag.
As for Christiansen, the 47-year-old is a chatty and affable Australian whose previous career as an advertising executive certainly taught him how to market himself and his business. Tiring of the rat race, in 2014, he bought a crumbling seven-acre estate on the edge of north-eastern LA’s Highland Park neighborhood, once owned by a porn film producer and founded Flamingo Estate there.
Christiansen has never commented on the Markle ‘partnership’ reports. However, when he recently spoke to the Mail about the publication of his new book, he was happy to clear the air and even say he’d love to work with his good friend Meghan – albeit on a rather more informal basis than a business partnership.
‘I am a big fan of hers. I’m excited to see where her plans go. I’m very excited,’ he told the Mail.
As to the question of whether he resents anyone treading on his fragrant patch, he was magnanimous about having competition: ‘I think there’s enough sunshine for all the flowers and so I’m excited for everyone that works with nature and the garden. So yeah, I’m very excited. It should be great.’
A sprawling trademark application suggests Meghan will offer all manner of home and kitchen supplies, ranging from soaps and lotions to napkin rings, place mats, jellies, jams, fruit preserves and nut-based spreads. (Pictured: Meghan on her Netflix show).
When the duchess last year launched her own lifestyle brand, by sending cutesy, limited edition numbered jars of strawberry jam nestled among a bowl of lemons to her celebrity pals, some suggested that it had come straight out of the Christiansen playbook.
Asked if he regarded it as copying, he said: ‘No I don’t… I wouldn’t be here today if I didn’t draw inspiration from Martha Stewart and all the people who’ve done this before me, so I welcome everyone to copy us.’
That being the case, is there any chance of a collaboration with Meghan?
‘Maybe. I don’t know. We’ve never talked about it,’ he said.
And then, perhaps to make clear that he wasn’t denying the report that Meghan had previously wanted to become an ‘active partner’, he added: ‘As a collaboration, we’ve never talked about it, no. But I would love to do something together.’
Has he given Meghan any tips?
‘I give all my friends tips,’ he replied.
Indeed, Christiansen appears to be friends with everybody in Hollywood from Jane Fonda and Cher to Barbie star Margot Robbie and model Chrissy Teigen.
And you certainly don’t stay in such a blessed state of existence for long if you start bad-mouthing any of them in public, so perhaps it’s not exactly surprising to hear he hasn’t a bad word to say for the Duchess of Sussex.
And why would he? He says they’re friends after all, and her thousands of fans would surely be delighted if she were to be his next celebrity product tie-in.
When we spoke, he was about to launch a new collaboration with actress Laura Dern: a chemicals-free olive oil.
The project started because Dern’s mother, fellow screen-star Diane Ladd, became severely ill from pesticides used on a farm near her LA home. All the proceeds will go to the Center for Food Safety.
Given that a 16oz bottle of the ‘Dern Over A New Leaf’ oil costs $60, however, buyers might expect Dern to have picked the olives herself from the trees she grows in her own garden. But Christiansen said that sadly that wasn’t the case.
Christiansen’s meteoric rise would itself make a great Hollywood movie for some of his devoted A-list customers, should they fancy playing themselves.
Entertainment news website Puck said that there were ‘multiple in-person meetings with the Flamingo Estate team in 2022’ and ‘Markle expressed a desire to come on as an ‘active partner’ in the business.’ (Pictured: Flamingo Estate products).Â
Indeed, Christiansen appears to be friends with everybody in Hollywood from Jane Fonda and Cher to Barbie star Margot Robbie and model Chrissy Teigen (pictured).Â
He clearly cannot quite believe his luck. After he bought his flamingo-pink painted hillside home 11 years ago, he spent years doing it up to become a ‘utopian version of Los Angeles’ – complete with a garden possessing what he calls a ‘sublime orgiastic anthem’ – that has been regularly used as the backdrop for glossy photo shoots and interviews.
Christiansen, who grew up on a sugar cane farm in New South Wales, started his lifestyle brand in early 2020 after his creative agency’s work dried up with the onset of Covid.
Many farmers in the area were facing a bleak future after the restaurants and hotels they supplied closed. The entrepreneurial Christiansen offered them a solution, allowing them to sell their fruit and vegetables (in $35 brightly colored boxes) from the parking lot he owned near his estate.
They sold 300 boxes the first week and 600 the next, before he and his team – comprising many of the staff of his now defunct agency – started delivering them.
Christiansen got his first foot on the celebrity ladder when model Chrissy Teigen, an early customer, turned up at his house one day, wrongly thinking it was a restaurant. They became fast friends and she spread the word.
‘It was very fast from there. The Kardashians were customers – all the girls – and Ellen [DeGeneres] and eventually we got on Oprah’s list of favorites,’ Christiansen said. ‘It was very quick but very honest – we never paid anyone [for an endorsement]. We don’t do that stuff. It was just people who were interested in what we’re doing, and we’re so grateful for it… I think it became a badge of honor to get the vegetable boxes.’
Meanwhile, he and his staff branched into experimenting with herbs and plants from his medicine garden at Flamingo Estate to create new products, such as a rosemary-infused hand sanitizer and a sage-scented candle.
It was a roaring success – within a year, Flamingo Estate had sold almost $10 million worth of self-care products. Oprah gave the business a huge leg-up when she named the brand’s $190 ‘Three Sisters’ candle set (made from rosemary, sage and tomato plants) one of her ‘Favorite Things’, after which they started selling at the rate of up to 2,500 an hour.
Christiansen and Flamingo Estate were so popular with celebrities that they were soon paying him to visit their homes and cook for them.
The business has also been busy infiltrating the homes of the rich and famous with its bees.Â
His $250 honey pots – often brandished as the most outrageously priced items in his store – are actually made from honey produced on celebrity-owned land, so they really are A-list insects.
Christiansen and his staff branched into experimenting with herbs and plants from his medicine garden at Flamingo Estate to create new products, such as a rosemary-infused hand sanitizer and a sage-scented candle.
Christiansen’s $250 honey pots are actually made from honey produced on celebrity-owned land, so they really are A-list bees. (Pictured: Meghan bee keeping in her Netflix show).Â
Christiansen sends his celebrity collaborators the bees and the hives – even to as far away as New York – and then sends his staff to harvest the honey.
His weighty new book, The Guide To Becoming Alive, which costs $50, is part-memoir, part-manifesto, he says.
In it, he tells people to ‘learn’ from nature, urging readers to ‘find your banana’ and offering chapters with headings such as ‘Flirt like the Orchid’ and ‘Court Your Shadow Like The Fern’.
He also includes some ingratiating conversations with famous friends such as zoologist Jane Goodall, Martha Stewart, Ellen DeGeneres and Jane Fonda.
DeGeneres reveals that ‘I really do prefer dogs to people’ which, given how she allegedly mistreated her underlings, hardly sounds surprising. ‘We’re called human beings but we’re human doings,’ she adds meaningfully.
It’s easy to see why Christiansen has been such a hit in LA.
But for all his claims about welcoming competitors, he complains in his book about how ‘some of our team members were poached by a copycat brand’.Â
One can only hope the same thing doesn’t happen again should ‘As Ever’ finally open for business.
