‘Millions of pounds in the red’: Victoria Beckham reveals the heartbreak over fashion label’s numerous losses

Victoria Beckham has had many public lives – as a Spice Girl, as a football WAG and as a fashion designer.

It’s the last one that seems to have given her the most purpose and joy – and also the most grief in many ways.

Her three-part docuseries lands on Thursday night, and it is mostly a story of how she built her fashion business after feeling lost when the Spice Girls disbanded after two dizzying years of pop superstardom in the 1990s.

It’s been almost two decades since she launched a label, and she had to fight sniggering and accusations that it was a vanity project, or that she wasn’t doing the real work herself. Since then, Beckham’s elegant designs have graced catwalks and red carpets, and has been worn by the likes of Jennifer Aniston, Kendall Jenner, Lady Gaga and Meghan Markle.

But as she revealed in her doco, things were not hunky dory. She said, “It looked great from the outside but the reality was, it was slipping through my fingers. We had to go from presentations to bigger shows, but we were doing it in a really extravagant way, and the business wasn’t growing at the same pace.

“There was a lot of money being spent that should never have been spent. The losses were so big, and David (Beckham) was investing a lot. It made me panic.”

It also made David Beckham panic because, as he said in the series, “I never saw anything coming back. It was just getting worse and worse and worse.

“We always agreed that we would support each other, no matter what. But it worried me. This wasn’t sustainable.”

Beckham said her company was millions of pounds in the red, and that she didn’t know what to do.

The headlines around that time in the mid-2010s were quick to point out the precarious position of Beckham’s business, and the losses it had generated year after year, and it hit a little bit differently to the reams and reams of tabloid and media judgement she’d copped over the years.

Beckham said, “I knew it was public knowledge, I felt embarrassed, but it’s fact. It wasn’t an opinion. It wasn’t anyone being unkind. It was a fact and I had to just take it on the chin. I was in a hole, I felt like was in quicksand.”

The docuseries comes from the same production team as her husband’s 2023 show, Beckham, but rather than a comprehensive portrait of Beckham’s life and impact on the culture, the focus is on her fashion business.

The framing story is the week leading up to her 2024 debut at Paris Fashion Week, which is thrown into chaos by several incidents including a model’s knee injury, a sheer corset skirt that just wasn’t coming together, and the torrential rain that threatened her outdoor event.

Interspaced throughout is a cursory look at her start in theatre and music and time with the Spice Girls, which she acknowledged as the only reason she is able to pursue her fashion dreams, even revealing that groupmate Melanie Brown said to her not long ago, “Never forget where you come from”. Beckham said the comment actually hurt her because, by her reckoning, she never has.

The series’ raison d’etre is to depict her as someone devoted to her goals and with a tireless worth ethic. As husband David put it, “She put everything into this business, her identity is her work”.

Which made the fashion business’s financial quagmire all the more distressing. The company was posting huge losses year after year. It never made a profit. She said she “used to cry before I went to work every day. I felt like a firefighter”.

All the while, a lot of the media coverage at the time focused on David Beckham’s investment in the business, using language such as he had “bail her out”.

He recalled, “Part of that conversation broke my heart because Victoria is a proud woman. When we met, she was a lot richer than me. She actually bought our first house in Hertfordshire, known as Beckhamham Palace.

“So, for her to have to come to me and say, ‘We need 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.”

In stepped private equity firm Neo Investment Partners and its founder, David Belhassen, who in 2017 bought a minority stake in the company, giving it a cash injection.

Belhassen said he had originally rejected the proposal but changed his mind when he saw his wife in a Beckham-designed gown as they prepared to go out for an evening. But it wasn’t easygoing.

He said, “I realised this was a very, very difficult situation, and it was a disaster.

“Frankly, I had never seen something as hard as that to fix.”

Among the things that had to change was the profligate spending. Belhassen cited one line item on the books was an annual expense of $70,000 on office plants, which included $15,000 for someone to come around and water it.

Beckham said because she had come from entertainment and not fashion, she didn’t wasn’t fully cognisant of the wastage, such as flying chairs from halfway around the world, or having 15 different kinds of lining for the insides of outerware.

“I hear it now and I’m horrified,” she added. “But I allowed that to happen. I think part of the problem was people were really afraid to tell me no. If I’m being honest, that was the power of celebrity, people thought that I wasn’t used to hearing no.”

The docuseries then shows how under the new structure, the company launched a successful beauty line, which have higher profit margins, and Belhassen said they turned the business around.

While the series ends on a high note, it gets a little fuzzy on what “turning it around” really means.

The business is still bleeding cash. In late August, company accounts showed that despite strong sales growth of 26.5 per cent to £112.7 million in 2024, it still recorded a pre-tax loss of £4.8 million, up from the previous year’s loss of £2.9 million.

The Guardian reported that the Beckhams and Neo had to inject another £6.2 million loan into the business to help it weather “material uncertainties”, and extended a £4.1 million bank loan.

In 2023, the Beckhams, Neo and other shareholders including Simon Fuller put in £6.9 million in cash and loans.

In 2022, the business recorded a profit of £200,000, the first and only time it was in the net positive.

Victoria Beckham is streaming on Netflix