Prince Charles's business venture failed, the UK's entrepreneurial environment is just too poor

Once upon a time, roughly thirty years before the Celestial Empire put forward mass entrepreneurship and innovation, Prince Charles started his own business.

He set up an ecological agriculture project.

In 1986, Prince Charles bought a stretch of ravaged, crumbling land with nothing but an abandoned church on it, and named it Highgrove Estate. Back then, the beauty by his side was still Diana.

Then he worked at it for 30 years, until he had turned this plot of land into this

Apples trained to grow along supports in the garden

Walking colonnade

Highgrove Estate is full of natural, unspoiled wild charm

The cows graze contentedly on the green grass, while wild mink play leisurely with the plump koi in the pond

Beyond not disrupting the local ecology, many plants and insects naturally form complete little ecosystems.

The estate also has a vegetable garden that relies entirely on compost and natural fertilizers extracted from Boraginaceae plants and seaweed, supplying fruit and vegetables year-round on a self-cycling basis.

Besides solar panels providing heating and hot water, the estate has a wood-fired boiler, double-glazed windows and ecological insulation.

This is a wonderful place full of cachet, yet it is an unsuccessful entrepreneurial project.

When Prince Charles farms, he is no dabbling official's kid. He is a diehard fan of anti-GMO food, a standard-bearer of organic agriculture, a walking health-and-wellness post, and an ecological agriculture entrepreneur.

In 1990, building on Highgrove Estate, Charles founded an organic farm and food company, growing and cultivating organic food free of chemical synthetics, and launched the "Duchy Originals" brand.

"Duchy Originals" potatoes, carrots and other vegetables, planted with the prince's own hands, supplied hundreds of supermarkets across the UK. Over the following 19 years, Duchy Originals produced more than 200 products, including food, beverages, gardening tools and furniture, every one of them "organic."

The prince has always worked hard to drum up momentum for "Duchy Originals." At all kinds of high-cachet banquets, balls and outdoor events, Prince Charles has no time at all for flirting; like an Amway salesman, he urges government heads, officials and businesspeople from various countries not to eat GM food, because he himself "never eats it, and will not provide any GM food to guests or family."

In the ancient estate, a beauty in 10 cm sky-high heels, swirling white wine, with a hint of cleavage, faces a prominent prince. As the sun sets and sunlight falls on both their golden hair, the prince suddenly says, "Have you ever eaten the organic potatoes I grew?" The scene is too beautiful! I dare not look!

Prince Charles also often attends discussions on GM food, holding forth that such food is "unproven by science and potentially dangerous."

As a guest on a BBC program, in a pose like holding up a little red book, he refuted two biologists' statements that "GM food is harmless," and even called on all Britons to unite and make the British Isles a pure land free of "GM food contamination," suggesting that the public eat only uncontaminated organic food. He also cited himself as an example, highly praising the benefits of eating "organic crops" grown without chemical fertilizers and without sprayed pesticides.

When he and Camilla visited India, they did not even go to the Taj Mahal, but instead visited a local agricultural and food science park named after him; the park mainly helps and promotes the sustainable development of local agriculture.

To increase the brand's stickiness, Prince Charles also wrote an organic cookbook. The recipes are classified by the four seasons, and the ingredients are of course all the organic vegetables and fruits Charles champions.

Yet such a big IP, an entrepreneurial project built on the concept of health, actually advanced step by painful step.

First, the prince's family was quite unhappy with his entrepreneurial project, or perhaps quite unhappy with his entrepreneurship itself. 

In an interview with the famous British shopping magazine The Grocer, Princess Anne said: "Make everyone in Britain eat organic food? That's ridiculous! Moreover, there is no evidence that GM food is harmful to humans. Charles himself is not an expert in biology, and it is wrong for him to attack GM food like this."

Philip also said in an interview with reporters at Windsor Palace: "GM food is not harmful. Think about it, all plants and animals in the world are the result of natural selection. In the process of reproduction, genes keep changing, and those with strong adaptability survived. You could say all food now is GM food. I never fuss over such things; I eat everything!"

The British media was also quite unhappy with the prince selling vegetables; it once ran extensive coverage of his entrepreneurial project under negative headlines such as the commercialization of the British royal family and shops tarnishing the royal family.

Yet after the prince made such a sacrifice as the "commercialization of the British royal family," consumers did not entirely buy in either. Some people who did not spare his feelings complained that the potatoes he grew were ugly.

British supermarket giant Sainsbury's also announced it was dropping Prince Charles's organic food, because the vegetables he provided could not meet the supermarket's standards. Of course, the standards were set based on products handled by industrial systems.

Then, when the capital winter arrived, in the 2008 financial crisis, as the UK's domestic economic conditions were sluggish, Prince Charles was forced to close his vegetable shop "The Veg Shed."

A spokesman for Prince Charles said, "The price of organic vegetables is higher than ordinary vegetables in supermarkets, so consumer demand for them is not great, and the shop had to be closed," but it would continue to operate on the internet.

Furthermore, due to the continued economic recession, the Duchy Originals brand, whose profits had been hit hard, had to announce an alliance with the British high-price chain supermarket Waitrose.

It was called an alliance, but it was basically selling itself.Waitrose exclusively obtained the rights to create, manufacture and market "Duchy Originals" products in the UK, and even the brand name was changed to "Duchy Originals from Waitrose." Waitrose invests millions of pounds each year to research, develop and improve "Duchy Originals" products.

And so the prince's entrepreneurial project ended in a hurried, cursory way.

After reading this bumpy entrepreneurial story, I can only say that Prince Charles was really born in the wrong place. If he had started his business in our Celestial Empire, what a spectacular scene it would have been!

If Prince Charles transplanted this ecological agriculture startup to the Celestial Empire, there is no need to elaborate on the postures investors would use to squeeze into this project. An angel round valuation of 200 million US dollars would probably not be difficult. The A round would surely put it in the unicorn ranks.

On the very first day of Charles's entrepreneurship, those startup headlines mixing chicken-blood motivational hype with melodrama would flood every screen. For example, "He failed at marriage twice, was suspected of coming out of the closet, and in this ecological agriculture startup found inner peace"; "For the sake of these ugly potatoes, he gave up the throne," and so on and so forth.

How could there be any such questioning as the "commercialization of the British royal family"? This is clearly a consumption upgrade led by the royal family!

How could a supermarket reject the prince's vegetables over standards? It is because your existing standards are not ecological enough and too backward!

If anyone complained that the potatoes the prince grew were ugly, heh heh, do you not know that on this land, even saying Diao Ye's beef brisket is not tasty gets you criticized for having a plebeian palate that has not opened up? If you say the prince's potatoes are not good-looking, it is your eyes that have not opened!

Because the vegetable prices were too high, the vegetables could not be sold, and the shop was forced to close? Only the low-class British could do such a thing. Teacher Lin guarantees you that in the Imperial Capital, the prince's vegetables would absolutely have to be snatched up.

The hotels with the highest cachet would launch Charles salad, Charles set meals, and maybe even a Charles wedding banquet package.

Prince Charles's ecological agriculture planting experience gardens in Beijing's Yanqing, Shanghai's Pudong, and Hangzhou's Longjing Village area would open one after another. On every mild, sunny weekend, the Guomao dogs, Lujiazui dogs and Kerry dogs would wriggle out of the city to personally join in picking the prince's crops, pull a few radishes, dig a few potatoes, post a few Moments, sigh a few lines about the quiet beauty of the years, and then wriggle back home through the endless stream of traffic.

Their lives, you see, just need a little of this sense of ritual.

Film companies would come running with their teams, hoping to obtain this honor and develop a series of products using Prince Charles as IP: films, web dramas, games, derivative merchandise and so on.

Investors and brokers would bring Prince Charles, along with his ecological agriculture plantation project, to visit local governments, telling them that the era of consumption upgrading has arrived, and that the big health industry is standing at the forefront. Then local governments would successively roll out ecological agriculture industrial parks. Of course, Prince Charles could also take the opportunity to grab land cheaply and dabble in real estate.

Just thinking about it casually makes one's blood boil. How could this be merely an ecological agriculture startup struggling to survive in the British Empire? What Prince Charles re-created is a way of life. Prince Charles's entrepreneurship in the Celestial Empire would simply be a full-ecosystem startup project ignited by ecological agriculture.

It is just that we do not know whether Prince Charles, who can tend an estate into this, would still find the entrepreneurial scene in the Celestial Empire, with its deafening gongs and drums and firecrackers, as he wishes?

It must be solemnly stated that the important condition for Prince Charles's "Duchy Originals" selling itself to Waitrose was that Waitrose pays a certain percentage of royalties to the charitable foundation sponsored by Crown Prince Charles based on the sales performance of several products. And before selling itself to Waitrose, the 7 million pounds in profit from "Duchy Originals" was also donated in full to charitable organizations.

Because Prince Charles's entrepreneurial project was not in the Celestial Empire, the world has one fewer super-gigantic unicorn.

Because Prince Charles's entrepreneurial project was not in the Celestial Empire, the world has a little more of a difficult yet slow small beauty.