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Victoria Beckham was nearly forced to shut down her namesake fashion brand after falling victim to irresponsible spending that left her company “tens of millions in the red.”
In Netflix’s new documentary, titled “Victoria Beckham,” the former Spice Girl — who, throughout the three-part series, gave viewers a behind-the-scenes look at what it takes to prepare for a show at Paris Fashion Week — got candid about leaning on her husband, David Beckham, for financial assistance in the early years of her company’s launch and detailed the “mind-blowing” decisions that nearly cost her her brand.
“This business is everything to me. It’s absolutely who I am. But it’s been a hell of a journey,” she said in the documentary. “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 tens of millions in the red.”
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“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 said they both looked at their investments within the company, and came to the conclusion that something had to change.
“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,” David said.
“When we met, she was a lot richer than me. She actually bought our first house in Hertfordshire, known as Beckingham Palace,” he added. “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 said the “entire house was crashing down.”
“I was losing my business. I needed outside investment. I needed someone to help me,” she said.
The former pop star eventually connected with outside investor David Belhassen, who claimed the state of the company was a “disaster” at the time.
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“I had never seen something as hard as that to fix,” he said.
“For years, she had people telling her what she wanted to hear. I remember one of the expenses was the office plants. “She loved plants,” Belhassen said. “And it was costing her £70,000 a year. And then there was someone who was coming to water the plants for £15,000 a year – and that’s only the beginning. So I went to her and I decided to just tell the truth, exactly the way it is, and I didn’t know how she’d react.”
“I said, ‘Victoria, we have to change everything, restructure the business, and that’s going to be painful,’ and when I finished she just listened, and she left a little silence,” he recalled.
Victoria admitted it was difficult to hear the truth.
“I hadn’t been to business school, I’d come from an entertainment background … I didn’t realize it at the time, but the waste was mind-blowing. I mean, I had 15 different linings for the insides of the outerwear. People thought that I was used to getting the best … bizarre things like flying chairs from one side of the world to the other.”
“I hear it now and I’m horrified, but I allowed that to happen,” she said. “I think part of the problem was people were really afraid to tell me no. There’s a power to be honest, the power of celebrity. People thought I wasn’t used to hearing no.”
“I needed to put Victoria Beckham into Victoria Beckham,” she said.
And that, she did.
Elsewhere in the documentary, Victoria also opened up about one of the toughest challenges she’s faced — her past eating disorder.
“People felt it was okay to criticize a woman for her weight, for what she’s doing, for what she’s wearing,” David said in the documentary. “There were a lot of things happening in TV then that won’t happen now. That can’t happen now.”
“My Victoria that I knew, sits at home in a tracksuit, smiling, laughing, having a glass of wine. That started to go purely because of the criticism that she was getting,” he added.
While recalling a 1999 incident in which a TV host asked her to step on a scale on live television to confirm her weight was “back to normal” six months after giving birth to her first child, Victoria admitted the whole ordeal affected her deeply.
“I was weighed on national television when Brooklyn was six months old,” she said in the documentary. “Get on those scales on television. Have you lost weight? And we laugh about it, and we joke about it when we’re on television, but I was really, really young and that hurt.”
During the live television segment in question, “Don’t Forget Your Toothbrush,” host Chris Evans said, “A lot of girls want to know, because you look fantastic again. How did you get back to your shape after birth?”
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After Victoria detailed her exercise regime, Evans asked Victoria, “Is your weight back to normal? Can I check? Do you mind?”
That experience alone left Victoria feeling as if she wasn’t enough.
“I really started to doubt myself and not like myself,” she said in the doc. “And because I let it affect me, I didn’t know what I saw when I looked in the mirror. You lose all sense of reality. I’m just very critical of myself. I didn’t like what I saw.”
“I’ve been everything from Porky Posh to Skinny Posh,” she continued. “I mean, it’s been a lot. And that’s hard. I had no control over what was being written about me, pictures that were being taken. And I suppose I wanted to control that. I could control it with the clothing and I could control my weight, and I was controlling it in an incredibly unhealthy way.”
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“When you have an eating disorder, you become very good at lying,” she added. “And I was never honest about it with my parents. I never talked about it publicly. It really affects you when you are being told constantly you’re not good enough. And I suppose that’s been with me my whole life.”
At one point, the businesswoman broke down in tears to David as they discussed her reasoning behind all that she does.
“But who are you trying to prove this to?” David asked.
“Maybe a lot of it to you,” said Victoria, who admittedly accepted financial aid from David while establishing her brand in the early years. “I feel bad about all that times when I had to ask you to help me out.”
“You don’t have to prove it to me ever,” he said, to which Victoria responded, “No, but I want to, myself. I want to. When I saw your face and the kids’ faces backstage after the last show, it was not the first time, but it was a real moment for me where I could see how proud of me you were. I’ve still got so much that I want to do.”
“I think you’re trying to prove it to yourself,” said David. “Not to me. Maybe you’re so stubborn in the fact that you are trying to prove everybody wrong.”
“Yeah, success. It feels good. I’m not going to lie,” she said. “I am proud, and I’m not ashamed to say that I’m ambitious, and I’ve still got a lot that I want to do.”
“So you’re not stopping yet?” David asked.
“I’m not stopping yet,” she quipped.
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