Victoria Beckham has admitted she “absolutely hated” having her husband David as a business partner. The 51-year-old star reflected on the challenging times when her fashion brand was on the brink of closure, due to the financial pressure it was under. In her new self-titled Netflix documentary, she revealed: “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.
“Yes, I’m going home to my husband, but I’m also going home to my business partner.
“And so I would talk to him about it. I had to. He was invested. And I hated it. I absolutely hated it.”
Retired footballer David confessed these discussions “broke” his heart, given how “proud” his wife is, and he found it difficult to accept that he needed to stop his investment.
He said: “She was a lot richer than me. She actually bought our first house in Hertfordshire known as Beckingham Palace.
“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.’ “.
Eventually, David Belhassen was approached to become her new business partner, but he emphasised that she needed more than someone to “just put money” into the company.
In the documentary, he said: “She needed a partner that knew the business, understood her dream and was capable of making it happen… Frankly, I had never seen something as hard as that to fix.”
Initially, he declined the opportunity, only to have a change of heart during a date night with his wife when he discovered she was wearing Victoria’s designs.
He said: “The flame lit there. It became like a fire. And on Monday, I gathered the team and say, ‘We have to do it. If we fail, we fail.’ “So we signed. I remember she was very emotional and she told me, ‘I won’t let you down.
Victoria said that Belhassen made her realise “there was a lot [she] had to change” within her debt-ridden company after she “lost [her] way”.
She admitted: “Part of the problem was people were really afraid to tell me no. People thought that I wasn’t used to hearing, ‘no’.
“I’ll hold my hands up and be accountable for things that I have done that I should have done and could have done differently, and I was in debt.
“There was a lot I had to change.”