Victoria Beckham, in profit, in control and in a league of her own
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“It’s been amazing.” Victoria Beckham is reflecting on a landmark year. The designer, brand founder and global style icon is sitting in her living room in Holland Park – green velvet sofas by Rose Uniacke, Ed Ruschas on the wall, a warm fire belching heat on an uncommonly freezy winter’s day. She’s wearing slim navy trousers that pool around her stilettos and a chunky navy sweater. Her hair falls in luxurious extensions. The eyes are smoked in a dark satin kajal liner – Beckham’s own brand, naturally. She looks elegant and expensive, as people tend to when they wear one colour head-to-toe. “The only reason I’m even semi-decent,” she explains in that familiar clipped London accent where the vowels sound almost chewy, “is because David’s got his work drinks this evening and I feel that I should go and say hello.”
Even for someone who has rarely left the headlines since first exploding on the cultural landscape (this year marks the 30th anniversary of the forming of the Spice Girls), the past two years have seen VB – as she is known by all around her – catapulted further as a major global brand. First came the decision to restage her fashion show in Paris, placing her among the top 10 brands for show impact, according to Launchmetrics, and capitalising on an estimated EMV (earned media value) of £48mn. Then she stole all the scenes in which she featured in the Netflix series charting her husband, David’s, footballing career. In October she launched three perfumes – the latest iteration of a growing beauty business that saw her scents, priced from £170 a bottle, bouncing into an already crowded market with extremely positive results.
This confluence of moments had a “huge” impact, says Beckham. “Especially in America. We had Messi going to Inter Miami [David is co-owner of the football team]. We had the documentary. Then we had Paris, and the fragrances. But don’t forget, I’ve been working on that [perfume] for eight years. David’s been working on Miami for over 10 years. The documentary, he was filming that for two. And then everything happened all at the same time.”
She’s also celebrating another milestone: brand profitability. After 14 years of business, Victoria Beckham finally clambered out of the red. VBHL revenues rose 44 per cent to £58.8mn in 2022, versus £40.9mn in 2021, and operating losses declined significantly year-on-year from £3.9mn to £0.9mn. This followed an injection by shareholders, including the Beckhams themselves and NEO Investments, of £6.9mn, steadying the business after a few unstable years. “The directors are pleased with the 111 per cent improvement in adjusted EBITDA for the year,” reads a company statement. “2022 marks a turning point where the group became profitable.”
It seems a million years since Victoria Beckham, then better known as Posh, the sophisticated Spice Girl, made her fashion debut in New York with a small 10-dress collection and industry expectations set to sceptical at best. She quickly carved out her name in contemporary luxury, but the brand was dogged by poor results and annual loss. Things turned around in 2019 after the Frenchwoman Marie Leblanc joined the company, first as product director and now as the fashion label’s CEO (beauty is managed by a separate company; Katia Beauchamp, who founded Birchbox, is Victoria Beckham Beauty CEO). Leblanc and Beckham have completely realigned the business. “A case of lifting up the car bonnet and dealing with everything,” says Beckham. “Not the – shall we say – most exciting topics of conversation for the creatives. But finance, logistics, that side of things all had to be restructured.”
A former designer who worked at Isabel Marant and Sonia Rykiel, Leblanc was previously head of product development, under Phoebe Philo, at Celine and headed women’s fashion and brand positioning for the Printemps department store. “We’ve had to reinvent ourselves completely,” says Leblanc, in a separate conversation. “We had to review our organisation, our processes, our supply chain and outsourcing, so that we could bring the two lines [the more luxury Victoria Beckham, with its £1,000 retail price average, and the contemporary VVB line, which is around £300] into one cohesive brand. Together they worked out “who is the Victoria Beckham woman, what’s our brand ethos”, and developed “one single overarching vision of the woman, the strategy and the product offering”.
The restructure required redundancies (much publicised) and hitting pause on some production –including bags. On top of this came the pandemic. The investor David Belhassen told WWD last year that had it not been for Covid-19 lockdowns, the brand would have been in the black two years ago. “We are now really seeing the results of what we’ve been planting for the last three years,” says Leblanc. “We’ve closed what I call chapter one – building up a solid business backbone. Now we’re moving into phase two, which is to leverage the brand. Now comes the exciting part.”
Asked to describe the brand’s ethos, Leblanc says: “The Victoria Beckham [label] is designed for women to feel confident with their femininity. The beauty, the strength, the vulnerability and sensuality. We also talk about the joie de vivre. It’s about ‘the British art of living’, and fun, and glamour. And it’s about impeccable taste. The taste level is the core of everything that we provide.”
Impeccable taste and Victoria Beckham aren’t words that have always been uttered in the same sentence; one only needs to Google images of her purple-swagged wedding at Luttrellstown Castle, Ireland, in 1999 to see how times have changed. Beckham’s tastes are mercurial. “I feel so lucky that I can create clothes that I want to wear myself,” she says. “I like to say to people, ‘Don’t be scared to try new things.’ It’s about taking what you’re used to, but trying something different so you don’t get stuck in a rut.”
The Netflix documentary opened a rich seam of nostalgia for fans of ’90s fashion, but the renewed appreciation for her and David as icons of that era – those low-slung jeans! Those co-ordinating leathers! – is not something with which she has much engaged. She doesn’t do nostalgia. “Not really. We’ve come such a long way since that period I almost don’t recognise some of those early days,” she says of the years before the country farmhouse and the Georgian family manse. While she looks back at her early style with mild amusement, she’ll leave the ’90s revival to the kids, Brooklyn, now 24, married and living in the US, Romeo, 21, Cruz, 18, and Harper, 12. “I look at Romeo and Mia [Regan, the model influencer who has been involved with her son since 2019 and with whom she collaborated on a denim collection in 2022]. They rock up in all their ’90s stuff. David said the other day, ‘God, I wish I’d kept all those bloody Maharishi combat trousers.’ Do you remember Evisu and all those brands?”
She’s not averse to some nostalgia, however: she and David are currently weightlifting while listening to Wham! The weights are what account for her currently extremely contoured biceps, as showcased in her fragrance campaign in which she wore a black bralet and veil. “I don’t do 10km of running every day any more,” she tells me of her fall-out with the treadmill. She’s also dumped fitness guru Tracy Anderson’s routines. Beckham likes to keep things moving. She “gets obsessive” about something – workouts, low-waisted jeans, the smell of her early courtship – for a period, and then she lets it go. “You know what I think it is,” she says, curling an extension around a finger. “Everybody’s style should evolve… It’s not that you get too old to wear things, it’s that you’ve already done it. I’d rather get something wrong than be boring.”
If Beckham’s business nudged into profitability in 2022, she’s positively buoyant about the coming year. The launch of Victoria Beckham Beauty, a long-dreamed-of project that started as a direct-to-consumer business, has exceeded all expectations, and her three new perfumes have propelled things further still. She would have done it sooner but was determined that the whole thing should be produced in-house. “We’re doing this as an independent brand,” says Beckham. “That’s a really big deal. Years ago, I worked with Coty and had a fragrance with David, and it was always my dream to create my own fragrance or fragrances, but I wanted to do it my way.”
“Victoria’s attention to detail is unparalleled,” says Melissa McGinnis, head of beauty at Selfridges department store, the brand’s exclusive partner in the UK. “Victoria Beckham Beauty has been a huge success since launch. Customer favourites are the new Vast Lash Mascara – already one of our best performing mascaras – Signature Smoky Eye Brick, Posh Lipstick in Twist, Reflect Highlighter in Pearl, Instant Brightening Waterline Pencil…” The list continues. “Alongside the fragrances – with Portofino ’97 being the bestseller.”
Ask anyone who uses make-up and the feedback is consistent: it’s very good. There’s a consensus among my peer group that Beckham makes the best mascara of them all. “I wear and try everything,” she says of her exacting standards. “And sometimes that means that we have to change our strategy, because if something isn’t right or I’m not happy with it, then we hold it back. I never want to compromise.”
She smudge-tested the mascaras in Miami while staying there last summer. David Beckham bought the Major League Soccer team Inter Miami for $25mn as part of the contract he signed with LA Galaxy in 2007, and the Beckhams split their time between their Miami, London and Cotswolds homes. Miami is fun, extremely hot and often very humid: the perfect place to test for panda eyes. “I went to Sephora and I bought every single mascara because I wanted to see which one was actually going to pass the Miami humidity test. And I can hand-on-heart tell you there’s only one, and it’s ours.”
Beckham is one hundred per cent the consumer of her product. “I wear-test everything,” she continues. “And I’m pretty difficult to please. Everything is genuinely, in my opinion, the best in class. We say, it’s got to pass the VB test. It’s not about me creating as much as I possibly can.”
This could sound quite uptight and controlling; in fact, Beckham has rarely seemed more relaxed in an interview. She was always one of the sharper, smarter Spice Girls – she has brilliantly sardonic humour – but could sometimes come over as slightly stiff. As the brand has grown, she has become more confident: her TikTok tutorials offer a quaintly charming “why not try this” schtick. She has also indulged her more mischievous side – witness her sneaky Insta videos of David wiping down the kitchen cupboards, precision cooking or working out in teeny-tiny trunks.
Despite her reservations, the Netflix documentary was humanising. “It was quite liberating,” she says. “I was very mindful that usually, when I did my filming, I would be controlling. But this was very much about David, and so I took the approach of, I’m just going to be very easy‑going here.” You can see why she might have learnt to be wary. Watching the documentary is a harsh reminder of the wave of hate the couple felt: the Beckhams’ persecution by the tabloids in the late 1990s and 2000s would ice anybody’s natural warmth. The documentary has been, to some extent, the end of a long public rehabilitation. “People come up and they’re like, ‘We love the documentary,’” says Beckham. She’s had notes asking for forgiveness put on her windscreen and she is routinely approached on the street. Not so posh any more, then? “Let me tell you, Jo. They used to be scared to approach.”
With the business now on a more stable footing, she and Leblanc are leveraging Phase Two. “2024 is pivotal,” says Leblanc. “Our ambition is to reach £100mn [revenue] in the next three years and to become a global luxury fashion house. We have a promising start with the leather goods, and 2023 already comes with double-digit growth. Now it’s about amplifying the business trajectory through direct-to-consumer channels and also the retail and geographical expansion. We want to solidify our footprint in our strongest regions – the UK, the US and Europe – but we also want to accelerate our development in Asia and the Middle East.”
Now approaching her own half century (she will turn 50 on 17 April), Victoria Beckham has moved things up another gear. Side projects and collaborations are a constant in the schedule: this month, a set of Royal Mail stamps to commemorate the Spice Girls’ 30th anniversary; in February, she’ll launch a watch with Breitling, a chunky timepiece she calls “the perfect watch for women who are looking for something versatile”. Beckham is always working. When I ask whether she gets to relax when staying in Miami, she snorts with amusement. “I never chill by the pool.” Miami means a lot of beauty meetings. “Quite often, I come back paler than I’ve gone.”
In her 2001 autobiography, Learning to Fly, Beckham wrote that she wanted to be “more famous than Persil Automatic”. And while she may be more coy in stating her ambitions, it’s clear she still has much to do. “Am I strategic?” she wonders of her business instincts. “Gosh, I don’t know. I have lots of ideas and I want to do everything. I’m like, why does it take so long?”
She loves being in the UK but she’s stimulated by Miami – she loves the climate, energy and food. She’s even, after some 27 years with David, started to appreciate football. “I never enjoyed watching football,” she confesses. “I never felt necessarily wanted [at the matches]. I’m not saying this as in, poor me, but it was never the fun that it is now. Now, when we’re in Miami, I feel wanted. I’m friends with the families of the players.” She remembers a game recently, in Nashville, “and all of a sudden, I found myself on the pitch. The club wanted pictures of the family and the trophy. And that was the first time a club had ever entertained the family as well.” Life as a WAG is better when it’s warmer. “Since Messi turned up, the energy has gone to a whole other level,” she adds. “It’s a whole other experience. It’s fun.”
She remains, as ever, deeply loyal to her husband. “It’s unbelievable. I feel so proud of what he’s done. When he went to LA all those years ago, people were ridiculing him. But he went knowing that this was ultimately what he wanted to build; to really make a difference with the MLS. And so to have been part of that journey and look at what he’s achieved… It’s bloody amazing. He actually makes things happen.”
When asked where she sees her own brand going, Beckham becomes her much more cautious self. Some might liken her to Tom Ford, for example, another independent label led by a charismatic founder combining fashion, beauty and some monstrously successful fragrances that sold for $2.3bn in 2022. She’s grateful for the comparison but she’s keeping quietly schtum. “We’re just looking at all the different opportunities and figuring out what works for us.”
“I took Tom Ford to a game,” she adds – a great deflection. “He loved it.” She flashes me a cheeky VB grin. “I don’t think either of us knew what was going on,” she deadpans. “But we both smelt very nice.”
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