NEED TO KNOW
- In Netflix’s new docuseries Victoria Beckham, designer Victoria Beckham breaks down the challenges she faced transitioning from music to fashion
- “I knew what people thought. ‘She was a pop star. She’s married to a footballer. Who does she think she is?’” she reveals in the docuseries
- Victoria and her business partner, David Belhassen, also share the details of the debt she found herself in with the business
In Victoria Beckham‘s new self-titled docuseries, she gets very real about the struggles she faced to not only get her eponymous fashion brand off the ground, but also to keep it going.
Victoria, 51, made the move from her musical background in the Spice Girls into full-time fashion when she initially launched her brand in 2008. She started small, with a 10-look show at New York Fashion Week, because, at the time, the general public questioned why a pop star would be doing such a thing.
She set out to change their minds.
“When I started this fashion business 18 years ago, I didn’t know a lot about the industry. I was scared. I was scared because I loved fashion and it was always my dream, but I knew what people thought. ‘She was a pop star. She’s married to a footballer. Who does she think she is?’” Victoria says in the first episode of the three-episode series.
But she refused to back down.
Not only did her brand launch to great positive feedback from the fashion world, but she drew in countless customers as well. She steadily grew the brand for years, taking her show from New York to London and eventually Paris. However, on that route, she found her fashion house falling into immense debt.
For a while, her husband, soccer star David Beckham, poured his own money into the business, which caused a strain on both of them.
“I almost lost everything and that was a dark, dark time. I used to cry before I went to work every day because I felt like a firefighter. We were 10s of millions in the red,” she reveals in the docuseries. “Yes, I’m going home to my husband, but I’m going home to my business partner as well. And so I would talk to him about it. I had to. He was invested. And I hated it. I absolutely hated it.”
David, in his own interview in the docuseries, says that when the two met, his future wife had more money than he did, which also made this turn of events a struggle for her to deal with.
“We both sat there, and we looked at what I’d invested. And I think part of that conversation broke my heart because Victoria is a proud woman,” he shares. “She actually bought our first house in Hertfordshire, known as Beckingham Palace. So for her to have to come to me and say, ‘Can I have some — we need some more money. The business needs more money, that was hard for both of us because I didn’t have the money to keep doing this, and eventually I was like, ‘This cannot continue’.”
Victoria eventually turned to outside investors to hopefully pull her brand out of the red, and in doing so, she had to make some serious cuts on her spending. She landed with businessman David Belhassen, who initially turned down her ask for help — but then Belhassen’s wife changed his mind.
“Victoria was not looking for a partner that would just put money. She needed a partner that knew the business, understood her dream and was capable of making it happen… Frankly, I had never seen something as hard as that to fix,” he reveals in the documentary.
But he signed on and immediately took a look at Victoria’s failing finances. One of her major expenses? Plants for the office.
“When I became partners with Victoria, the business was in a very, very challenging situation. So I needed to understand, is she really capable of accepting what had to happen? For years, she had people telling her what she wanted to hear. I remember one of the expenses was the office plants. ‘Cause she loves plants. And it was costing like 70,000 a year,” he says, not specifying if that was GBP or USD. “And then there was someone who was coming to water the plants for 15,000 a year. And that’s only the beginning.”
He goes on to say that he got very real with her and what needed to happen to “restructure” the business to finally make a profit.
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Victoria Beckham at her fashion show in 2023.
Giovanni Giannoni/WWD via Getty
“I took it on the chin,” Victoria says of the difficult feedback. “Part of the problem was, people were really afraid to tell me ‘no.’ I think there’s a power to be honest. The power of celebrity. People thought that I wasn’t used to hearing ‘no’. I’ll hold my hands up and be accountable for things that I have done that I should have done and could have done differently, and I was in debt. There was a lot I had to change. I realized I’d lost my way.”
In the time since, Belhassen has helped Victoria rejuvenate the brand and climb its way back from immense debt.
“I trusted my instinct,” Victoria says of fighting her way back.
Victoria Beckham is now streaming on Netflix.
