What you need to know
Victoria Beckham’s new self-titled documentary series gives a very real look at the struggles she faced not only to get her eponymous fashion brand off the ground, but to keep it going.
Victoria, 51, made the transition from her musical career with the Spice Girls to full-time fashion when she first 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 was wondering why a pop star would do such a thing.
She tried to change their minds.
“When I started this fashion business 18 years ago, I didn’t know much about the industry. It was scary. It was scary because I love fashion and it’s always been my dream, but I knew what people would think: ‘She’s a pop star. She’s married to a football player. Who does she think she is?'” Victoria says in the first episode of the three-episode series.
But she refused to back down.
Her brand not only launched with great positive feedback from the fashion world, but also brought in countless customers. She steadily grew her brand over the years, taking shows from New York to London and eventually Paris. But along the way, she realized that her fashion house was in huge debt.
For a while, her husband, the soccer player David Beckham, poured his own money into the business, which put a strain on them both.
“It was a very dark time when I lost almost everything. I felt like a firefighter and cried every day before going to work. I was tens of millions in the red,” she reveals in the documentary. “Yes, I’m going home to my husband, but I’m also going home to my business partner. So I was going to talk to him about it. I had to. He was invested. And I hated it. I absolutely hated it.”
David said in his interview in the documentary that his future wife had more money than he did when they met, so this was a difficult thing for her to deal with.
“We both sat there and we went over how much money I had invested, and I think some of that conversation broke my heart because Victoria is a proud woman,” he shares. “In fact, she bought our first house in Hertfordshire, known as Beckingham Palace. So she came to me and said, ‘Can you give me some? I need some more money. The business needs more money. It was tough for both of us. I didn’t have the money to continue this, so in the end I thought, ‘I can’t continue this.’ ”
Victoria ended up turning to outside investors to bring the brand out of the red, which required her to drastically cut spending. She reached businessman David Belhassen, who at first refused to help, but then Belhassen’s wife changed his mind.
“Victoria wasn’t looking for a partner who was just going to give her money. She needed a partner who had business knowledge, who understood her dreams and who could make them come true…Frankly, I’ve never seen anything so difficult to fix,” he reveals in the documentary.
However, he signed and immediately looked into Victoria’s failing finances. What is one of her main expenses?Plants for the office.
“When I became partners with Victoria, the business was in a very difficult situation, so I had to understand if I could really accept what was going to have to happen to her. For years, she was letting people say what she wanted to hear. I remember one of the expenses was a plant in the office, because she loves plants. And it cost about 70,000 a year,” he says, declining to say whether it was pounds or US dollars. “And we had people coming in to water our plants for $15,000 a year. That’s just the beginning.”
He went on to say that he had a very serious conversation with her about what it would take to “restructure” the business to ultimately make it profitable.
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“I took it on the chin,” Victoria said of the difficult feedback. “Part of the problem was that people were so afraid to say ‘no’ to me. I think I have the power to be honest. The power of celebrity. People thought I wasn’t used to hearing the word ‘no.’ I hold my hands up and take responsibility for what I should have done, what I could have done differently, and what I was in debt for. There were many things that had to change. I realized that I was lost. ”
Since then, Belhassen has helped Victoria revitalize its brand and recover from massive debt.
“I trusted my instincts,” Victoria says of her fight to return.
Victoria Beckham is now available on Netflix.
