Two years after the premiere of David Beckham’s sprawling Netflix docuseries, Victoria Beckham is taking a stab at TV with one focusing on her own life. Netflix’s three-part Victoria Beckham docuseries mostly features the former Spice Girl dishing about her past, along with confessionals from her husband, Anna Wintour, and Tom Ford. Beckham recalls singing “Mein Herr” from Cabaret for her Posh Spice audition, dealing with the brutal transition from pop star to WAG (“I remember thinking, God, is anyone going to want to put me on a plane and do a photo shoot again?”), and contending with the near-constant paparazzi photos. But the series’ juiciest revelations come when she addresses her eponymous fashion line, of which she remembers, “I almost lost everything.”
The brand showed its first collection in 2008, and Beckham knew, as she says in the series, that “the likelihood that I was going to become successful was very, very slim.” For a time, it was outwardly successful: Madonna wore one of Beckham’s designs in a 2009 issue of W magazine, and in 2011, Wintour attended one of the brand’s shows. But by 2016, the company was “tens of millions in the red,” Beckham remembers. “There was a lot of money being spent that never should have been spent. The losses were so big. David was investing a lot.” When asked about his side of things, David said the brand’s financial struggles “did make me panic,” adding, “I never saw anything coming back. We always agreed that we would support each other, no matter what. But it worried me. This isn’t sustainable.” He eventually had to stop injecting money into his wife’s business, recalling, “I didn’t have the money to keep doing this. And eventually, I was like, This cannot continue.”
“That was a dark, dark time,” Victoria said. “I used to cry before I went to work every day because I felt like a firefighter.”
In 2017, Victoria brought in David Belhassen of the private-equity firm NEO Investment Partners as her business partner to salvage what was left of the line. Belhassen, who was also interviewed for the series, said it was a financial “disaster” that had “never made a profit” when he arrived. Upon inspection, he claims he discovered Beckham was spending $70,000 a year on plants for the office, plus another $15,000 for a gardener. “Frankly, I’d never seen something as hard as that to fix,” he said.
Click here to preview your posts with PRO themes ››
“I hear it now and I’m horrified, but I allowed that to happen and I think part of the problem was people were really afraid to tell me ‘no,’” Beckham said. “I’ll hold my hands up and be accountable for things 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 years that followed, things didn’t exactly take an upward turn: The Times reported, also in 2017, that Victoria Beckham Limited had racked up losses of nearly $16 million — equivalent to losing $5,300 a day. In 2022, according to a report in the Mirror, the brand’s total debts had reached $71.6 million. After years of operating at a loss, per BoF, the label reported a 22 percent increase in its pretax earnings in 2024 from the year prior. And while the series culminates in the designer’s spring-summer 2025 show at Paris Fashion Week last year, things still aren’t entirely rosy. According to the Guardian, the brand’s losses widened to almost $6.6 million this year, and the Beckhams and NEO were forced to inject an $8.2 million loan to keep things going.
At the very least, it seems Beckham still has Wintour on her side. “I was skeptical,” Wintour said of the singer’s initial career pivot in the series. “I think we can all be a bit snobby in the fashion business and think maybe this is a side gig, but Victoria was one that totally proved us wrong.”
